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.

How Open House Broadcast can save your life (literally)!

Safety

When you think of dangerous professions, firefighters, police officers and soldiers likely pop into your head. People who work in hazardous conditions — including coal miners, construction workers and even those window washers who scale high-rise buildings — might also come to mind.

But Real Estate Agents? They probably don’t even make your list.

Maybe they should.

Believe it or not, over 200 Real Estate Agents were killed on the job in the U.S. between 1982 and 2000*. Countless others suffered various non-fatal attacks including robberies, assaults and rapes. True, these incidents were and still are extremely rare. However, given the unpredictability of today’s world, the Real Estate Safety Council considers the problem serious enough to release a safety guide that includes the following tips for Open Houses:

-Don’t advertise a listing as vacant

-Establish escape routes

-Call the office or a buddy hourly

-Keep your keys and cell phone with you

-Park where you can get out quickly

-Make sure all the deadbolt locks are unlocked to facilitate a faster escape

* Source: Washington Real Estate Safety Council

While a link to the actual guide is provided here, you don’t need to read the entire booklet to get the point – Real Estate can be a dangerous job. And the traditional Open House is probably the most dangerous aspect of a Real Estate career.

Why?

When a Real Estate agent meets a new client, he or she normally starts a file on that person, gathering contact information that can be used to track the individual down. Even more important, the agent is able to form an opinion of what type of person they are dealing with, and if any red flags go off they can opt out of working with the prospective client, or at the very least arrange not to see the client alone.

An Open House, however, puts the agent in contact with complete strangers for an extended period of several hours. Often, an agent sitting an open house waits alone in a location where anyone – with any sort of intention – can drop by. To make matters worse, the fact that the agent will be sitting alone in the house has no doubt been advertised in the paper, on the internet and with signs on the road, all hoping to entice potential buyers to the house. Lure the wrong kind of person, and the Real Estate Agent is at risk, simply for trying to make a living.

Home tours can be dangerous as well. Whether it’s haste to make a sale or to sign a new client, or reluctance to appear suspicious of people who are in most cases honest and decent, many agents overlook the necessity to screen potential clients prior to showing them property or meeting them alone.

This is another, tremendous advantage of using www.OpenHouseBroadcast.com. With no prospective buyers actually visiting the house in person, the potential for danger is greatly reduced. All doors and windows can be kept locked, because all foot traffic will be “virtual,” allowing anyone in the world to enter the house without physically being there. Potential buyers can then make appointments to see the house, allowing the agent to pre-screen them and arrange to meet on their own terms, eliminating the need for potential exposure to individuals with bad intentions.

With access to www.OpenHouseBroadcast.com, Real Estate Agents will never again have to sacrifice personal safety for their business. It’s the ultimate tool to give their listings maximum exposure at minimum risk.