It’s as much a part of the NZ property market as street signs and auctions! – the open home is the efficient and effective tool to enable agents to promote their clients homes and in doing so evaluate the interest in the property from prospective buyers.
However whilst there is no doubt that open homes remain a popular weekend activity for inquisitive property seekers – the process of planning an open home schedule has been up until now a challenging task requiring a degree in project management and a well structured Gant chart!
Well now just as property search was revolutionised by the web, so organising open home is equally being revolutionised by this website.
As of now anyone can search on any area of the country and select just the properties for which there is an open home planned in the next 7 days. No more cutting up the local newspaper or property magazine and gluing pieces of paper into a timetable – the web can do it all for you. Here’s how.
- Search box – this box now features a tick box, select this and you will just see the open homes featured on the site today with scheduled times in the next 7 days. At this time there are over 2,000 scheduled in the next week – that should keep you busy. As a point of note as with all listings we rely on the individual agents to provide the details to us of the open homes as well as their company data integration system. With this feature only launched today we will see the number of listings featuring open home details grow significantly over the coming weeks.
- When you do any search for property at region, district or suburb level, whether it be for an apartment, house or unit, 3 bedroom, 2 bedroom etc you can filter the result by ticking the “only show open homes” tick box at the top of the filter. So for example if you were interested in looking for a home with 2 or more bedrooms in Taradale in the Hawkes Bay and you were looking to spend between $400,000 and $500,000, then you would have a choice of 16 listings to tempt you – of those 4 of them have open homes times scheduled this weekend.
- Now having selected your chosen area and refined search if you save that search by registering your selection as part of “My Property” you will not only be sent notification emails of new listings that match your search but each Friday we will send you (your choose) an email which details in chronological order all the listings with open homes scheduled in the coming week. A great tool to making the planning of open home visits so much easier.
- Never fear as to being kept informed of the status of open homes as the data transfer between each office and our database is very frequent ensuring that if for any reason an open home is cancelled or rescheduled then you can with this weekly email or by checking before you set off review the status of all open homes.
- Best of all for every open home you are interested in viewing you can from the website download an reminder to your iCalendar or vCalendar which is compatible with most calendar based applications allowing you to take the details of each open home with you on your phone, PDA or iPhone.
As ever with all facilities on realestate.co.nz you know you are always seeing the most comprehensive selection of real estate listings of any website. There is no other website in NZ that has such a comprehensive selection of properties of all types. As at this time we have over 111,000 listings of which over 42,000 are homes for sale, 10,000 are lifestyle properties and over 17,000 residential sections. We have a subscriber base of over 93% of all licensed real estate offices and thereby are displaying the most comprehensive view of the market.
Expect more from us in the coming months as more and more open home details will be presented on the site. We have plans for further enhancements with mapping of open homes and in time GPS driving details – technology offers such great opportunities – all designed to help you make better use of your time in viewing those prospective new homes. Happy open home viewing!
Well done Alistair, great customer service. I had someone through one of my open homes today who had a very well organised list printed from your website.