Archive for March, 2009

Real Pro Gold 3.2 – Release Notes

Thursday, March 19th, 2009 by Joe Lininger

Real Pro Systems has been hard at work to improve you real estate agent website. We are happy to announce the following enhancements in our release of Real Pro Gold 3.2.

  • Top Producer 8i Integration: Share web leads with your Top Producer 8i account. Real Pro Systems provides three convenient ways to share leads between these two systems, described in this Application Note.
  • New Navigation Builder: It’s now easier than ever to modify your website menu. Create second and third level menu items, link to established content, new custom pages, or outside links. This enhancement is available for all websites built on the new design.
  • Tag-based Listing Pages: Create a special custom page to display a subset of featured listings using our enhanced tagging system. Tag-based listing pages (with custom title and text) promote a unique niche of listing to your web visitors. So, if you have tagged a bunch of listings as “condo,” you can then create a custom page that features all of your listings tagged with “condo.” You can view an example here: http://www.gold3demo3.com/Properties/VacationTag-based listing pages are extremely useful for promoting subdivisions, neighborhoods, water front homes, and other specialty areas. This enhancement is available for all websites built on the new design.
  • Custom Page Templates: Create new custom pages with our library of custom page templates. There are nine available as of this writing. This enhancement is available for all websites built on the new design.
  • More Featured Listing Photos: Upload up to 27 photos per featured listing.
  • Default Controls for Featured Listings: Control how your featured listings are sorted on your real estate agent website.
  • Sitemap Submissions: Ping service has been activated for your Real Pro Gold sitemap. Our system pings Google, Google Blogs, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN services with new updates to your real estate agent website.
  • Contact Page: We’ve added a fresh new look to your general contact page, accessible from the link in your agent profile widget that appears on the right hand side of your real estate agent website.
  • PDF Property Flyer: A special link to a preformatted featured property flyer is available on Real Pro Gold and Silver sites built on the new design.
  • Blog – Future Dates: Type your blog post today, and have the system publish the article on a specified date in the future.
  • Blog – Post to Twitter: Twitter users are able to push their new blog posts directly to their Twitter account. Tinyurl links are automatically generated and posted when you activate the Twitter publishing option.* Stay up to date on RPS updates by following our Twitter accounts:
    http://www.twitter.com/realprosystems (official announcements)
    http://www.twitter.com/realprojoe (unofficial observations)
  • Blog – Ping Service: The following sites are pinged when you update your blog:
    • http://rpc.pingomatic.com
    • http://ping.feedburner.com
    • http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
    • http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
    • http://rpc.twingly.com
  • Blog – Collapsible Archive: Readers have the option of expand or collapsing your archive for easier, cleaner navigation.
  • Enhanced Guest Registration: Website guests now register via the Total Access lightbox. This enhancement is available for all websites built on the new design.
  • RSS Feed Enhanced: RSS feeds now include featured listings in addition to your blog posts.
  • Email Counter: An email volume counter is accessible within the email blaster section of your control panel.
  • SEO Controls: Enhanced search engine optimization controls have been added throughout your admin panel, allowing maximum access to SEO settings.

Along with these items, we have made some optimizations to both the database as well as caching which should help keep performance high and in some cases improve performance.

We hope you enjoy these enhancements.

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Tweet Tweet Tweet Goes the Real Estate Agent

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 by Tara Sybrant

TwitterWhat is Twitter? Why are people tweeting? Why do real estate agents join Twitter?

These are all great questions. And first of all, no we haven’t all gone to the birds, Twitter is a “social messaging utility” and tweeting is the messages sent or “micro-blogging.”  People have been “micro-blogging” on Twitter for three years this June, giving people a chance to say what was on their mind in 140 characters or less!

Twitter has caught on quickly in the social networking sphere and has begun to attract those in the real estate industry. People I know are twittering from their desks, their cars, their iPhones – at conferences, at dinner with their wives and even standing outside the men’s room. The point here is that you can send an update, anytime from anywhere.

Just like texting, twittering or tweeting can be award at first; relaying short messages designed to answer a simple question “what are you doing?”

“Helping a seller with a hardship get a short sale approved”

“Death of a newspaper. Interesting video… www.url.com”

“Don’t Let Debt Block Your Mortgage Refinancing http://url.com”

“I just dropped my phone in the mud”

“Running to Vegas for the weekend”

Messages range from strictly business to personal and everywhere in between. As you can see above your tweets can include links to podcasts, blogs, and websites that expand on your message.

So this begs the question: why in the world, would you, a real estate agent want to join Twitter?

It’s a good question, you’re a real estate agent – not some social media guru looking to make “connections” online 24/7, but the reality of it is – your consumers very well may be. Life online has gone beyond sending emails to a database of names, people are online seeking connections and wanting to get to know one another.

Twitter doesn’t need to take over your life or become a 24/7 365 obsession – you can incorporate it into the things your already doing like your blog. When you write a new blog post you can Tweet about it giving the title and using a URL compression service like www.tinyurl.com or is.gd to give you a shortened URL. You can tweet each time you get a new listing. There are multitudes of ways you can incorporate twitter into your business.

Tweeting has its advantages, including creating networking connections with like-minded professionals and expanding your reach online. In future articles we will talk about more about how to get started on Twitter and how to incorporate it into your business.

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Creating Custom Content for Real Estate

Monday, March 2nd, 2009 by Tara Sybrant

Foreclosure and Bank-Owned Vocabulary

As we all know the past eighteen months, and for the foreseeable future, foreclosures, and bank-owned are an indelible part of the housing landscape. A dramatic increase in these types of transaction has increased the need for knowledge about the terms associated with foreclosures and bank-owned properties. Become a resource for information; create a custom page on your website where you provide the vocabulary and define it for your readers.

Foreclosure

Bob Corcoran of Corcoran Consulting & Coaching has created a wonderful list of terms and definitions that we have listed an excerpt below:

  • Abandonment: The situation in which a homeowner leaves a house with no intention to return.
  • Accrued Items of Expense: Those incurred expenses that are not yet payable. The seller’s accrued expenses are credited to the purchaser in the closing statement.
  • Apportionment: The adjustment of the income, expenses, or carrying charges of real estate that are usually computed to the date of closing of title so that the seller pays all expenses to that date. The buyer assumes all expenses from the data on which the deed is conveyed to the buyer.
  • Appraisal: An estimate of a property’s value made by an appraiser who is usually presumed to be and expert in this work.
  • Appurtenance: Something which is outside the property itself but belongs to the land and adds to its greater enjoyment, such as a right-of-way or a barn or a dwelling.
  • Assessed Valuation: A valuation placed upon property by a public officer or a board as a basis for taxation.
  • Auction: The process of selling property at a public sale to the highest bidder. The person conducting the sale will call out the initial asking price and each price that anyone in the audience bids until no one will bid a higher price. The auctioneer then calls out “going once, going twice, sold to the highest bidder!”
  • Automatic Stay: A bankruptcy court order. When bankruptcy is filed, the bankruptcy court will issue a court order that prevents any creditor from attempting to collect any debt from the person who declared bankruptcy. Creditors, even though they are owed money, may not undertake foreclosure, repossession, eviction or seizure, or even call or write the debtor demanding payment. Instead, they must all come to the bankruptcy court and seek the money they are owed together with the other creditors.

For the complete list of terms please contact Corcoran Consulting and Coaching at info@CorcoranCoaching.com. Corcoran Consulting & CoachingSM is an international consulting company that specializes in Performance Coaching and the Implementation of sound business systems into the Brokers or Agents existing practice.

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