Pat at Transparent Real Estate wrote today about Google’s new mapping functionality and pointed out how brokerages can take advantage of these tools to create some novel applications. One of the new functions is the ability to add customized markers. This allows site visitors to clearly and instantly understand what is being offered by looking directly at the map. Pat also believes that there should be more functionality in the infowindow itself. For example imagining clicking on the marker and opening a slew of click to action options such as chat, call and email. Pat has a great visual of what this would look like and we’ve annotated the idea with additional linkages to specific click to action pages here.

Why is this important ? Sometimes site visitors just want to talk or chat with a live person immediately after searching around the web for hours for information. Instant communication tools such as Meebo, Plugoo, and JAXTR allow exactly just that - the ability to instantly communicate with someone without having to wait for email or contact form responses.

Does this sound like a lot of work ? Well we’ve made it super easy! All of Realivent’s websites and blogs are now pre-installed with Meebo, Plugoo and JAXTR. All you have to do is copy your widget code into your site’s “CHAT” option page. Like this:

Also, you only have to do this once. For example, if you create 20 single property sites with us, then you only have to configure your page for the first site and we’ll do it for you automatically each time thereafter.

If you are listing your website anywhere where you want to give prospects the ability to instantly talk to you just point them over to your new communications page using this link: MYCHATPAGE

Here’s a sample, enjoy!

Popularity: 47% [?]

We just installed Google Translator on our sidebar. Now you can read our blog posts in Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, Portugese, Russian and many more languages by clicking on the country’s flag. This is also available on all of our single property and agent blogs.

Why is this important ? Well first of all when we introduced our product in San Jose, CA the first comment was “this is a great product, do you have your product in Spanish ?” We didn’t have a solution at that time, but with more and more widgets now available for your websites, it was easy to find a solution. I recalled using Babelfish several years ago, but I could not find any widgets (a couple of months ago ) that allowed you to embed the translation tools directly on your site.

Here’s the code to install the translator on your site: (http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/11/add-language-translation-to-website.html“>Courtesy of Digital Inspiration)

Popularity: 43% [?]

Check out your Meebo chat window today. Do you see that new “send file” icon ?

Here’s what it looks like:

This is a much needed addition which has been long overdue. I have been using Yahoo IM for a long time but quickly switched to Meebo after finding that you can have multiple chat windows open from several service providers at the same time. However, I always ran into situations where I had to shut down Meebo and switch back to Yahoo to send files. Now that this function is working with Meebo, there is little reason to switch back to Yahoo. One less thing to worrry about with all these new tools. Kudos to the Meebo team for finally releasing this enabling function.

Popularity: 40% [?]

The 1st Day at Connect was a huge success, especially with the Bloggers Connect debut!  Joel Burslem , host at InmanTV asked for feedback regarding Bloggers Connect and our response  - "Absolutely a Must!" for any new or experienced blogger.  One of the most encouraging trends we noted was the large number of new local blogs that have been started by so many agents.   Discussions and sessions talked about everything from how to monetize your blog, to best blog widgets, to using blogs to manage your online reputation.   

The main conference kicked off with spectacular panel duets featuring:

Zillow's Rich Barton and Dale Stinton - CEO, National Association of Realtors 

Trulia's Pete Flint and Russ Capper - President, Prudential Real Estate Services

This was as usual some of the best panel match-ups that Brad Inman has been known to consistently deliver.  

Day 2 should be a blast with many more geeky sessions…

Popularity: 51% [?]

We have a major update to the realivent wordpress CMA Plugin, I'd like to say it when from "great" to "Holy Cow, this is awesome".

The biggest improvement is the new feature that allows people to guess on future home values. A new form has been added to the plugin that allows people to choose a future date anywhere from tomorrow to years from now and then enter a price that they think the property will be valued at. The valuation is coming from Zillow, just like the old plugin.

What makes this such a valuable tool, is that when the future date arrives for the estimation, that user gets an email with a link to see the results back on your website. This means constant traffic coming back to your website! Even if they completely forget about you, they will be reminded to go back to your site and see how good they are at guessing prices.

It is really a lot of fun.
Screenshots:

get your gallery at realiventblog.com

This feature is in beta and you can turn it off in the admin section. All data is stored and we will be producing data trends based on the guesses. This data will not be available immediately because we do not have that much data, but as we start seeing some interesting trends we will release the data. The data will be release in the plugin also, so the public will stay on your site (sticky) and see how the world is estimating values.

Since Zestimates update about every 2 weeks, if you enter a future date in the near future and the Zestimate has not been updated, an email will get sent out telling the person that made the estimate that the value has not changed, and they will get another email as soon as it does. 

Along with this feature we have improved many other features:

1. Better look and feel. Of course you can also edit the code to fit your website.
2. Along with the default sidebar widget, we added a function to pull out the form so you can skin with you own sidebar container. See screenshot above.
   to skin, call the form with this function: <?PHP get_cma_widget_form() ?>
3. better results. Removed many of the errors from missing data.
4. added a permalink to the results. You can now get the permalink and use as a reference when blogging about house values, or send to clients in emails. Here is an example of the permalink: Upcoming auctions in Oakland, CA

Download the plugin here: Realivent CMA plugin

typical plugin install, upload entire folder to your plugin directory, and activate. Go to options->realivent cma to configure. The Options page will make a new wordpress page automatically. To add the widget, go to presentation0>sidebar widgets and drag the realivent cma widget to your sidebar. 

Popularity: 61% [?]

I love the lightbox javascript library, but I was having the hardest time getting it to work with Wordpress. I finally figured it out with some help from these plugins

http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/lightbox2-for-wordpress/

http://www.4mj.it/lightbox-js-v20-wordpress/ 

Here is a sample of ours:

get your gallery at realiventblog.com

The problem I found with all the other lightbox plugins was that they had no image uploader so I had to make the gallery and maually add the lightbox viewer. So I added an uploader and an easy way to add the gallery to the blog post or blog page.

Admin Sections:

get your gallery at realiventblog.com

To install the plugin, upload the entire lightbox_gallery folder to your plugin directory. Then activate it. The admin section will be under the options tab as "Lightbox".

Download: lightbox_gallery.zip 

How to Use:

1. Make a gallery. All photos have to go into a gallery so first thing to do is "add gallery". Once you add a gallery, you can upload images to it. You can delete and move the photos from one gallery to another in the edit section.
2. Once you have a gallery, just add [GALLERY=X] where X is the gallery id. The gallery id will be visible in the admin section. It must be capitalized!

Notes:

If you upload an image that is smaller then the desired max width, the image will not be resized.
It seems the page has to fully load before the lightbox will work. I'm looking into this.
If there is other javascript on the page, like a mybloglog widget or meebo, the lightbox will appear behind it…I'm working on this…no biggie, IMO.

It looks a lot better in Safari and Firefox, then IE7…but then again, most things do!
Safari, is quickly becoming my new favorite browser.

Popularity: 54% [?]

It's plugfest  2007 here at Realivent. This entire week will be blogging about plugins, widgets, and extensions. So tune in all week.

The first update we have completed is for the featured listings.

Featured Listing Overview.
This plugin builds a page to display your listings and created a widget for your wordpress sidebar. The benefit of this plugin, is that the website visitor does not get sent to a third party website to view the listing, or pop open a window (pop-up blockers). The website visitor stays on your website and views all your listings. The plugin also allows you to create a single featured listings. For example if you want to create a single property website, the plugin will automatically make the entry page (landing page) for your wordpress blog the highlighted listing instead of the default blog page.

Updates

1. Added Bird's eye view for listings. Now you can map the property on a google map and also get the bird's eye view from microsoft maps.
    

2. Added the title for the listings. Many people were asking why they added a title when inserting a listing into the system, but it did not appear in the plugin. Well, now it is…We just missed it on the previous versions.
3. Along with automatically adding a widget, you can now just pull the listings code out and add to your own sidebar widget.
   
   Simply place the new function in a custom container
   <?php get_listings_only() ?>

   If custom widget skins is over your head, give us a call, we can make custom skins for you to match your website look and feel

   Example of custom widget skins: smartlegacy.com

The updated plugin is available in the widgets section of this blog. You can simply upload over the old featured listing plugin, you do not have to delete the page and recreate it, or de-activate the plugin and reinstall.
Download here: Featured Listing Plugin

Please try it out and let us know what you think! 

Popularity: 36% [?]

There are two features of our single properties websites that need to be highlighted because they are great features and essential to get the most from your sites. Google Sitemaps, and Google Analytics. In this post I will be talking about google Sitemaps.

Why do you NEED to do this?
Because every single property website you make needs to have links to all your other websites, creating a web of links to all your websites. When the Google bots index your websites they see all these links to your websites and increases your page rank. The higher the page rank, the more often your website will appear on searches.

What does it do?
The Wordpress Google Sitemaps plugin builds an XML file that maps your website and lets the google robots know about pages and posts in your website. Once the sitemap is built, you submit the xml file to google using their webmaster tools and within a few days you will be indexed on google and in the search engine. The webmaster tools allows you to see how Google indexes your site, views your keywords, shows incoming links, etc… You can add unlimited number of sites to you account which makes it easy to check the status of all your websites

If you have a self hosted wordpress website, you can download the google sitemap plugin here

Since we run wordpress MU to host all the single property websites, we had to tweak the sitemap plugin to work for us. Below are the steps to create and submit a sitemap for our single property websites.

1. Activate the plugin, then in options you will see the sitemap tab. Once on the sitemap page, simply click build sitemap. Or rebuild sitemap. You only need to build it once, unless you do major changes to your site. 

the sitemap gets created instantly and then provides a link to the webmaster tools.

2. If you do not have a google account, create one, then add your site. At the top of the page, when you are in webmaster tools, you will see the textbox to add the url of your website.

3. Once added you need to verify it. There are 2 ways to do this. Since our single property websites do not have ftp permission, and you cannot add meta information to the site we had to make a little hack to allow Wordpress MU to get indexed.

4. at the dropdown, choose Upload an HTML file.

5. That will bring up this page, which tells you to upload a certain type of file so Google can verify that you are the owner. 

You are suppose to upload that file, but our little hack takes care of it for you, so just click "Verify" and in a few seconds, you will see a success message that your site has been verified by the google bot.

Now you need to tell Google where your sitemap is.

Navigate to the sitemaps section in webmaster tools. You have 2 selections, mobile or nrmal sitemaps…choose normal. You will then see this page. Notice the example below the textbox. That is the link you need to add. Just copy and paste the example url into the textbox, click submit and your done. Now just let Google do it's magic. 

Like always, if you have questions, shoot them my way  

Popularity: 20% [?]

I think we nailed down all the bugs and ready to release this widget.

Download it here (zip file)
Extract and upload the entire folder to your website plugin directory.

What is it?
This widget will add 2 forms to your Wordpress website. One form is for instant house values, retrieved from Zillow.com. The other form is a request form that allows users to send you a description of their property so you (the agent) can send then a custom made comparable market analysis of there home.

Both forms can be turned off, so you can only display the Zillow form, or only display the agent form…or turn them both off and display nothing.

Why Should I use it?
Offering instant online house values is a great way to advertise your website. You can make newspaper ads or google adwords offering this services. It's all about getting people to your website, and staying there. This adds value to your website. Sometimes Zestimates can be high or low, so the agent form allows people to send requests for professional home estimates if they need additional help while checking for house values.

Editing Options:

To configure the pages and widgets, you have to active the plugin, then go to Options > CMA Request. From this page you will create the CMA page. If a CMA page already exists, this page will update the public CMA page. To delete the public page, go to Manage > Pages then delete the cma page 

1. Add your email address because that is how you will get the request form set from potential clients
2. Make a page title. This will appear in the menu bar.
3. Choose page template. I prefer wider main sections, but this should work with main sections as narrow as 400px.

• Then you need to add a Zillow Api Key and select what forms to display. You can get a Zillow API Key in about 30 seconds here

• You can edit the introduction message for the agent form, and edit the message after the agent form is submitted.

• The widget colors are configurable also.

• Zillow provides some very nice graphs for address, city, state and zip. These graphs are configurable. You can adjust the height and width so they fit perfectly onto your pages.

Once you have it all configured, the page will be created automagically. The forms will work without the sidebar widget, but the widget will allow people to get house values from any page on your site, so I recommend adding it.
Note: this is only for widget enabled themes

Go to Presentation > Sidebar Widgets and drag the "Realivent CMA" to your sidebar

The widget will disappear when the CMA page is accessed so you do not have the main form and the sidebar form visible at the same time. The widget will be visible on all other pages.

Enjoy  

Popularity: 28% [?]

I made my first Blidget (Blog Widget) and it was ridiculously simple (I'm sure some of you have already done this).  It literally took me 2 minutes to make this and you can see it in action here.    Make your own by going to http://www.widgetbox.com/ and just enter your blog URL, customize the colors and that's it  -  widgetbox does the rest.  Let others subscribe to it and track how many hits you get.  (doesn't it look like a Nano ?):

Enjoy!

Popularity: 12% [?]