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% [?]

How many agents out there us Top Producer to manage all their customers? A lot right…I tried it for The Legacy Group, but do not use it anymore. Unfortunately they make you buy a year contract so I’m still paying for it…When I buy a product I expect it to do everything I need, and top producer just doesn’t. It crashed all the time, it was a bad interface, and it was browser specific.

Since I love open source, and I love FREE, I want to introduce SugarCRM. a Free, open source, customer relationship manager. If you think free mean “bad, or cheap” you have to look at this product. It is a commercial grade product, that can seriously compete with Top Producer, Act, Outlook, etc…

The current version is 4.5.0 which is very nice. I started using Sugar around 4.2 and liked it then, and the new version is very nice. Version 4.5.1 is coming out at the end of December with 2 added features that I can’t wait to use.

• Newsletter manager - timed delivery of e-newsletters
• Auto create web based lead forms - drag and drop form creator

The one problem with SugarCRM is that it might be overwhelming for most Realtors. We actually do not use the full product, we only use the Campaign manager. The campaign mananger allows you to send a one shot email to all your leads. We use this for our newsletter. Sugar can track views, clicks, forwards, bounces, and opt-outs. Very nice, even if you don’t plan to use the entire product, the campaign manager is great, and with the new implementation of the newsletter manager, we will be using this product more and more.

Also, since it is open source, you have access to the code. Of course, I don’t expect you to start hacking sugar, but if you think you can improve the product, you can hire someone or go to Sugar’s forums and see if someone will help you out. There are already a lot of add-ons for Sugar including mailmerge extensions, mapping, organizing…

If all you want is a newsletter manager, you might want to think about PHPlist. A small newlsetter manager, that handle sign-ups, delivery, and opt-outs. I will probably use both to capture leads this year.

I just wanted to touch on some really good products…later on i will show some more detailed examples of using these products, but right now, I have to get ready for Hawaii.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Let’s start podcasting, it’s not hard, and you don’t have to buy anything…except a computer. I’m going to show you how to create a podcast using a couple Free tools that you can get from the internet, and show you have to then add to your blog, and then I will subscribe them to Itunes.

Before we start, here is what you need for the most simple podcast.

• A Working Microphone, A broken microphone will not work in this situation… I tried.
• Sound Recorder - This is a free application that comes with Windows. To access the Sound Recorder go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Entertainment -> Sound Recorder
• A blog, or another way to create an RSS feed. If you need to build a blog, go to http://realivent.com/wp-signup.php
• Itunes to play the podcast. You can also play the mp3 directly from your blog, but Itunes will let you see how other will view and subscribe to your podcast. Get this from www.itunes.com. There is also a good explanation of what podcasting is.
  http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcasts.html

Ok, you ready…Sound recorder is very simple, just get your mic and click on record.

If this is your first podcast, I bet you said “testing, testing, 1, 2, 3″ everyone says that the first time. I don’t know why…but I bet you did.

You have to save the file as an mp3…you can’t podcast the default .wav file that sound recorder tries to save it as. Make your recording and then click on save. You have to change a couple setting on the save file box. Change “Save As Type” from “.wav” to “All Files”. Click on “Change”, below “Save As Type”. This will open a Sound Selection box. Use the drop down to save the output as an mp3. Click “OK” and the sound selection box will close, and you can save the new recording as an mp3.

**Make sure you use the full file name. If you only use the filename “podcast” it will still save it as a .wav file. You have to type “podcast.mp3″ to save the recording as an MP3.

Now that you have you a shiny new mp3, you need to get it out to the public. There are millions of people just waiting for your information. The easiest way to syndicate is to add it to a blog. If you don’t have a blog, just go to realivent.com and create a free one. I created pods.realivent.com. To add your mp3 to your blog is easy, just go to the admin section of the blog, write a new post, upload the mp3 using the file uploader, and then send to post. Once it’s in a post, people can subscribe to it, just like they subscribe to your blog. Itunes is able to parse blogs and find only the mp3’s. When a new podcast is available it will not download it, but you can see that there are new podcasts, and then you can choose to download the mp3 and listen.

If you open up Itunes, you can subscribe to my podcast at http://pods.realivent.com/feed

I was hoping to finish this post earlier and continue to talk about enhancing the podcast, but I think I will do that later. There is a very cool music editor that you can use for free called Audacity. I will take my simple podcast and add some background music to it. Then once we get the editing down we will look at using Skype to create podcasts. When you use Skype you can create podcasts with multiple people from all around the world…should be good.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I love open source, I love hacking, I love guerilla marketing, I love figuring out ways to take tech gadgets and apply them to real estate.

Here is a technology that is fairly new, but coming on strong. GPS Navigation on cell phones.

I bought Trang the Tomtom GPS for her Treo 650 this year, and it’s great. Easy set up, works perfectly, and was half the price of a stand alone GPS system for her car. The cool thing is, I can take the GPS receiver and play with it on my Treo 650 without the maps, and just get my location.

I got this idea from my friend Alain (ak4life.com)

Off topic: Alain as Borat for Halloween

Alain Navigating us through Livermore Wine Country

Back on topic…
Tomtom for Treo comes with CD’s that include all the maps for America, and the GPS receiver. I loaded them up on trangs Treo, but I have not put them on mine. I don’t even know if I can, there is an activation code, doesn’t matter, I don’t want them anyways, I just want the GPS receiver.

My goal is to track where I am, get the logitude and latitude so I plot it on a google map.

I found a lot of products that will do this, but I don’t want to pay…this sounds like fun, but not for $50. I finally come across a product called cotogps. This is an awesome product, Just follow the instructions, and install to your Treo. You have to install the palm mathlib first, which you can also get from cotogps website.

It installed with no problems, Just had to make the ’serial port’ accept bluetooth and I’m off and running. ready to start tracking my location.

cotogps, tracks a lot of data, your location, speed, direction, elevation… It has a track sytem to record your location every 1 second, 2 seconds, 10 secs, or 1 minute. I set it to 10 seconds, jump in my car and head off to Best Buy…I lost my stylus, so I need another one. Every 10 seconds the palm beeps to let me know it recorded my location. it also keeps the palm on, so make sure you have a lot of battery life.

After I get back from Best Buy, I want to view my path. You can see your path from your palm, but not very much info. I need to get the data off the phone and into a gpx file to put it on a map. The palm will not directly export it. I have to download another tool from the cotogps website called cotoGPSDT. Another very cool tool, This guy did a great job.
I sync my palm with my computer, and go to my backup folder and find the track that I plotted. I open that in cotoGPSDT and it creates some very neat images.

This is the path and elevation. Looks like I fell off a cliff.

The cotoGPSDT program lets you export you path as a gpx file. A gpx file is nothing more then an xml file.
I export it to my desktop, and search on Google for ‘gpx to google map’ and come across this page:
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/googlegpx/

Simply upload you gpx file and it puts it on a google map. In satellite mode, you can actually see which parking spot I was in. Another cool thing is that cotogps tracks your speed and allows you to add markers to your path. you can take pictures and connect them to your path.

Ok, so how does this help realtors…

If you can find your exact location, you can find all the homes for sale or open houses around you.

You can take your clients on a home tour, and create a path, mark the homes you were in, with pictures, and then create a website with that path. Your clients will love it, they will remember a lot more if they see the path to the houses.

There is also a game called geocaching, which is like a high tech treasure hunt. You can get together with other realtors and create a game for open houses. create a path, and tell your clients to follow it. I know it sounds aweful but give it some thought, it might work.

any suggestions for this technology is welcome…I’m jumping on my mountain bike and hitting the hills. I’ll have a new path later.

Popularity: 7% [?]