Open House

Monday, September 18, 2006 at 3:29 PM

By Mark Heynen, Strategic Partner Development

We all know that real estate can be voyeuristic. Folks go to open houses for fun, people look up each other's home valuations out of sheer curiousity. And obviously they look up listings online for fun as well. However, to maintain a robust sales pipeline, many brokers I speak to are finding that it's important for home sellers to reach out to buyers at all stages in the process, even the "voyeurs" who are 1 to 2 years away from buying. Search for real estate on Google, and you will occassionally find a "Refine your search" option that brings you to listings, which can be filtered by location and listing attribute. Selling brokers can upload their listings directly onto Base as shown here, or they ask their web vendor or MLS to do so, like this. This is one of the few ways to get real estate exposure that's open and free of charge -- and one of the many ways the Base platform aims to improve the Google search experience as well as help connect brokers to buyers.