Open houses still matter to Curb Hero: Tech Review Update

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This story was last updated May 30, 2024.

Curb Hero is an app for capturing leads and building your databases during open house events.

Platforms: Browser; iOS; Android
Ideal For: All agents, teams and brokerages that market with open houses
Initial review: May 2020
Update: May 2024

Top selling points

• Dynamic QR code: Alter landing page
• CRM integrations
  
• Team administration
  
• Text-to-notes feature
• Listing micro-sites
• Fully branded forms and visitor experience

Top concern

Well, the industry’s mixed take on open houses never helps products in this category, but maybe if more agents leveraged software to make lead capture easier, open houses would be better understood as the powerful marketing activity they can be.

What you should know

Curb Hero is a property open house promotion and sign-in solution with added benefits for ongoing listing marketing. The software is simple and modern, enabling agents at all levels to benefit from its ability to impress sellers and those who make time to visit a property.

It offers individual property micro-sites for continued promotion pre- and post-open house, and its dynamic QR code means you don’t have to make a new one for every website or open house you want to push into the market.

The sign-in forms can send visitor data directly to any number of popular CRMs for ongoing follow-up, and it also provides social media marketing templates for effective pre-event promotion. The CRM integration has been improved, using an API link for rapid setup and automatic lead assignment. A few account details need to be entered, but that’s mostly it.

Curb Hero can deliver sign-in names and contact data to your appropriate CRM vendor, all but eliminating the biggest hassle and most common reason leads go un-contacted after an open house, and that’s the process of translating them from the sign-in interface to a system that can market to them.

Its OnlyLink tool creates a slick promo page for users and offers intricate controls through simple toggle switches for what can be shown on each profile according to audience.

The user interface has continued to improve since I last looked at Curb Hero a year ago. There’s now an auto-populate for email address sign-in to ensure a guest isn’t hunting-and-pecking their way into a state of sign-in frustration, and the entire process itself uses clean, bold fonts and data entry fields to not give the user any excuse to abandon the sign-in.

It also asks the person, “Who is your real estate agent?” first, to make it as evident as possible that this is not a fact listing agents want ignored. It simply causes too much hassle, and I’m sure many of you have been there.

Curb Hero added a team administration component to manage multiple members on a single account. This is a great project for a team admin to oversee, entering each person’s information that will allow them to quickly log in and set up an open house when it’s their turn.

Logos, colors and other branding assets can be assigned to each account, and major brand logos have already been onboarded. A “pairing link” makes it even faster for a member of the team to register on the app and connect themselves to their listings.

Because it’s 2024, there’s a new AI component to Curb Hero, too. The user can send a report of all sign-in names and information directly to ChatGPT to get an analysis of who deserves the most attention after the event. In short, it’s analyzing lead quality.

With that information and the CRM connectivity, a user can quickly put a person on an email sequence and properly classify them. After all, we all know open houses attract a lot of tire-kickers.

QR codes continue to play a big part in Curb Hero. From the tablet resting on the end table to a sign at the nearby intersection, any aspiring buyer can scan themselves into your database, then be delivered a very cool property listing page as visually engaging as any portal. It has an agent bio, community information and a map tab for quickly finding out what else is nearby the house about to be seen. 

What’s cooler about this QR code than others on the market is that the user can adjust on the fly the URL to which it sends people. Using a short interface in the app, it’s merely a case of entering the appropriate web address and tapping update. No new code needed, meaning you don’t have to copy and paste a new version into every marketing instance it appears. The company calls it, “the last QR code you’ll ever need.” It’s good stuff.

New sign-ins result in the listing agent getting alerted via text, to which they can respond directly to ensure information about the prospect ends up in their connected CRM.

Curb Hero has also included lead qualification and identity verification, as well as the ability to easily add and edit questions to the intake form. 

Brokers can ensure all branding assets are in place and get associated automatically with any open house event created under their brand. There are templates to be created and saved, as well. 

Curb Hero also provides a number of avenues for social media promotion of open houses, offering models for the Meta networks with all kinds of looks, copy options and calls-to-action.  

Curb Hero’s founder, Ajay Pondicherry, has an extensive background in e-commerce. He was vice president of product at Live Nation, and he leveraged his knowledge of how people interact with online forms to build this app, and his business acumen to keep it flourishing under a new name and during a crazy market.

Pondicherry knows that online form completion percentages increase when each question is presented individually on a screen, so that’s how Curb Hero works when asking for personal information, agent affiliation, and if the attendee is interested in mortgage information.

If they answer in the affirmative about mortgages, the app sends the lead to a preferred lender partner pretty much immediately, which could be an incentive for agents’ lending partners to play a role in the open house in some way, assuming RESPA guidelines are followed. 

Onlylink is a slick alternative to Linktree that lets agents create fast, attractive social summaries to share with open-house guests or anyone they happen to meet in their general course of business. It’s been updated to allow for more advanced controls for what content is presented in the My Featured Links section, as well as to allow a “full-screen takeover” of a listing for an extra boost of attention, something any seller client would be psyched to see.

There’s no doubt Curb Hero is a highly capable lead capture technology. It can become an easy bolt-on to any agent’s or brokerage’s open house promotion efforts given what it’s now become. Granted, the market is slow, and sellers are hesitant to take action. Tools like this, though, can help convince them that if they do take that step, their home will be considered a priority for who they hire to sell it.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.