OpenHouse.com is the latest effort from real estate brand conglomerate Realogy to capitalize on the web and today they have expanded the site’s coverage to all its brands.

They’ve built out the site as a single destination for buyers to build and create a private open house itinerary. The site lists thousands of open houses across the country and pulls the listing inventory from across its brand portfolio (Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby’s).

The idea is a good in theory. Functionally however, the site was clunky and overall, I found the site a pretty disappointing experience.

Design wise it is uninspired and bland. Functionally, it was confusing and unintuitive. Luckily (for Realogy anyway), it is still in beta, and a “consumer-facing marketing campaign is not scheduled until later in the year” – meaning they still have a few months to work out the kinks.

They really need to dust this thing off and put a little elbow grease into shining it up a bit before they do. How about maps with a satellite, bird’s eye even street level views? What about giving me an RSS feed of the search so I don’t have to keep coming back? The ability to output my search to a KML file so I can pull it into Google Earth and preview my route would be cool too.

Thankfully, their press release seems to have anticipated my concerns (not sure why you’d release a half finished site though…):

In the months ahead, the OpenHouse.com management team will look to
enhance functionality on the site with a focus on Web 2.0 technologies
that tap into search and social book marking, rich media interfaces,
user-generated content and social networking technologies. The team
will also look to identify and consider appropriate alliances with
content providers with the intent of expanding OpenHouse.com’s depth
and coverage of U.S. real estate markets

The bigger question is are open houses still relevant? Today on real/diaBlog they give us some reasons why real estate video is killed the open house.

It seems to me that driving around neighborhoods visiting open houses is an incredibly inefficient way to find a home you want to buy.

The Internet has given us amazing tools by which we can refine a real estate search down to a manageable level. And Tony and Danilo are right, video — when used appropriately — can be an incredibly useful method by which you can filter out the homes you want to look at, making the step of visiting an open house largely redundant.

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Second Life (SL) is like World of Warcraft – they are products largely driven by virtual communities that have very quickly developed its own meta universes. They’re also kind of like twitter (you can follow me here) – I don’t really get it.

But I’m probably alone here. Thousands, if not millions of people are using it to live out virtual fantasies through their SL avatars.

Being that it’s a virtual world, many of these fantasies center around real estate, and buying and trading virtual land. Some residents like Anshe Chung, the “Rockefeller of Second Life” claims to have made over $250,000 from creating, renting and selling virtual homesteads to new residents.

So it only makes sense that a real estate company would try and capitalize on this virtual land rush too…

Coldwell Banker (CB) announced today that it is the first national real estate company to sell homes to SL residents. From their press release:

Coldwell Banker has an inventory of more than 500 homes on 550,000 square meters in the Ranchero section of the Second Life mainland, one of the largest home developments in this virtual world. These virtual homes will vary in price based on size and style, including southwestern, colonial and contemporary, among others. In addition, Coldwell Banker is offering homes perched atop a picturesque hill overlooking the ocean. Second Life residents can meet with a Coldwell Banker sales associate avatar in the brand’s virtual office and schedule an appointment to tour virtual properties of interest. Homebuyers who close a purchase with Coldwell Banker will receive free “virtual furnitureâ€? for their new home as a closing gift.

You can see a current map of the SL world (or “grid”) here – Ranchero is located just in from the inlet on the eastern side of the island that kind of looks like a “J”.

It’s a interesting idea. Large companies like CB are making all kinds of creative plays in SL’s cyberspace – HSBC has a bank, Toyota has a dealership, even Reuters has a SL news bureau. For good reason too, SL can be a test bed for new ideas and it gets people interacting with their products and services; and it’s a relative cheap investment:

…an island costs $1,675 for about 16 virtual acres, plus $295 a month for maintenance fees…

(more in Investor’s Business Daily: Companies Are Finding Second Life)

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to figure out where CB’s headquarters was. If anyone can find it, can they post a SLURL in the comments?

This commercialization of SL is not without controversy however. Folks who resent this corporate intrusion (nicknamed “Grievers”) have taken matters into their own hands; apparently there’s a Second Life Liberation Army who have shot virtual customers outside a virtual American Apparel store and even gone as far as detonating virtual nuclear weapons (more in USAToday article).

Then of course, there was the infamous “Phallus attack” on virtual Realtor Chung earlier this year (see Virtual Real Estate Tycoon Assaulted in Second Life).

I’m sure we’ll see more attempts to capitalize/advertise in these virtual worlds in the future. CB is definitely ahead of the curve on this one and, in a day and age where advertising is becoming so ubiquitous and consumers are becoming increasing desensitized to tradition branding efforts, this is a way for a major real estate brand to try and cut through the message clutter.

If you’re interested in checking out Second Life, click here to join.

Of course, in the mad rush to take advantage of the opportunities in Second Life, let’s not forget that you should also Get a First Life.

Update:

I found it.

Here’s the SLUrl to teleport you there.

Porsches and Beamers parked outside and CB-branded helicopters on the roof. Nice.

Nobody was home when I visited, but there’s coffee and donuts and there’s a nice boat to hang out on while you wait.

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Trulia announced today that it has inked a deal with Realogy Corporation (H), parent company of Century 21, Coldwell Banker and ERA, to upload more than 500,000 of its affiliates’ listings to its database. Realogy made this move to Trulia alongside a similar deal with Google Base.

Realogy putting its listing inventory online only makes sense and it’s heavyweight presence is further vindication of a broad distribution strategy. Trulia, especially, must be feeling elated with a big win like this – perfect timing too, hot on the heals of its deal with Keller Williams.

Not sure if the deal with Realogy includes branded listings like KW deal, but if it does that’d be a huge boost to Trulia’s bottom line.

We may just have seen a tipping point here; as smaller brokers, who may have hung back, race to embrace both of these platforms to keep up with the Jones’.

As they do, as Jim Duncan points out, how much longer till the local MLS databases don’t much matter anymore?

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In order to counter perceived “Negative Media Spin”, real estate giant Realogy made a bold move recently.

The Parsippany, New Jersey-based parent of such real estate brands as Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby’s, placed a full-page advertisement in USA Today to let consumers know that dropping mortgage rates and an increasing number of available properties make today the “perfect timeâ€? to purchase a home. The Realogy ad ran in this past Friday’s main news section of USA Today, the section that receives the national newspaper’s highest readership.

So does this kind of advertising work? Will readers of USA Today respond to this ad? Or will they see through the spin?

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