As many businesses do, it started with a great idea and an important problem to solve.
Sometime in 2017, Qi Chen found himself struggling to find property to buy, specifically greenfield lots or townhouses.
It seemed strange because there was plenty of development of both, but he kept running into listings for apartments instead, especially on future competitors’ sites.
There did not seem to be a site or any means of collating all the greenfield, new house builds, and house and land packages.
“He was looking for somewhere to buy himself and driving around to several estates every weekend to try and work out what was out there,” OpenLot’s events and marketing manager Josh Kenshole said.
It resulted in Chen building the OpenLot site himself, collating information about what was out there to put on it.
It paid off—people signed up to use it, allowing Chen to amass a database of interested buyers.
“We’ve grown by 40 per cent over the last seven months from what numbers were in December 2022,” Kenshole said.
Now, a team of employees scour the web for new house builds, house and land packages and greenfield estates in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia.
The company stays away from apartments, which are over-represented in their competitors’ offerings, they say.
But with the growing database of buyers that uses the site has come new opportunities: OpenLot now offers developers the opportunity to get real time data on buyer demand, trends and desires by suburb which can allow developers to finetune their offerings to suit the market in an area.
The company also offers targeted marketing to developers using their database, primarily through plans that guarantee leads.
Tapping their database allows them to guarantee targeted leads in a way that their key competitors who only offer listings for payment cannot.
“For example, you’re just getting a listing on there, and there’s no guarantees with that whereas that’s where we’re putting our money: into action to really ensure that they’re getting quality leads,” Kenshole said.
“And the reason that we have so many users coming to us as well is because we’re showing a true representation of the property market.
“It’s not a pay to play model where it’s only companies that are paying to be there.”
Developers can use OpenLot to generate reports about what is available in specific suburbs and then opt into plans to access localised data around buyer demand, trends, lot sizes, timeframes and other key information.
Both the suburb report and the buyer index tools provide developers with insights that allow them see what buyers want in real time.
Some of those trends and insights can provide key information, such as the prediction that titled land will lose buyer preference to land settling in 12 to 24 months across the greater Melbourne region, according to data from the second quarter of this year.
It is also indicating that house and land buyers across Victoria are taking longer to buy with purchasing timeframes up from less than three months to six to 12 months for the year to second quarter of 2023.
Insights like these are then put together with a suite of marketing options for developers, agents or builders to use in targeting those very same buyers with their projects.
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