Open House on the Go

2007-12-02T10:21:00.001-08:00

For those of you who are gracious enough to share your time by reading my blog, my commitment in return is to keep it concise, relevant and as free of rhetoric and exposition as possible.

After seeing firsthand Open House On The Go appear as the top search return on Google, then moments later on Yahoo, I paused to recognize the path we’ve taken and the accomplishments of our small band of mobile marketing soldiers.

Open House on the Go was created as a simple solution to what seemed to be an evident need. I don’t know about you, but each weekend in my neighborhood, several corners are overrun with a hodgepodge of open house signs. Century21, Prudential, Re/Max – all the big dogs as well as a variety of local, non-franchised offices are represented. The signs jockey for position as their under inflated balloons valiantly hang on for dear life. Some of the signs employ the general “go that way” theory, while others rely on hand written addresses taped, pasted or otherwise scribbled in place. I could go on, but I promised to keep it brief. It just seemed to me that with all the technology available to us, there must be a better way to communicate with potential home buyers. There was. Well, let me clarify. There could be. So with that idea in hand, we set out on our admittedly not all that lofty a mission of connecting Realtors with the home-buying (or at least home “searching”) public. I’m not certain the details of how we put the whole thing together is all that important. But the long and short of it is this. We had an idea. We got together with some smart folks who had a pretty good understanding of the real estate market. We took some existing technology and created some new tech stuff. And then all we had to do was get the open houses. I could make this longer as well, but the bottom line is that after many months and an equal number of meetings, we were able to partner with the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island (MLSLI) which would allow us to migrate their massive database of weekly open house listings to millions of cell phones users in the area.

The moment now over, it's time to tackle the new challenge of providing information to the masses on the matter of how to best take advantage of our platform. My next blog will focus on that very subject. Thanks for checking in.