We’ve been asked recently about how to add property disclosure documents and floor plans to blogs and websites. There probably are a number of different solutions that many have used before, but we just discovered a way to make them more easily accessible (no downloads) and instantly viewable (at full page width).

The tool that we’re using here is Scribd. I’ve seen many people used Scribd before in real estate to share:

Property Flyers
Trump University Lessons
How-To-Manuals

But the same tool can be used to embed full width reports and supporting documentation for your property.

Here is a sample inspection report at full width on a property site: Full Inspection Report Page

Here is a sample floor plan page at full width: Floor Plan Page Sample

This can be easily done in a few steps:

1)Upload your PDF
Go to www.scribd.com and login to upload your PDF file

2)Resize your embed code to your page width (in our samples above the width was set to 950 pixels wide) and desired height by clicking on the “advanced” option next to the “Embed” option:

3)Login to your blog and “Write” a new page and select your “Page with no sidebars”
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create a full width page with no sidebars.

4)Embed your code from Step #2 above and make sure to click on “HTML” before you paste the code.
Finally save and update your page.

That’s it, the finished product should look like this : Full Inspection Report Page

Popularity: 74% [?]

Realivent and Domus Consulting today announced the launch of Homescopes , a multi-agent blog site that is comprised of a premiere group of Coldwell Banker real estate agents delivering hyper-local real estate information to more than 8 counties including Sonoma, Napa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa.

Homescopes is the first Web 2.0 real estate multi-author blogging site that allows agents to blog on their own branded individual sites while at the same time delivering content to a common blog site that offers buyers and sellers a wider scope of topics and geographies from all over Northern California. This solution offers several distinct advantages to both the team and the individual agents themselves. Agents have the ability to maintain and grow their individual brand while the team as a whole receive the benefit of diverse content developed by their colleagues. The main site is an aggregate of geographically diverse ideas and expertise on a hyper-local level. This is truly a win-win solution for the team as a whole as well as the individual agents who make up the group.

Team blogging has been proven to be hugely successful as been demonstrated by some of the most notable real estate blog sites including 3OceansRealEstate, Bloodhound Realty, GeekEEstateBlog and RainCityGuide. Now team blogging can be done remotely from your very own site. In fact, the system also allows writing to the main site directly from any of the agents, broker, or team leader creating another dimension of publishing.

The sites are all feature packed with lead generation forms, IDX, Zillow CMA widgets, Altos Research Charts, and Google mapping of agent locations. Other Realivent plugins include property watch forms, mortgage calcultor, and featured listings. All of these sites are fully blogging enabled with Wordpress and come with Realivent’s powerful backend listing and marketing platform , all accessible within Wordpress.

Finally, the individual agent sites also includes Realivent’s On-Demand quick build system for individual property sites. Agents get new listings and enter them directly into their site and in a few clicks create individual property sites on their own domain name. Here are some samples:

http://4184manila.homesacrossthebridge.com/

http://allenheights.roots2realestate.com/

http://410moana.mariansbennett.com/

Pat Kitano at Transparent Real Estate makes a compelling case about why this new blogging model will be an important factor in future real estate marketing.

Popularity: 73% [?]