In the hyper-competitive US real estate market, it’s hard to stand out when there are so many different real estate sites to choose from (real estate sites are visited 120M+ times a month). Not to mention, virtually every house listing looks alike, because they all pull from the same source, MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a home listing database.

Being a massive underdog in the real estate market, Opendoor needed a way to make their listings stand out in this MLS sea of sameness. Not only to increase brand awareness, but to sell homes.

To help Opendoor’s listings stand out from the competition, we skipped the staging tool most real estate companies use to virtually stage their home, and instead, used a custom staging tool, with spatial recognition technology, turning thousands of Opendoor’s listings into a new, untapped media channel.

It started with a celebration of Opendoor’s home team, the Phoenix Suns. And continued through the holiday season, bringing festive cheer to our listings.

And the best part? Our listings then appeared on ALL of the other real estate sites as a result of this MLS hack.

Our strategy was to catch the attention of highly engaged house-hunters, who currently visit real estate sites 120M+ times every month in the U.S.

But home listings all look the same, so we needed a way for to stand out from our competition. And as a challenger brand, we decided to also challenge the institutional norms of our category, such as the MLS system and virtual staging tools.

Then, we went a step further, by aligning our efforts with key passion points and current events that are known to influence the housing market:

From a target audience perspective, we focused on the passion point sports - because hot sports teams also tend to heat up the housing market. And for the holidays, we shaped the second wave around the fact that the holidays are a time when people are visiting home (thinking about buying and selling).

The project had two phases, early summer and early winter.

First, since Opendoor’s largest (and original) market is Phoenix, Arizona, we decided to start off with a celebration of the brand’s home team, the playoff bound Phoenix Suns (Opendoor is an official sponsor of the NBA team). During their playoff run in late May/early June, we gamified scrolling through home listings (with the help of our custom spatial recognition tool) by hiding playoff tickets in our properties, encouraging the public to find them. Fans went wild, scouring through properties all over the Phoenix area.

For the second wave of our hack, we decided to get into the holiday spirit in late November/early December. We digitally decorated properties turning them into winter wonderlands, complete with snowmen, reindeer and more. And for those that purchased our homes, we gave them a custom replica snowglobe of the house they just bought.

310 homes sold

20% increase in awareness