Open Home Pro Blog

There recently has been a lot of discussion in the real estate industry about “Raising the bar”.  You can check out some of the discussion in Professional One’s Facebook Group, but the underlying values stem from providing a better experience for the consumer and agent’s holding themselves to a higher standard.

At Apple in 2001 we often referred to this as surprise and delighting your customers.  By going beyond a potential customers expectations for service and product you get them to tell their friends and possibly give you repeat business.

Sadly I think most agents fail to realize that “raising the bar” takes a lot of work.  It’s not as easy as verbalizing or pointing the finger online about bad practices.  You have to do the little things that make clients do things for you like buy you gifts :)

I’ve made it extremely clear from the start why we started Open Home Pro.  We felt there was a need in the industry for products and software that solve a real problem but also make you feel fuzzy inside.  You ever asked someone about their iPhone or an app like Path? They smile and talk passionately about it.  Now ask them about CRM solutions or their local MLS. Most times they’ll shrug their shoulders.  Those things keep us and I hope others up late at night knowing everyone can do better.

To raise the bar it requires hard work, innovation and the balls to invest yourself or capital in building solutions that matter.  It’s not as simple as slapping a badge on your profile online or using the hottest new gadget.  It’s about surprising and delighting your customer.  

We get asked a lot about how does Open Home Pro work when it comes to collecting leads at Open Houses’.  Well we decided to take a look at the last three months of data to see exactly how many of the email address’ that get collected are legit.

The number to know is 91.2% of leads collected are legit email address’.  1.5% are soft bounces (this is where the email gets delivered to the receipients mail server, but for some reason is rejected).  A lot of times this is because the person’s box is full.

The remainder are actual bounces.  We’ll continue to work hard…in a perfect world we would go 10 for 10

Update: It’s available now in a free update!

1. More Questions for Open Homes

Included in this update are three new questions “What is your home address?”, “Are you Pre-Approved for a loan” and “How soon are you looking to buy?”. By default they are disabled, but to turn them on simply drag and drop them into active questions under settings.

2. Multiple Photo Uploads

With a lot of users leveraging dropbox to get their photos into the app we got a lot of requests to allow multiple photo uploads at once. Now simply tap all the photos you want for a listing and press done. We do the rest.

3. Improved Sharing

Lots of listings are going out via email, Twitter and Facebook from Open Home Pro. We’ve added photo support in the emails and Facebook when shared. Simply choose to share a listing on Facebook or via email and the photos will be inserted.

4. Video Tutorials

Under settings you can now access video tutorials with one click. This should make it easy to get your questions answered around creating listings and leveraging alerts.

5. What property did someone visit in Leads Section

As more user put leads into the system we realized it was hard to remember which property each person visited. So we’ve added beneath every leads name the property they visited or what alerts they are receiving.

6. Sharing Panel

We updated the sharing panel to include one click access to not only email, Facebook and Twitter sharing, but also to view the listing page and to copy the listing url to your clipboard on an iPad.

As always you can show your support by leaving us a review on iTunes or talk to us on Facebook.

When we started developing Open Home Pro 3.0 we sifted through what must’ve been 500 plus feedback emails from all of you.  It was very apparent we needed to do something drastic to really let us build the features you wanted….so we threw everything out.  

Some fun things about the app you may or may not notice:

1. The thank you for visiting screen.  After the potential buyer enters their info the screen “flips” and thanks them for visiting. This is intentional to queue the user your done here.  After 5 seconds or so the screen redirects to a few agent tools like notes.
2. Hot lead.  What leads are valuable at an open and what leads aren’t.  I got emailed a stat literally this morning about the 1% open house conversion stat. People forget that stat is to sell that specific house you are holding the open for.  They may have a house to sell or do not have an agent.  Hot lead hopes to help you sift through who are the leads you spend your time on.
3. Kiosk mode. When you start an open house we display a slideshow of the properties photos. If you gently run your finger left to the right side of the screen we will swap between the photos.  
4. Tap to edit. Any info in the application can be modified on touch. If you want to change the price of the home from dollars to euros simply touch the $ sign with your finger.  Want to lower the price simply tap it.  It really is that easy.
5. Question & Answers.  If you attach a photo to a property it shows up in the background of the question and answer experience.  Check it out by attaching any photo.

If you have questions about the app ask them here