Bernice Ross

Marketing and converting open house leads is easier than ever and it costs next to nothing.

Perhaps the most shocking finding in the 2016 NAR Profile of Buyers and Sellers was that an open house generates as many closed listing transactions as Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, MLS, broker and all individual websites combined!

Furthermore, Zillow’s latest research reports that 43 percent of the buyers visited an open house to decide if the property was right for them. Another 5 percent first met their agent on an open house. To take advantage of these statistics and trends, here are five good ways to digitally market your next open house.

Be prepared to conduct a digital transaction: If you’re marketing your open house digitally, provide your open house visitors with other digital tools and information including an e-signature platform such as Docusign for contracts, free digital reports on the demographics, trends, and local neighborhood from NARRPR.com and the free HomeDisclosure.com property report that pulls up school data, crime rates, environmental risks and whether the house has an insurance claim from fire, hail, water or wind damage.

Market your listings and open houses on Facebook and Oodle Marketplaces: Facebook initially launched Facebook Marketplace in 2007. Several years later, they turned it over to Oodle, a classified ad search engine that operates much like Craigslist. In 2016, Facebook reactivated Marketplace on their own site. There’s no charge to post your listings “for sale” or your open houses on either Facebook or Oodle.

Use Facebook groups, pages and articles to market your open house: When I searched Facebook for “open houses this weekend,” agents were using three primary strategies to generate traffic for their open houses. The first strategy was to create a group of users from their sphere, referral database and active client list who opt in to receive their list of open houses this weekend.

The second option was to post a free list of open houses each week with pictures, prices and other information on the agent’s Facebook business page. One agent using this approach generated 4,800 likes for his weekly list.

The third approach is to write an article, which leverages the other two approaches. For example, one agent publishes his “Top 5 Open Houses this Weekend in Worcester.” If you were doing this, explain your reasoning as to why each of the homes you picked merited being in your Top 5 homes for the week. (One or two sentences should suffice.) The idea is to build trust, stay in front of potential client leads every week, and to establish yourself as a local expert.

Take advantage of Instagram’s #openhouse: Posting videos and photos on Instagram is an excellent way to create lasting exposure for your listing as well as to advertise your open house at no charge.

Some ideas for marketing your open house on Instagram include:

Use video or any other livestreaming services to do a walk-through of the open house showing off its two or three best features.

Make a video of your sellers answering the question, “What are three things that you love about this living in this neighborhood?” You could also ask the same question of any of their neighbors who would be willing to be on camera.

An entirely different approach would be to create an open house theme, complete with some tasty refreshments. Show the set up on your livestream that day and invite viewers to drop by, see the house and enjoy those great brownies you baked this morning.

Don’t forget about Pinterest: Pinterest is another highly trafficked site where the strategies for Instagram also work.

Converting Open House Leads The Easy Way

Once someone visits your open house, the next issue is how to convert them. This is easier than ever with tools like OpenHomePro and Spac.io. These two apps also automatically follow up after the open house by sending your open house visitor a thank you text or email for attending your open house.

Spac.io has several other very useful features including lead verification, an evaluation of the lead’s social media profile, lead scoring against your ideal client type so you can get the best ROI on your time and money, plus the ability to generate separate property reports for other properties.

Bernice Ross, CEO of RealEstateCoach.com, is a national speaker, trainer and author. She may be reached at Bernice@RealEstateCoach.com.