Thursday, February 26, 2009

Syndicating Open House Listings

We've been ask to provide a little history as to the genesis of OpenHomez.com. You'll find more detail in this blog and at OpenHomez.com but here is a brief history. You should know that our founder is an office manager for a small independent real estate company and an IT consultant. He tells the story like this:

While going through my normal Thursday drill of preparing open house information for the weekend and posting each individual open house to a multitude of Web sites it occurred to me that this was very repetitive and mundane work, not to mention boring. Being basically lazy, I set out to write a tool that would take a single open house listing and syndicate it to as many other sites as possible but only require me to enter the data once. It’s been refined over the last year and it’s available, free of charge (ad support) to anyone who would like to use it.

The site is OpenHomez.com. As I said, it is free to all. We use the ad revenue to pay for the servers, etc. Listings point pack to the agent site(s), and of course, we don’t sell email address or other personal information. You can find additional information throughout this blog. You’ll find the system has some interesting features like email and SMS notifications, an iGoogle gadget by zip code, GPS and Calendar downloads, and a variety of other interesting features. We would greatly appreciate any feedback. We’re wide open for input and suggestions on improving the site.

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