Inman

Waze is getting open house ads from HomeSpotter

Photo credit: Waze

HomeSpotter, a mobile app developer for real estate agencies, started offering open house ads through the Waze GPS navigation app.

This week, the Minneapolis-based company announced that it is expanding its Boost by HomeSpotter open house marketing platform. While the platform currently targets potential homebuyers with ads through social media and website advertising, it will now also push out open house ads for people using the Waze live map to look up directions or zoom in on a specific location.

The practice, which gives agents the chance to target customers by placing map pins with listings ads right in Waze, has become a popular way for real estate agents to reach potential clients by geographical location — last November, HomeSnap has launched a similar feature.

“HomeSpotter wasn’t the first to introduce Waze advertising to the real estate community,” Aaron Kardell, founder and CEO of HomeSpotter, said in a statement. “However, we believe Waze advertising is best leveraged for promoting open houses immediately before and while they are happening. HomeSpotter provides the first automated system that allows large brokers to leverage this huge branding opportunity while assuring that they are only promoting open houses near the time that they are actually open for viewing by the general public.”

Out of the most recent real estate companies to take up the feature, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services & Roach launched HomeSpotter’s new advertising platform for its real estate agents — they started promoting open houses through the navigation app.

“This represents a great compliment to the existing Facebook and Instagram open house and listing promotion services HomeSpotter is already providing for us,” Rajeev Sajja, Fox & Roach’s vice president of digital innovation, said in a statement. “We are also excited to begin promoting our coming soon listings on Waze as well.”

To see how the open house listings appear in the Waze navigation app, check out HomeSpotter’s preview here.

Email Veronika Bondarenko