Open House Marketing

We are preparing for our first open house in Deer Park, Texas. This house was completely remodeled by Rent Ready, a contractor we found in Lifestyles Unlimited, Inc.
We have a couple fronts we are working on to get ready for this. 1. The kitchen is not complete yet and the beautiful vent hood we ordered that we were expecting Wednesday will not be arriving until Thursday. 2. We are spreading the word about the open house using techniques from the SIMS training I took with Greg Clement.

The first issue we have is that in the kitchen, the space for the vent hood is smaller than usual, so we had to get a special vent hood. Not the same old under the cabinet will work...no cabinet. To add some sizzle to the house, we splurged and ordered from Euro-Kitchen a lovely high end vent hood. According to the website, it should take 4 business days to get here, so we were expecting in on Wednesday. Now that it is in route, it will arrive Thursday - in the northwest of Houston - far from the house. Now I need to work out with Rent Ready to get it installed 8 AM on Friday or Thursday evening. Why? Because we have an agent open house on Friday at noon! I have no idea today how long it will take to install a vent hood, I'm hoping 1 hour or less.

The second front we are working on is marketing. I love marketing!
- Email
- Postcards
- Press Releases
- Talking House
- Videos
We have sent out an email to the top producers in the Houston area to give them a heads up on the open house. I also have prepared a press release that I am sending out to TV, Radio and Newspapers. Why do they care? Because we are giving up to $500 to a local school right down the street from the house. For every family that shows up, we will donate $1! I'm not sure which media venues will announce this, but even just a couple will help. I also spoke to the principal of the school and she is spreading the word to her staff, who will hopefully spread the word to everyone they know.

I am creating videos to show the house, putting the house on the MLS today, putting together a before and after portfolio for the agent open house, creating a flyer about the $8,000 tax credit to have at the open house, finding a few items to dress up the counters and bathrooms, and making a flyer for the house which shows comps for the area.

I am not using a Realeflow website for this promotion, which may be a mistake since Greg is having a fun contest for high traffic. But I need to see the traffic that my marketing is generating and at this point, I can't do that with Realeflow websites. I believe they will have that available in the future, but I'm living this today.