Open Home Pro Blog

We’re busy preparing a big update to the iPad app, but in the meantime we have a few new things to share with you on the website.

1.  Bigger Photos on listing pages

We’ve reworked the listing pages to have much bigger photos. They are HUGE.  Also the pages now work even better on mobile devices ensuring wether your customer browse them on an iPhone, Android or homecomputer they simply look beautiful.

2.  Pinterest Buttons

We are a bit late to Pinterest party, but better to arrive fashionably late then never show. We’ve added pin buttons to all listings. Get Pinning.

3.  Profile Pages

You have a lot of listings.  We wanted to give you a great way to show them off so we’ve build out profile pages showing your FB photo, contact info and all of your listings.  You can see mine below.

http://openhomepro.com/profile/andrewmachado

To get started Login and connect with Facebook.

4.  My Account Settings

Users have asked to change your from name, password, email address, bio, phone number, etc.  So we built a panel you can quickly change those items.  Test our your settings here.

To our customers,

We are in the business of delighting our customers.  We want to build the most useful and beautiful tools to help you sell more homes.  

Recently there have been some questions about our data. Especially around what happens to lead data that is inputted into Open Home Pro.  

To put it simply your leads are yours and nobody else’s.  When you enter a lead or listing into Open Home Pro we store the information on our servers for two reasons which I will outline below.

1.  Backup - Say for example you go to the Apple Store and they tell you to erase your iPad and start fresh.  If we did not store your listings and leads you would be unable to retrieve them and have to start over.  That is not fun.

2.  Access Anywhere - If you are at the office and load up your web browser we want you to be able to manage your listings without having to pull out your iPad. Without storing the data on our servers this is not possible.

What we don’t do

We do not sell your lead or listing data to the highest bidder. As I note above your leads only belong to you and not anyone else. Your lead data is simply backed up on our servers in case you get a new iPad or use our web product.  We don’t exist without customers like you and to violate your trust by doing anything with your data except what is mentioned above is against everything we stand for.

I hope this helps better understand our system and how seriously we take all of you.  Over the course of the year you are going to see some incredible improvements made to Open Home Pro and we look forward to having you join us along the way.

If you have any questions simply email me at the address below or ask me on Twitter.

Andrew Machado

andrew@openhomepro.com

Founder, Open Home Pro

http://openhomepro.com

As we continue to add new features at a blistering pace we wanted to tackle a few things that we think will give you more tools to maximize conversion and followup with your leads.

1.  Visit Reports

Delivered to your inbox every night is a detailed report showing every lead you collected during the day.  This lets you from your mobile phone call them with one click or even shoot them another email with a finger press.

2.  Photos in emails

Now included in every auto email to potential buyers and brokers is a photo of the listing that links through to the property page.  It’s going to sit right next to the map of the listing ensuring the person has total context of where they were and how to get ahold of you.

3. Updated Listing Pages

We got a lot of feedback about the listing pages and we’ve since updated them. Now the photos will cross dissolve between each other and photos load dramatically faster.  We’ve also added in a much larger contact agent button and the status of every property whether its already sold, in escrow or available is persistant and in front of buyers.

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.