Last weekend, while driving around different areas of the Silicon Valley of California, I saw multiple open home fold out signs on corners sporting a picture and name of a Realtor® and pointing the way to the open home.  This is nothing new and I've seen these same signs week after week.  This time I decided to check on what other marketing these Realtors® had done.  I found most of the Open Homes in the MLS service, three of them on Craigslist, and only one of them on most other online related open home posting services like Google Base or Backpage.  I followed up with one home I hadn't seen in the MLS and also the one that I found everywhere.  My first caller reported that he had put it in the MLS, even though I couldn't find it, and that he had four people in a four hour period.  The second agent whose open home was posted everywhere had a large flow of traffic that specifically said Craigslist or other online classifieds was where they had found the open house information.  A respectable amount had come with MLS printouts and even agents.

Why an agent would spend time on a weekend to do an open house and not take advantage of every means of getting the most out of their time still amazes me.  Most of the online services that I looked into were free to use and fairly easy to operate.  If an agent doesn't have the time, there are virtual assistants available online that can be hired to help with online marketing like this.  Also, some real estate websites may have tools that can be used to increase your open house traffic.  The PropertyMinder AccelerAgent Real Estate Website has a great tool for just such an endeavor.  The Buyer Match tool on the AccelerAgent Real Estate Website can be used to market an open house to your own current active property searches.  By entering in the general information of the open house, the Buyer Match will find all active searches on your AccelerAgent Website that match it.  Buyer Match will also provide you with a letter that you can send off to these people to let them know of the open house and send them a personal invitation to attend.  This exact same tool can be used to market to other members of the Agent Alliance who have active property searches to allow them to send personal invitations to their own active property searches.  In this way, everyone has a chance of turning an online looker into a real world acquaintance and then on to client.

Helping Realtors® to understand and implement programs to assist them in real estate lead generation from different forms of internet marketing is one of the many goals of the PropertyMinder TECH-MAR Clinic.  With marketing programs in place, you will have leads in your websites Client Relationship Management (CRM) database that will be exercising ongoing MLS property searches looking for that perfect home.  One method of converting them from just an email address and a name is to meet these leads in person.  An open house provides an excellent opportunity to bring these web searchers into the real world.