A relatively new Web site called " FindOpenHouses.com" has entered into a marketing agreement with industry giant Chicago Title Company to provide real estate agents and consumers a place on the Web where they can find out which homes are open for inspection, and when.

FindOpenHouses.com is about three months old. Chicago Title was founded more than 150 years ago.

FindOpenHouses is an effort to help potential home buyers find which houses are open without endlessly combing the newspaper and trying figure out which homes are within price range.

"Historically, the majority of open house advertising has been done in local newspapers," Anthony Marguleas, founder of the Web site. "This service allows agents and home builders to market their properties to everyone, instead of just those who may have seen that newspaper that day."

Randy Foster, vice president of marketing, said the company makes most of its money servicing the top real estate company and franchises Web sites around the country. Those companies use FindOpenHouses technology to post their own open houses on their own sites.

Foster said the majority of traffic hits the site Thursday through Saturday. The vast majority of people coming onto the sites are consumers, with the remainder being agents preparing home tours for clients, as well as agents locating broker open houses.

Traffic dives on Mondays before starting to rebuild for the week.

The site enables visitors to enter their desired viewing dates, areas, price range and other key parameters. FindOpenHouses.com will provide information and a picture of their desired home.

The site also provides a map to the home and a number of other features.

The company says it has posted more than 5,500 open houses on behalf of 2,500 licensed real estate agents and builders across the country.

There is no charge to real estate agents for posting listing on the service. Nor is there a charge to consumers or buyer agents to search for homes.

Pete Filler, vice president-Southern California for Chicago Title, said the company felt it was a good match to the Web site.

"Our company has been so impressed with FindOpenHouses.com that we have entered into a marketing agreement between the two companies. We are thrilled to be able to expose the value offered in this web-based service to thousands of Realtors we work with around the country."

Chicago Title Company is a division of Fidelity National Financial, the nation's largest title insurer and provider of real estate related products and services.

Published: October 23, 2000

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