Broward, Palm Beaches and St. Lucie Realtors® and their MLS, BeachesMLS launched their Virtual Open House functionality with a big SPLASH this week! They launched an entire website dedicated to Virtual Open Houses, akin to Open House websites MLSs have hosted in the past.

For every listing on the site, there is a scheduled Live Open House. Many of the properties also include 3D Tour Virtual Tours and Floor Plans in addition to the normal array of property photos to give consumers a variety of way to learn more about the specifics of the property without physically visiting it..

 

 

 

Create an event to draw attention

Instead of just launching the functionality and hoping that consumers would find it and agents would participate they created a promotional event called Virtual Open House Week from April 20th to April 26th.

 

 

 

 

Easy to Use Virtual Open House Search

VirtualHousesearch.com includes an easy to use Open House Search where potential homebuyers can look at all Virtual Open Houses for the next day, weekend, or 7 days for the entire area or for a specific town or price point.

Educate Consumers about how to engage with Virtual Open Houses

While we are ALL a lot more comfortable with Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, Join.me, Microsoft teams and other live streaming services now than we were a few weeks ago, the site does include some consumers education about how to engage with Live, Virtual Open Houses.

Importantly, they encourage home-buyers to invite their REALTOR® to go “with” them on the Virtual Open House tours so they can discuss each property and the agent can provide more perspective or hunt down answers to their specific questions.

Region-wide promotional collaboration

Smartly, Beaches MLS knows that every local community is as worried about a housing slowdown as the real estate industry is. That’s why they engaged local Chambers of Commerce, NAHREP, developers and even a local Museum to help get the word out about the event! This is a REALLY smart way to take a small marketing budget and make it a LOT more impactful!

It’s rare that I see a program in real estate executed SO well. Way to go guys!

Can’t wait to find out how well this program worked. I have had so many questions about whether Virtual Open Houses can actually sell homes like live tours can. With a program like this I gotta believe they are going to!