How Did I Come Up With This Concept?

How it all started…

My determination to evaluate the efficiency of the traditional Open House was sparked by my first Open House experience. ‘Twas a chilly November day in Everett, Washington. After setting up all of the Open House signs and making the house all pretty, my broker and I sat down to wait. And wait… And wait… After the 1 hour of setup and 5 hours of waiting, only 3 people came to the house. One of them was another agent, and the second was the home owner himself (why he showed up to the Open House, I don’t know). 6 hours of my Saturday afternoon, and 12 man hours (my broker’s time included) were wasted to show a house to only 1 potential buyer, who of course, did not want to buy the house (go figure).

It was this experience that led me to question the process by which Open Houses were traditionally conducted. It occurred to me that traditional Open Houses were very limited due to their “local” nature. By this I mean that in order to attend an Open House in the traditional manner one has to be nearby house in question, or be willing to pay the cost of traveling to an Open House that is outside the local area. This serves to limit the potential customers who can attend any particular Open House to that miniscule subset of prospective buyers who actually live relatively near the house in question.

I realized that while 84% of home buyers are searching for properties on the Internet, only a small fraction of them actually live near enough to the property in question to attend an Open House. At this point, it occurred to me that I could increase the number of attendees at my Open Houses by conducting the Open Houses over the Internet using a WebCam. However, this brought forth another problem; getting people to find out about my Open House. I could design a website for myself where I could conduct my Open Houses over the Internet, but the likelihood of anybody finding my individual website was very small. What I needed was a site where everyone went to conduct their Open Houses over the Internet. By consolidating all Open Houses on one site, there would be a greater likelihood that people would have heard of it, because agents all over the country would be advertising their own Open Houses that were being conducted on the site. Much like people are more likely to look for real estate at Realtor.com than at dominiqueramirez.com, they’d be more likely to search for Open Houses at a nationally recognized site, than my own individual Open House webpage.

So I set out to find such a site and found that, as far as I could tell, it did not exist. At first, this was discouraging, because my goal was to find somewhere to host my own Open Houses over the Internet. However, I soon realized that this was actually an opportunity. If nobody else had created the site yet, then I decided that I would. www.OpenHouseBroadcast.com was the result of that decision.