Archive for January, 2008
Enhance Your Listings with Video
Eyejot is a video messaging service that lets you easily send videos via email or attach them to any website. Jeff Turner at Real Estate Shows, provides a great example of how this service can be used to provide better, more personalized service for your clients. Check out his sample page for an example.
I’m very impressed with this use case for Eyejot’s technology. There is no question that it beats out regular email or paper flyers as a means to sell your properties. And while it lacks the 2-way communication a client would get in person, it has a permanence you can’t get with one-on-one conversations.
As a real estate buyer, I’ve left my agent’s office with a stack of print-outs only to realize I’d forgotten half the details she’d told me by the time I got home. With ...
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ActiveRain's Newest Member
…well not any more I’m sure. With 65k+ members, the network is huge and only getting bigger. I joined ActiveRain for the same reasons any real estate professional should:
- networking
- exposure
- knowledge
With that many members, there is a vast opportunity for us to meet potential clients, share our wisdom with regard to real estate websites, and learn from the agents that are “in the trenches” so to say. For agents or marketers, it is a great place ask questions, bounce ideas off of people or learn what works and what doesn’t from other’s professional experiences.
You may view our AR profile here and if you’re not a member yet, join today using our referral link.
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Big Changes at Zillow
Real Estate site Zillow has made some big changes to their service recently (official Zillow release and TechCrunch response). The most exciting part of the announcement for us is that they now allow listing submission via feeds. This means that our system will be able to automatically upload your listing to Zillow along with the other vendors we support for automatic listing promotion.
Even better, they are working towards a common listing format between many of the real estate aggregation services. This is great news for us as the current system is a mess. We currently export a different feed for each vendor we post listings to, making maintenance more difficult than it needs to be. By creating a common format, it also lowers the bar for new aggregators to enter the market and quickly propagate their sites with lots of listings.
All around, great ...
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Defining Neighborhoods
When out-of-town customers search your site for properties, the neighborhood/area portion of their search is probably the most confusing question they must answer. If they are unfamiliar with your city, how do they know what neighborhood they want to buy in?
Risa Weiss of We Rock Chicago took an interesting approach to this problem with the following video about Wicker Park.
I caught this via FOREM who thinks video will break out in 2008 for real estate websites (it’s about time). I have to agree that video is a great medium to portray the vibe of your local neighborhoods. It makes a wonderful complement to our neighborhood mapping and description feature (see it in action at www.MySteamboatConnection.com). Our system accepts video from sites like YouTube and WellcomeMat today and ...
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Kick-off
Our site is finally ready for its maiden voyage. We’ll still be putting the final polish on it over the coming weeks, but as of today, we are open for business.
We’ll be using this area to highlight new product features, new sites, and discuss marketing real estate on the web in general. Bookmark us, get email updates, or subscribe to our feed. Exciting things will be coming.