After soaring growth, the residential real estate market appears to be coming back down to earth as mortgage rates rise and economic concerns threaten consumer savings. To stay top-of-mind and educate customers about its services, online real estate company Opendoor is investing in marketing, including a new campaign with a new agency, as it tries to be an “all-weather” product.
“Even in this tough economic climate, the thing we sell is really, if you boil it down, certainty and there’s more value to having certainty in a market’s uncertainty,” said David Corns, who joined Opendoor as VP of marketing earlier this year, speaking on a recent episode of the Marketer’s Brief podcast. He added that Opendoor is “set up for a hot or cool market.”
Now, he is trying to educate consumers about how Opendoor, which buys and sells properties on behalf of its customers, can work for their real estate needs. The 8-year-old brand is now in 50 U.S. markets.
“The company was running really well and scaling well and but everyone agreed a brand did not yet exist so I had the opportunity to come in and help define the strategy, define the brand and help build out the marketing,” Corns said.
Earlier this summer, Opendoor debuted a new brand platform “Be Open” with Venables Bell & Partners. The push, which includes TV spots, shows customers how they never know what their residential real estate needs might be.
“It allows us to talk philosophically about be open to opportunities that are hitting life, but it also allows us to talk tactically about be open to a new way of real estate,” Corns said.
On the podcast, he discusses what marketing channels, like TV and direct mail, have been most effective for Opendoor at building brand awareness.
Corns also talks about the challenges of reassuring consumers following a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, which last week ordered the company to pay $62 million. In its complaint, the FTC said that Opendoor had been “cheating potential home sellers by tricking them into thinking that they could make more money selling their home to Opendoor than on the open market using the traditional sales process.”
In a statement on its website, Opendoor noted the complaint dates back to a period between 2017 and 2019 and that it has “modified” such marketing messages since then.
“We are pleased to put this matter behind us and look forward to continuing to provide consumers with a modern real estate experience,” the statement read.
