Open House LIVE!

I consider myself a tech savvy agent.  It is of the utmost importance to stay ahead of the pack when it comes to implementing technological advancements into marketing and business.  I’ll often check out blogs and websites of companies in larger, trendy markets, such as Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, etc., to see what agents in these young, diverse cities are doing and test some of their strategies in our market.

After skimming through a blog from a Texas Realtor a few weeks back, I decided to utilize a strategy which has been very successful for this particular Realtor.  The agent has been streaming his open houses live.  I’ve adopted the term “Open House LIVE!”

Upon arriving at my listing I set up an account on www.ustream.com.  Ustream allows you to stream basically anything, as long as the content is consistent with their agreement policy.  Once I had my account squared away it was a simple as writing a description of what I would be airing and titling my stream.

One of the strongest assets of the Open House Live! is that I was able to interact with my viewers via the live chat.  Many people had questions about the property and some simply dropped a line letting me know how cool and innovative the idea was (thank you Texas agent, you owe us Tennesseeans anyway so we’re even).

Every 30 minutes I would give viewers a live tour of the property.  Macbook in hand, I paced the entire property getting live video of every nook and cranny of the home.  Doing an actual tour alleviated the problem of my Macbook being stationary, which constrained it to streaming video of a single room.

Attendees of the open house loved the idea and, in turn, I looooved this.  See, many prospective buyers have the contingency of having to sell a property before purchasing.  The Open House LIVE! was marketing my business to every prospect that attended the open house.  In fact, one attendee told me she would be in touch once she decided to put her house on the market.

Open House LIVE! links to various social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,
AOL Instant Messenger, etc.  Therefore, the majority of my viewers were actually local.  Don’t get me wrong here, I love the random viewers I picked up from across the country because they stumbled onto my page but it’s very doubtful that I’ll sell the property to the highly complimentary man from Bend, Oregon.

Since my Open House LIVE! debut was so successful, I will now be streaming all of my open houses.  Be sure to check them out on my Ustream Page if you won’t be able to attend in person.

Seth