Open Home Pro has been quietly building a business that uses the iPad to solve a serious problem for a real-world industry. “My girlfriend would come back upset after showing people houses,” founder Andrew Machado tells me, “because people wouldn’t fill out their information. It’s like the people standing outside of Whole Foods — you instinctively don’t want to give them your information.”
The app offers a polished interface to help realtors collect prospective buyer’s information, and it’s been building on top of that with a set of other features that are designed to make the home-sales process easier. These include a photo slideshow to help a realtor show off all of their prospective listings to clients, a filter showing which client leads are the most interested in buying, custom landing pages for each listing, email lead management, and a way to share listing times to Facebook and Twitter. It’s shipping a new version today, with a new user interface, that also includes features like a way to let people sign up who aren’t at an open house.
So, it’s not just a listing-collection app, but a lightweight CRM.
Up to this point, the app has 15,000 realtors using it, Machado says, noting that a large portion of people in the indstury already have iPads that they use for work. They’ll use DocuSign to collect buyer signatures and close deals, and real-estate apps like Trulia and Redfin to show related listings, and Realtor.com for a variety of services (including a competing product called BrightOpen).
The company is in the process of raising an angel round, and has been incubated at Dogpatch Labs Palo Alto. You can download the iPad app here.
