Have you noticed a design change on our main site ?   We hope you are still able to find the login buttons as you browse through the new design, but the main purpose of the change was to introduce a new exciting lineup of real estate business packages.  Since we've received plenty of positive feedback from our users for our single property site system, we decided to extend our On-Demand Website Platform to agents and brokers.  The same features which are available on single property websites are now available on agent and brokerage sites.  You can see all the features of each product here and see the new packages here.

One of the most exciting features of our new agent and broker platform is the ability to add new sites to "your personalized domain name" ON-DEMAND.  What does this mean ?  Well, basically it means that you can add new neighborhood sites, new individual listing sites, new niche sites anytime you want as long as you have enough site bandwidth.   For example, if your site is currenlty "bobbroker.com" and you have 10 listings, just use our system to add 10 individual property sites on top of your main site in minutes.  Then, turn each of these sites into their own custom domains anytime you want.  Want to grow your reach even further ?  Let's say you are the neighborhood expert for the "Bel Aire" community in xyz city and want to expand your offerings to the "Eagle Ridge" community near by.  You don't have to go out and spend more money to create new websites for each of these communities, just use our ON-DEMAND system to build these new neighborhood sites on the fly  - and build them in minutes.  This allows you to grow your website by constantly adding fresh content and new niche sites making it truly dynamic to meet the ever changing needs of the market.  Don't understand how all of this works yet ?   Contact us to schedule an agent or broker demo today.

Don't forget, once you enter your listing once into your website platform, your listing is automatically syndicated to listing sites such as Google Base, Edgeio, VAST to name a few.  But that's not all, your online flyer has already been created for you as well.  Where do you find it ?  In your website admin panel.  Just go to your website administration and copy and paste the code to post on Craigslist, Backpage, BackFence and many others.   So let's recap, what is the new agent and brokerage marketing platform ?  A powerful fully featured website, a fully functional blog, a syndication service, an online flyer generator, and most importantly a centralized control panel to manage all of your online marketing.

Lastly,we've seen a lot of interest from solution providers who want to offer the platform to their colleagues and clients so we've just launched our Affiliate Program to allow resellers, distributors, system integrators, web developers, consultants, and virtual assistants to offer this platform everywhere.  If you're interested in becoming an Affiliate, please contact us for an online demo and program details.  We hope these new offerings will help you market yourself and your listings faster and aim to add more functionality to the system as we grow. 

Popularity: 27% [?]

Just added the meebo widget to Propblogs.com. The meebo widget allows you to add meebo to your sidebar, quickly and easily.

What is Meebo?

Meebo is a web based IM that lets you log into your IM networks from any computer with a browser and internet connection with no firewall issues. It employs technologies (like AJAX) to make it act more like a desktop application, which dramatically improves usability. Many users enjoy the benefits of a native DHTML application, as it does not consume as many system resources as a Java applet (such as ICQ2Go or Yahoo Web Messenger).

What is the Meebo widget?

This is another sidebar widgets to embed Meebo Widgets on your wordpress blog.
Source: Patrick Chia (author of the widget)

Good job, Patrick, you probably have no idea how much this will help the real estate community!

This is a really good plugin, because you can now make unlimited single property websites, and people can contact you immediately from any of them, how cool is that!! This is what I call a spider web of lead capture sites.

How to use the meebo widget

1. login to your admin section
2. go to plugins and activate the WP-Meebo Widgets
3. go to meebo.com and get the code to make the Meebo IM tool
4. In the admin section, go to Presentation->Sidebar wigets, and drag the meebo widget to yor sidebar. Enter your code in the widget and your done. (don't forget to save settings)

Awesome, this is nice…I'm looking for more plugins that help agents comunicate to put on propblogs, so if you know of one, please tell.

Popularity: 11% [?]

There are many websites popping up that will take your listing and create an HTML ad on Craiglsist and other online classified sites, but none of them actaully capture leads directly from Craiglsist. My company is totally focused on getting you leads. Not only am I the CTO of Realivent, but I’m also the Co-founder of a top producing Real Estate Team (Top Producing in less then one year of business). The key is leads…you can never get too many.
Using a pretty HTML post on Craigslist will get you business, because when sellers see your add compared to all the typical text ads, it really makes you shine…and it looks like you spend the time to market your listings.

Again, there are many companies that do this, Now lets look at what Realivent does:

Our listing designer takes your listing information and creates a gorgeous post for Craigslist. We have the only tool that allows you to easily add related documents to your post. For example, you can add PDF’s docs of market stats, comparable info, buyer or seller reports, etc…The Craigslist user clicks on the document and then enters their email address, and the document gets sent as an attachment to their email account…bad email, no docs. Along with the documents, your email message gets sent. You can fully customize the email message…

So lets review. You have taken a normal Craigslist ad and create a powerful marketing tool. You are sending 3 times the amount of information to potential clients as compared to all the other posts on Craigslist.

Sure, pretty Craigslist posts help, but the Realivent Listing Designer GETS YOU LEADS!

We have also opened up our listing designer api and allow you to upload your own templates, plug in our information and you now have a custom Craigslist post branded to your marketing material and allows lead capture.

We also have a tool that allows you to post the full website created by our virtual tour editor…But I warn you, when you use this tool, you are posting a full website on Craigslist, complete with 800 IVR, lead capture, Zillow comps, unlimited images, etc…YOU MIGHT GET FLAGGED!. Why, I really don’t know…I mean I think I know why. It’s because you are posting a full website on Craigslist. To see this tool, add a listing to Realivent and then checkout the virtual tour section of “My Realivent” you will see the new Tool

Popularity: 12% [?]

This new report from Redfin has taken off, and by just looking at the comments I think Traditional Agents (TA’s from now on) are jumping into the ring.

First off, here is an interesting comment from Glenn over on Freakonomics:

Our cost structure and our business model are radically different. Redfin has virtually no customer acquisition costs except from development of our website; traditional agents spend 67% to 90% of their time looking for new clients.

We can afford to pay our agents double or triple the industry average, so we get the cream of the crop, and those agents can focus exclusively on closing deals; customer find the home they want to buy on their own.

I just cannot believe this statement…if this is true, why would any agent in the market today want to be a TA?
The average income is around $60,000 for a TA, so if I break out my calc, I see that a Redfin agents makes around $120K and $180K respectively (someone, please check this.). This is good income for many agents.

but…

Top agents make well over $180K a year, so I find it very hard to believe that the cream of the crop is leaving the TA model for the Redfin model. Of course, if you look at the trade off…no more lead generation and no more showing homes, it might be worth it.

The hardest part about becoming a top agent is the lead generation. Anyone can master the contracts, but getting leads is make or break in real estate. So a top agent will struggle for years to create a base of loyal clients, then throw that special skill away so they can churn out contracts?

One thing TA’s can learn from Redfin, is how to create huge buzz. The wave Glenn created is not going to break for a looooong time.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Given all the marketing tools that Realtors use to market properties, I would take the listing designer over anything.

website, blogs, email, CRM, video, etc…

If you market your property well on Craigslist you will get business over and over.

1. Craiglist is in the top 25 of all website, yet only 10% of Realtors post their listings on it.
2. most the posts are plain text with just 4 pictures.
3. Sellers are more likely to list their property with an agent that looks like they market better then the others

There is a saying at KW (Where I spend most my time) and at most brokerages. “List to Last”, the more listings you get, the more business you have. This is completely true. How does the listing designer help? When people are thinking about selling their house, they start surfing Real Estate websites. Inevitably they will hit Craigslist and see text ad after text ad and all the posts look the same. Then, they run across a listing that is highlighted in HTML, and has additional documents to download, and 800 numbers, and pictures, don’t you think they will be impressed and be more likely to use that agent that spends the time to really highlight their clients properties?

Bottom line, you are a professional, people are paying you thousands to market their property, you should work your hardest to make it look like the best house on the market and a plain text ad on CL, does not convey this.

Now let’s look at the Listing Designer. You enter your listing and add some photos, or set up a feed from your website, and the pretty HTML post gets created automatically for you. I just finished updating it and now you can make your own templates, and brand your own posts. You can actually take your blog or website, copy the code, add our tags, and you can post your website on CL…


It’s so simple even a caveman could do it!

Check out this sample post.

Another aspect that sets our Listing Designer apart from Postlets or VFlyer is that you can add document downloads directly to your Craigslist post, providing even more information.

for example, my partner Trang just got a co-listing from an agent in Sacramento. Trang used the listing designer to add 2 documents for download. One was for comps and the other was “How to do a lease option”. The second document gets tons of downloads because Sacramento is getting hit be a lot of investors and for Trang to provide this information is very valuable. The documents get attached to an email and sent immediately to the person that requested it. Along with the document, Trang’s e-newsletter gets sent, and the person that received the email can select to sign up for Trang’s newsletter.

We can also set it up for automatic drip email. As soon as a lead comes in, they get set up on a set number of automatic emails. We do not use this, but it is available. e-newsletters are much better at communicating with your audience.

I’m constantly adding features to the listing designer, and if anyone wants their website copied into a Craigslist post, I’ll do it, just email me.

I have another huge feature coming soon, so stay tuned!

Popularity: 6% [?]

As you can see I’m releasing a lot of plugins. The idea behind the plugins for wordpress is to create a full real estate website for your blog.

Take your typical wordpress blog, add IDX, your featured listings, contact forms, etc… and you now have a full blown website.

I’m releasing these plugins quickly because we are currently programming blogging software for Keller Williams San Francisco Properties. The foundation is WPMU, which I love. I actually use for all blogs I make, even for single agents, because it allows you to easily create subdomains. The great thing about subdomains is that google sees each subdomain as a different website, but the front end user see one site. WPMU handles this perfectly. Although you cannot just set up WPMU and create subdomains, you have to have wildcard DNS available, and access to the httpd.conf file. If your hosted on a site does not allow this access, you are welcome to come over to Realivent.com. Our servers are completely set up and ready to host Wordpress MU sites.

For more information, please contact: matt@realivent.com

Back to the new plugin. I have made a lot of websites over the last 8 years, and one of the biggest wastes of time is creating forms for people to contact you over the internet…There are a lot of form generators, but any programmer knows you still have to build them manually.

I created a property watch plugin that allows visitors to your site to fill out a form that contains information for home searches. The form gets emailed to you, and you (the agent) sets up the new lead in your automatic email notification system.  All you have to do is download the plugin, add your email in the admin section, and then add it to a page…Simple and effective.

Example website: http://smartlegacy.com/property-watch/

Download the plugin: Property Watch Plugin v1.0

Install into plugin directory, and then access it at admin->options

Any comments or questions are welcome, and as you can see I’m focusing a lot on plugins for wordpress, so if you need anything made, just let me know. I can do it.

Popularity: 7% [?]