With Memorial Day weekend coming up and the country easing back to normalcy following more than a year of shutdowns and social distancing, open houses are set to be a big—and we mean big—part of the summer of 2021.
You’re probably gearing up to host plenty of them in the near future, so why not make sure you’re taking every opportunity to delight prospective buyers and win as much future business as possible?
Leverage Waze in Your Open House Marketing
More than a year since the pandemic began, many people are still opting to use their cars over public transportation and ride-sharing services. So, like any good marketing strategy, go where your audience is.
Think of Waze — the largest community-run navigation app, with more than 140 million monthly active users — as the digital equivalent of roadside billboards and top-of-neighborhood yard signs. Just as those are intended to lure in passing drivers, so too is Waze. Only Waze has a much, much broader reach—meaning you’ll attract far more interested prospects to your open house. In short, it’s a much more efficient use of your marketing spend.
It works like this:
- You advertise your open house on Waze during open house hours.
- As drivers use Waze to navigate around town and monitor traffic patterns, they’ll get a notification to attend the open house when they pass within a specified radius of your advertised property.
- If interested, they can click on the advertisement and get step-by-step directions to the open house.
Read our blog for a more in-depth look at setting up a Waze advertising campaign.
Optimize Your Open House Sign-in Sheet
We covered this topic in a previous blog post, which we encourage you to read to get a more thorough account of what an optimized open house sign-in sheet looks like, but here’s the general gist:
Too many agents throw a piece of lined notebook paper on an end table and hope it’s enough to farm potential prospects. But, it’s not.
Every open house sign-in sheet should include the following:
- Address
- Ask a question
- Leave a comment or provide feedback to the agent and/or seller
- What do you like most and least about this home?
- Real estate needs:
- Want to buy ASAP
- Want to buy within the next 12 months
- Want to sell
- Just looking
- Are you working with a real estate agent?
- What type of property are you interested in?
- __ beds
- __ bathrooms
- Single-family home
- Condo/Townhouse
- Specific features: ___
- Have you been pre-approved for a loan?
- Would you like me to send you a free home evaluation for your home?
- If yes, home address: ____
- Do you want to receive a free market report to learn about homes in this area?
- If yes, zip codes of interest: ____
Make Instagram and Facebook Stories of Your Open House
If 2021 taught us anything, it’s that we were all pretty efficient at switching to digital equivalents of in-person events. Even as we try to put the pandemic in the rearview, a proportion of prospective buyers remain reluctant to attend open houses. So why leave them out? Why not give them the opportunity to see what happened virtually?
With Homesnap Stories, you can add unique, engaging marketing content right to your active listings through the Homesnap Pro app. Add text, emojis, and even use augmented reality to create one-of-a-kind marketing content that you can also share on Facebook and Instagram. Record a voice-over or add music to personalize your Stories even more. Then, once complete, you can push these stories directly to your Facebook and Instagram.
Want to get more exposure? Put a little ad spend behind either type of Story on Instagram or Facebook easily with Homesnap Pro Ads.
Read more about how to post a Homesnap Story here.
Use Video Ads to Generate Buzz About Your Listing
You can also take those video tours and walkthroughs and turn them into Video Ads on Facebook and Instagram. This is a great way to gin up buzz for your open house, show your listing in a more interactive light, and give prospects a taste of your personality. Uploading your videos from your computer or phone and turning them into Video Ads just takes a few minutes.
Read more about Homesnap Video Ads here.
Or, Stream Your Open House Live
If you’d rather host a virtual open house live rather than after the fact, it’s possible with Homesnap. Using the Homesnap platform, you can promote video tours of a property and schedule and host open houses virtually, much in the same way you would an in-person one.
Once complete, scheduled virtual open houses will appear as a purple-colored pin within Homesnap’s map view, and property card banners will display the date and time of the virtual open house. Potential buyers can simply click to attend.
Read more about how to set up a virtual open house here.
