From the Field: Tips for a Successful Virtual Open House

Okay, Rick, Brittany, thank you both for carving out some time to hang out with us today. Let's maybe, just for starters, why don't you guys introduce yourselves, Let everybody know where your office is and just a little bit about your market, just for context purposes. So say hi to everybody.

Hi. Same time. So I'm Brittany Chasen. I'm the owner broker for Next Home, Rocky Mountain Realty and Rentals in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. When I named our office, Imran said, wow, that's long. So we obviously do. We obviously do property management. And that was the whole reason why I added that, because I wanted the public to know that we do rentals as well. But we are tucked away in the Rocky Mountains, southwest Colorado. Most people know Durango, which is closer to the Four Corners. It's a bigger city. We are just about 45 minutes to an hour east of that. So, yeah. So it's absolutely beautiful here. I'm actually California born and raised, Orange County. And we moved here almost 10 years ago when my daughter was about 5. And so we moved here because we got tired of hearing gunshots and sirens. We just kept moving to nicer areas, and people kept moving in on us. So we finally just decided to make a dash for the mountains. And so we've been here almost 10 years.

Wow.

It's about 70ft elevation and a very small population, so there's 1800 people, maybe.

All right, cool.

And I'm Riojas. I am the other owner, broker, associates, and Brittany and I have been married for about going on 17 years.

We'll do a webinar on how you guys have managed to pull that off another time. But I could probably.

He's actually born in Detroit, so it is a story for sure.

All right.

Okay. Okay. Let's start with how this all started. So you, I think, attended the webinar we did with Brad on doing a virtual open house. And then I got a Facebook message from you, Brittany. And what did you tell me?

I was crying in my soup, basically. So, you know, of course, I think we all agree that Brad made it look very easy. And I'm a pretty confident person anyways, so I was like, let's do this. I'm ready to jump in, and I can make this happen. And we have some pretty colorful people that work in my office. And what I mean by that is they have great personalities. They are willing to go out on a limb. They're willing to be themselves in front of the camera. And I am, too. Although I'm really tired of looking at Myself on camera at this point and hearing my voice. But basically we decided to jump in and do some virtual open houses because we were on pretty much locked down as well. We weren't allowed to show property. Colorado is essential, so that's good. We can still do real estate, but we weren't able to actually go in houses and do in person showings. So we had decided to put the, put the gears rolling and get this going. And you know, it was a really simple idea in the beginning. We're just going to go and do slideshows for properties that we can't get into that are owner occupied. And we were going to go into houses that have been vacant for a long time because we have a lot of vacation rentals in this town because it's a tourism town and most of our tourists come from Texas and Oklahoma. The areas that are around us that are trying to get out of heat, they come here for the summer. So being that I do vacation rentals and long term rentals, a lot of my real estate inventory are rental properties as well that we end up selling for the, for the owners.

So you had a plan. So you had a plan. You were going to do just like a Facebook Live walkthrough, start that as a virtual open house and do the slideshow. And what happened?

Our bandwidth cannot sustain doing Zoom to Facebook. We came, we realized that if any of you were, I mean we had done all of our marketing, we live event, we invited everybody we knew and that was a bad idea. Probably for your first time. Don't invite everybody because it makes it that much more stressful. And that's really, I think what caused me go into anxiety breakdown mode when it wasn't going to stream. So in the end we got into our office and we were all ready to go and we had it. We had pre recorded a lot of our video. Because of where we are, we don't have Internet and wifi in certain houses. I mean some of them are up on a mountain, you know, and there's no WI fi out there.

No signal.

No signal. So we ended up recording some of our houses ahead of time and we tried to mesh all of that together into a Zoom launch to live share your page kind of scenario. And it didn't happen. I mean, I think the first one we did about 45 minutes late into our event, I threw in the towel and I was like, I can't, I just, I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to cry now. I can't do it. So I Had to, you know, lick my. And that's when I said, keep the text. And I was like, I actually regretted sending Keep the text because I was like, oh. I just. I probably put my heart on my sleeve and was like, oh, my God. Because he was right. You saw on his last webinar about us, the emoji with the just bawling. And that was what I was feeling inside.

I cropped your name out. So I protected you. I cropped your name out.

That's okay. I mean, yeah. So we, you know, we're on our third one this week. We're getting ready to launch that today at 4. But in the end.

Be sure to tune in.

Yeah, yeah. But in the end, what we ended up having to do after we realized what our capacity was to pull this off is we have to record everything in advance and basically just do a watch party. We're just not in an area that we're able to do live. It just isn't gonna work if we do. We're just gonna keep messing up. And the second one was bad. We were late again, but it wasn't as bad. And that's after the second one is when we realized what our capacity was. And we just admitted to that and said, okay, this is the only thing we can do at this point.

So let me unpack that a little, though, because I think that it's a really. It's a really amazing testament, right, to, like, you put all this work into it. You promoted it. You let everybody in town know you were going to be doing this, right? And, you know, of course, in our minds, that means you might as well have, you know, ABC News filming you, right? Like, the whole world is seeing this, and then to have it go off the rails and not work. And it was the first time you tried it. And I got your message. I think it was on a Sunday afternoon when I got your message and I emailed you right away, and you didn't quit. You were like, okay, that didn't work. Let's figure out what does work. And I think a lot of us, when you try something new for the first time, and pretty much all of us, I had never used Zoom prior to six weeks ago. Never. Not once in my life. And now Petra makes fun of me. She's like, I thought you were a boomer, but it turns out you're a zoomer, right?

I'm not a zoomer.

We're all learning something new. And you push through that pain and that embarrassment of no one likes to fumble the ball that doesn't feel great. I just really want to commend you for pushing through that. You discovered that, okay, sharing the Facebook Live won't work in my marketplace, but here's what will. And so let's start now to kind of unpack how you structure your virtual open houses and just give us a high level overview of your vision for what your virtual open house videos look like.

Well, and the other thing I wanted to throw into what we were just talking about, I think that the emotion was running high as well, because the first one that we recorded and we worked on, I think I was going off of sleep deprivation as well, because we were up till 4am Three nights in a row before we actually launched it. I mean, that's how much time and energy. So that failing and that much time was. Yeah, it was devastating. But now we're only staying up till what, midnight. We were up till midnight last night, so it wasn't 4am anymore. We're getting better at it, so that's great.

Which is also now. Sorry to interrupt. That's also part of it, right? Like, the more you want to get good at something, you got to do it a lot. I wish there were shortcuts, but there aren't. And you went to three nights in a row at 4am and now you're two nights in a row at midnight. And then eventually it'll be one night till 10pm and there's no shortcuts. Right. You just have to work. So I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really wanted to anchor that point in.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a lot of new software to be trying to integrate into each other as far as on the tech side, but with the videos themselves, you know, we just wanted to, we watched. And not to bag on any competitors, but we watched a virtual open house of a competitor. And it was before we launched our.

Day before, so we got to see.

Yeah, it was a guy in a black shirt with a black background talking for 25 minutes about a $1.2 million house. As he's walking through a Matterport presentation, I'm like, oh, that's. That's rough.

It was really, really hard to sit and watch because it was just, first of all, how much of the population, especially in our area, now granted, California is different, obviously, but how many people are the percentage of the population actually can afford that house? I mean, that's not here. I mean, our average price point is probably 350.

Yeah.

So I mean, we do have huge ranches. Don't get me Wrong. But the average is just. But, yeah, it was the reason why I think that's important. And I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is something else I wanted to mention. We had not come up with the news format until we watched that. When we watched his, I said, okay, we need to up our game. I mean, just because we know that competitors are doing it. We're in a very small town, and most of our offices here are independent brokerages. They're not franchises. We have one ReMax office, we have an exit office, and I think we have us. And that's it for franchises. Everybody else is, you know, independent. So there's probably six or seven independent offices. And to be honest with you, all of them are basically just putting a sign out front and putting it on mls, they throw out some postcards, but they're not really doing anything. And so for me to see this other independent, which. What's interesting is the guy that we watch, he actually contacted Charis to be a broker for Next Home. And I had gotten it, like a month before, but his colors are still orange and gray on his logo for another logo. So, anyways, after watching him, it was really interesting because I would say he's probably the closest mindset to where we're at, because he wanted to be with Next Home. He wanted tools that Next Home offered. So he's kind of ahead of the game on that. But after watching him, we. I changed the whole format. I had an epiphany at that moment, and I said, we're gonna up our game. We're gonna do something totally different. We're not gonna be boring. We need to make this, like, a variety where it's actually so entertaining. You gotta watch it next week to see what's gonna happen.

I mean, I've seen the video, so it's. Seen the videos. It seems like it's part newscast, part pirate radio, part, you know, like, it's just like it is. So you guys, right? And it's. You know, sometimes there's wind noise in the background and, you know, but you just are. You're just doing it. It's fun. It is fun to watch. So talk to us just a little bit about that. Like, from a technical standpoint, how many homes do you try to profile? Talk about how you. You have the agents sort of be in front of the house and newscaster kind of ivy thing. Walk us kind of step by step through your structure.

So what we've been basically. Excuse me. And I do this in my videos quite often. What we basically have been doing is keeping it at about 20 minutes or less is our goal because we realize that anything more than 20 minutes is going to. Is might be too much for people. And watching the other guy do 25 of boring, we want to be no more than 20 minutes of somewhat fun. So what we're doing is about 20 minutes. We are keeping it at about three properties per video. And if we don't have three properties and we go down to two, for instance, like we're doing this week today we're throwing in something else. Like we threw in today, we're gonna have a little clip from our meeting with Keith about the market. And next week we're going to probably do two properties and then we're going to throw in a loan officer to talk about what the rates are doing and how the lenders are handling the coronavirus and that aspect of it. So we're doing about three properties and we're having meetings with our team once, maybe twice a week.