Mobile Agent Tip: Sync Microsoft Outlook Calendar with Google Calendar

By Reggie · March 7, 2008 · Leave a Comment 

Many real estate agents love the simplicity of Microsoft Outlook. Yet real estate is very much an active, fast moving business. It’s likely that when you need your calendar most is when you are in the field. Does this sound familiar? If so you’re in luck, introducing Google’s new Calendar Sync Tool. Now sync your primary calendar’s events between Microsoft Outlook’s Calendar and Google’s Calendar. Then use your Blackberry, iPhone, Treo to access.

Download the Google Calendar Sync

1. Click the download link above and then click “Save File.”
2. Click “OK”.
3. Read through the Google Calendar Sync Terms of Service, and click “I Agree.”
4. Continue to follow through the Installation Options and click “Install” to finish. 

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Viral Tools to Boost Your Real Estate Blog’s Readership

By Reggie · March 5, 2008 · 6 Comments 

Over the past few years we have all witnessed the explosive growth of social networking. One could argue this growth has been achieved with viral marketing tools. Think about it every time we sign up for a new network or add a new application we are given the option to spread the message (or application) to our network. By having the option to easily broadcast a message to your database, without having to retype your contacts email address, you are more likely to spread their word…right? Would that type of viral element work on your real estate website or blog?

Introducing Octazen Solutions a contacts importer and address grabber for PHP, .Net, Java, and Ruby. Octazen has built in support for all the major Webmail systems (Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, & AOL) also including Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Mozilla. For their complete list of supported services, click here to review. Are you wondering if your server is compatible with the address book importer? Try this PHP test script? Try the contact importer demo.

Perhaps rather than importing contacts from an address book, you’d like to spread your message through a social network. With Octazen’s Invite Sender Script, your visitors can message their friend list in Friendster, MySpace, Hi5, Facebook, Orkut, Xing, BlackPlanet and Bebo. Your visitors with enter their login information and the Invite Sender script will compile a list of contacts to invite. Once the message is sent it will arrive as a social network email. Try the Social Network Friends finder

These scripts could be placed before the download of an eBook or other value added item. It would allow those interested parties to also help spread the word with other that share similar interest…easy!

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Is eSignature Technology Right for Your Real Estate Business?

By Reggie · February 17, 2008 · 8 Comments 

As a real estate agent you probably have some basic understanding of how digital signature technology can help your real estate business. Maybe you could reduce the risk involved in holding and storing documents, gain time efficiencies by signing documents on the spot or even overcome geographical restrictions. Yet from my experiences many agents are sitting on the sidelines, not ready to jump in. Maybe it’s the result of not understanding how accessible the technology has become. Or is it the issue of legality?

First let’s address the legality of an eSignature. In 2000, the U.S. Congress passed a federal law titled Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) to “facilitate the use of electronic records and signatures in interstate and foreign commerce by ensuring the validity and legal effect of contracts entered into electronically”.

With the ESIGN Act stating clearly that “a transaction may not be denied legal effect, validity, or enforceability solely because an electronic signature or electronic record was used in its formation.” It paved the way for companies to start creating today’s eSignature platforms. Today in real estate eSignatures can be accomplished with various technologies, such as VREO Real Estate Dashboard or DocuSign. However they both deal with the digital signature in different ways and both have distinct advantages.

VREO real estate dashboard is a software application installed to a tablet PC. VREO dashboard allows agents to sign contracts and documents with a stylus pen on the screen—without ever printing a piece of paper. Once you’ve collected the required signatures, simply send to the other party using your dashboards integrated email or fax options. This technology proves to be very convenient for the mobile real estate agent who wants to conduct business anywhere, anytime! Note: An Internet connection is not required to collect signatures.

• Free trial of VREO Real Estate Dashboard here
• Watch “The New Way”—A motivation mobile agent story

DocuSign on the other hand is an online solution enabling real estate agents to capture digital signatures via the web. As a result geographical distance between you and the recipient(s) is not an issue. In 2004, DocuSign integrated with Zipforms (Winforms) to provide online signature processing. As a result of the integration, real estate agents can print contracts into a “digital envelope” and then place “Stick-eTabs” wherever a recipient’s signature or initial is needed. This digital envelope is then encrypted and saved to a secure location. Your recipients will receive their invitation by email, and they will need to authenticate and sign the contracts. In the authentication phase the recipient must provide basic identification and pick a signature. Then it’s time for the recipient to review and sign. When complete, each of the parties is notified of the updated contracts.

• Watch the DocuSign Demo
• View DocuSign’s Special Brief on the Legality of Electronic Signatures
• Zipform eSign Details & Zipform/Docusign FAQ’s

Where are you with eSignatures in real estate business?

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Mapping Done The Right Way in Your Next Single Property Site

By Reggie · January 30, 2008 · 2 Comments 

According to the Internet vs. Traditional Buyers Survey conducted by California Association of Realtors (C.A.R.), mapping technology continues to be one of the highest-rated features used by Internet buyers. Yet when I look around, many real estate Websites are either not leveraging maps at all or using old mapping interfaces to display homes and community info. Now don’t get me wrong, I do understand that this technology can be expensive to deploy. But as a real estate agent you do have options. Why not include the latest mapping on your next single property Website? Check out these two killer features from RealBird and MyMarketWare.

RealBird
Is Google street view available in your area? If so you are going to enjoy the directions from Zoltan over at RealBird. He recently posted on a very simple way to manually embed Google’s street view into your next listing publisher design. This view will give home searchers an up close view of local streets and neighborhoods as if they were driving down the street. Potential buyers can visualize their drive to the freeway or downtown without leaving their chair.

MyMarketWare
Our own NikNik offers MarketSites to real estate agents utilizing the latest in satellite imagery called pictometry. These visually pleasing aerial photos come from Microsoft Live and the give your web audience a surprisingly clear view of the neighborhood. Click your mouse on the satellite image and drag to explore new areas. Zoom in to 20 meters for an extreme and detailed close up. Take a look at backyard conditions, as well as distances to schools and park–you can do it all.

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Clean Duplicates in your Real Estate Database with a Free Add-In Technology for Excel

By Reggie · January 27, 2008 · Leave a Comment 

Do you have duplicate contacts in your real estate database? If so, you know that removing those duplicates can be a daunting project unless you are running the new Microsoft Excel 2007 or know visual basic. However there is a really cool add-in by Brett at VBA Express that will do the trick, and you don’t have to buy any new technology. Simply download the handy Excel Add-In titled “The Duplicate Master” for Excel 2000 and later. With this add-in you can filter out those duplicates by cells, entire rows or even multiple workbooks.

Use this Excel Add-In for your real estate business if you would like to:

• Highlight duplicate cells
• Delete duplicate cells
• Extract unique cells or rows
• Extract and count the number of duplicate cells or rows
• Run a row match on any number of columns

Instructions for installing the add-in:

1. Extract the “The Duplicate Master” for Excel.
2. Open Excel and select Tools, Add-In and then select Browse. Now locate the add-in file we have saved top the computer.
3. Select The Duplicate master.xla and select OK.
4. Check The Duplicate Master.
5. Now look for the new options in the Tools menu. You’ll see The Duplicate Master.

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Marketing Your Real Estate Blog

By Reggie · January 18, 2008 · 2 Comments 

Recently I was invited to the Inman Connect in New York to speak on a panel about “Marketing Your Real Estate Blog”. As you may know this can be a tricky topic. Please enjoy this video:

Remember that marketing your real estate blog will come in many forms. Here are a few more ideas:

1. Start with properly formatted HTML
2. Create remarkable and link worthy content
3. Syndicate original content: Ezine Articles, GoArticles
4. Social Bookmarks: StumbleUpon, Digg and Del.icio.us
5. Participate in communities: ActiveRain, Zolve, RealTown, Trulia Voices, etc
6. Guest post on popular blogs
7. Analytics Software: Google Analytics, Clicky, CrazyEgg
8. Conduct interviews with opinion leaders
9. Widgets: MyBlogLog, WidgetBox

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8 ways analytics software will help build a broader audience

By Reggie · January 13, 2008 · 5 Comments 

1. Unique Visitor Tracking: Visitors are a good way of tracking your website or blog traffic. So Unique Visitors are a great way of monitoring new traffic. You will be looking for your monthly number of unique visitors to trend upwards month after month.

 

2. Referring URL’s: I absolutely love this feature of analytics software. In my opinion Clicky is the best at giving me complete URL’s for referring pages. This data is extremely useful when tracking marketing campaigns for your listings, blog interviews, carnivals and lots more. You can see a specific number of unique visitors that came from a particular page or domain.

 

3. Searches & Keywords: Knowing what your website / blog visitors are searching to find you is very useful. Think of viewing your visitors search terms as understanding their goal in coming to your website. Gold mine! You’ll understand the content that is working so you can write more in that area.Also use the searched terms provided by your analytics software to track the effectiveness of your optimization strategies. Say your primary search term is “Dublin Ca Real Estate.” Analytics software will help you identify whether or not any searchers are finding you with those search terms. If you see they are not, you can increase your keyword density around those words.

 

4. Outgoing Clicks or Exit: Understanding where your visitors are leaving your site is important. Did they leave because they were uninterested, confused, or just because they didn’t want to proceed the way you were offering? Based off your exit page stats you can make adjustments to slow abandonment rates. For example you may learn that users are getting to your IDX MLS search but you require sign-in. The website visitors are leaving your search tool, looking for another site without registration. A simple fix may be to move the registration, and give more information upfront.

 

5. Screen Resolution, Browser etc: When first developing your website / blog you probably didn’t know a lot about your potential readers screen resolution. So you had to build your layout based on what little information you had available. However with analytics software you can track your visitors screen resolution. How many visitors have resolution lower than your site width can fit? If it’s a big segment you may want to redesign to stop unneeded scrolling.

 

6. Filter Viewers: As you take a closer look at particular characteristics of your visitors, you may have the need to segment your results. This is where Filters come in. Filter only users of a particular Web browser, Country, or even referrer domain. Maybe you want to filter out a specific IP address of your work? By eliminating those visits you gain a deeper understanding of your true visitor count.

 

7. Bounce Rate: If the bounce rate is high, you may need to tailor that page better…maybe redisplay the content. You may also look at the referrer URL and compare bounce rates. Are some traffic sources higher quality? If so, you can focus on gaining more traffic from those referrers.

 

8. Site Overlay: Google, CrazyEgg and a few others provide the ability to overlay your metrics on your website / blog to see exactly where users are clicking. Wouldn’t it be powerful to understand how Digg users are interacting with your site compared to StumbleUpon users? How about Google search traffic, how do they interact with your site compared to Yahoo search traffic?

 

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Are you missing hidden opportunities to grow your real estate blog readership?

By Reggie · January 12, 2008 · 4 Comments 

If you’ve started blogging for your real estate business, it’s likely the major reason was to grow your online presence or lower your monthly communication costs with potential clients. Both are very important byproducts of blogging. However soon after you start publishing posts the question comes up, “How can I get more visitors to my blog? And how do I retain more of my current traffic?”

Although there are many strategies for attracting new readers to your real estate blog, one basic strategy is to closely follow your website analytics software. If you don’t already use one…start now! I use three different analytics packages: Google Analytics, Clicky Web Analytics and CrazyEgg. Google Analytics is free up to 5 million page views a month. Clicky and CrazyEgg both have a limited free version and a few tiers of paid plans.

However before you jump in to your metrics and get overwhelmed, start by asking yourself a few key business questions about your real estate website or blog that you would like answered. The questions could be:

1. How do I convert more visitors with my IDX MLS tool?
2. How do I gain more subscribers to my Buyer or Seller eBooks?
3. How do I get more visitors to search local communities on my blog?
4. How do I get more visitors to subscribe to my RSS feed?

Once you’ve come up with the questions, you can analyze your data to help find the answers. This method should prevent you from being overwhelmed by the aggregate data and make better use of your time.

Next I will explore specific ways analytics software can help build a broader audience for your real estate blog.

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Does Google have the perfect Gadget for your Real Estate blog?

By Reggie · January 3, 2008 · 3 Comments 

Over the Holidays I took some time to look closely at Google’s new Gadgets for your blog. I was very surprised to see how many gadgets were out there. These Gadgets are the same offered on the popular iGoogle. I immediately thought about the real estate agent looking to add a bit of flare to their blog by providing relevant data to their geographic area. Many of the Google gadgets allow the blog owner to customize results by zip code.If you are more interested in using Gadgets for your own self promotion, you could always develop your own.

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Adding YouTube Video To Your Next Real Estate PowerPoint

By Reggie · December 16, 2007 · 3 Comments 

The impact of YouTube’s video sharing technology is hard to miss. Not only can you find any video imaginable on YouTube, but real estate professionals are leveraging the free bandwidth and enormous popularity to promote their own commercials, video testimonials, local community footage and lots more. However the need to leverage your video in a listing presentation, kiosk, or window display may arise. So let’s talk about how you embed that video into your next PowerPoint presentation.

This is a very straight forward task and can be achieved using a YouTube Video add-In created by Shyam at skp.MVPS.org. The Add-In works for PowerPoint 97’ to current. Keep in mind however the video is streaming, so you will need a live Internet connection to display the video in your PowerPoint.

THIS EXAMPLE IS FOR POWERPOINT 2007. For other versions of PowerPoint, click here.

To get started, download the YouTube Video Add-In here. Start by unzipping the folder.

1. Open PowerPoint, and click the Office Button.
2. Click PowerPoint Options then select the Add-Ins tab.
3. Click PowerPoint Add-ins from the Manage drop down and click Go.
4. From the Add-Ins windows click Add New.
5. Locate the folder you downloaded and unzipped. Select the Add-In YouTubeVideo2k7.ppa.
6. Choose Enable Macros if prompted.

Congratulations, the YouTube icon should now be added to your toolbar as seen below. To use, simply click the button and follow the simple 4 step process.

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Sidebar "Bling" Cross Promotes Your Online Presence

By Reggie · December 10, 2007 · 11 Comments 

These days real estate professionals are members of social sites, online communities, blogs and more. So how do we deliver a consistent brand and message over so many tools? Also how to we channel interested parties to our other communities? One way is to use a similar sidebar for each application.

Introducing the BLING Widget for Real Estate Agents

Since we have not seen the perfect sidebar bling application for you real estate agents, we developed one for you to use. You will notice in “Step 7″ I instruct you to use the full path to the icons. This is so that you can use this code on real estate networks like Activerain, Facebook and more without making further changes.

Here is an example of the buttons I have created for your use.
(Buttons from left to right: LinkedIn, Facebook, RSS, Activerain, Zolve, MyBlogLog, Google MyMaps, Friendster, Trulia Voices, Zillow and RealTown Real Estate Network.)

DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE OF BUTTONS HERE.

IMPORTANT: If you are adding this to your blog, please make a backup of your template before beginning so you can easily restore things if you need too.

Step 1:
Create a new folder on the root directory of your website or blog and title it “bling”

Step 2:
From the icons I’ve created, choose the specific icons you want to use on your sidebar widget and add them to your newly created folder titled “bling”. (Note: Choose either the .jpg files or the .png files. PNG files have a transparent background.)

Step 3:
Start by opening notepad or your HTML editor. Now you will be adding the code from each step to the blank notepad document. Please add each snippet of code to notepad in the order below. If you are advanced, the complete code is avaliable here.

Step 4
Copy the code below. Now paste into the notepad document we opened in Step 3. The code we just copied is for the header of our widget. The widget title is”Find Me Online” If you would like to use a different headline, replace those words with your own. You can also update the header and border color by replacing the hexadecimal (6 Digit) color with one from this chart.
<div style=”margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 3px; padding-bottom: 15px; border: 1px outset #0D3F70; background-color: #FFFFFF; width:210px; height:200px;”><div style=”background-color: #0D3F70; border: 3px double #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF; padding: 2px 3px 2px 2px; margin-bottom: 5px; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; width:200px;”>Find Me Online</div>

Step 5
Copy the text below. Now paste this code after the code above. We will be editing it as follows:

Replace [Insert URL of Personal Photo] with absolute/full URL to photo. (i.e. http://www.mytechopinion.com/images/reggie.jpg) (Tip: Ideal width is 75 pixels or less)
Replace [Insert Name] with your name
Replace [Insert Company Name] with your company or blog name
Replace [Insert Your Blog or Website URL Here] with your actual URL
<div style=”position:relative; top: 0px; left: 3px; width: 80px; height: 80px; float:left;”><img src=”[Insert Your Blog or Website URL Here]” alt=”Real Estate Technology” width=”75″ height=”72″/></div><div style=”position: relative; top: 0px; left: 3px; width: 130px; height: 80px; float:right;”><strong>[Insert Name]</strong><br />[Insert Company Name]<br /><a href=”[Insert Your Blog or Website URL Here]“>My Blog</a></div>

Step 6
Copy the code below. This is the DIV for the buttons. Please paste to our open notepade file after the previous code.
<div style=”background: #FFFFFF; top: 10px; left: 3px; width: 210px; height:50px; display:block”><!– Insert Buttons to the left of this block–></div></div><span style=”font-size:9px; vertical-align:top;”>Sidebar Bling by <a href=”http://www.mytechopinion.com”>Technology for Real Estate</a></span>

Ok, now you will start to add the buttons for your widget. 4 buttons will fit on each row. If you are using more than 4 buttons, you can add another DIV by preforming Step 6 again. This will create a 2nd row of icons.

Step 7
Earlier you added the buttons for your widget into a newly created folder. Now find the corresponding code from the options below. Then add each desired to your notepad or open editor. Look for “<!–Insert Buttons to the left of this block–>” and paste the button(s) code before it.

LinkedIn
Replace [Insert LinkedIn URL] with the link to your LinkedIn Profile.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="View My Profile on LinkedIn" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

Facebook
Replace [Insert Facebook URL] with the link to your Facebook Profile. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="Friend Me in Facebook" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

ActiveRain
Replace [Insert Activerain URL] with the link to your Activerain Profile or blog. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="Read more from me on ActiveRain" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

RSS
Replace [Insert RSS URL] with the link to your RSS feed URL. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="Add My RSS Feed" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

Zolve
Replace [Insert Zolve URL] with the link to your Zolve profile or blog. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="View My Profile on LinkedIn" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

MyBlogLog
Replace [Insert ByBlogLog URL] with the link to your MyBlogLog Community. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="Join My Community on MyBlogLog" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

Friendster
Replace [Insert Friendster URL] with the link to your Friendster URL. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="Friend Me in Friendster" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

MyMaps
Replace [Insert MyMaps URL] with the link to your custom Google MyMaps page. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="View MyMaps for Location Info" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

Trulia Voices
Replace [Insert Trulia Voices URL] with the link to your Trulia Voices profile. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href="[Insert"><img style="border-style:none" src="[Full" alt="View My Profile on Trulia Voices" width="51" height="47" align="left" /></a>

Zillow
Replace [Insert Zillow Profile URL] with a link to your profile on Zillow. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href=”[Insert Zillow Profile URL]“><img style=”border-style:none” src=”[Full Path to Image]” alt=”View My Profile on Zillow” width=”51″ height=”47″ align=”left” /></a>

RealTown Real Estate Network
Replace [Insert RealTown Profile URL] with a link to your profile on RealTown Real Estate Network. Also replace [Full Path to Image] with your full URL to the image.
<a href=”[Insert RealTown Profile URL]“><img style=”border-style:none” src=”[Full Path to Image]” alt=”View My Profile on RealTown Real Estate Network” width=”51″ height=”47″ align=”left” /></a>

Complete! If you have followed each step closely, you should have the complete code now. Simply copy and paste the code we created into your sidebar (keep in mind the widget is 210 pixels wide) and you will now be cross promoting yourself online. Keep in mind the same exact code can be used on your Activerain sidebar, Facebook and more.

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Google Offers Free “GPS-Like” Technology for Real Estate Agents

By Reggie · December 5, 2007 · 5 Comments 

As a real estate professional you’re in and out of neighborhoods all the time. You’re expected to know your area well. But at times you still need some directional assistance. When those times arise, you may be thanking Google. Recently the Google Mobile Maps crew has launched a new “GPS-Like”’ technology called “My Location”. This new feature is freely available for most web-enabled phones, and you don’t need to have GPS on your device for it to work.

So how exactly does the My Location technology work?

Google will pinpoint your location within 1000 meters by calculating and estimating your handset location based on the unique footprint of surrounding cell towers. To start up this feature from with Google Mobile Maps, click “0” and your approximate location will be displayed on the Map. Your location will be represented by a blue dot if you have GPS or a blue dot with a light blue circle around if you do not have GPS. This dot is your approximate location.

To get started, simply text the word “bluedot” to 33669 or visit www.Google.com/gmm on your mobile device to download the application.

Other useful Google Mobile Apps:

• Search
• Gmail
• Picasa
• Goog-411
• Google Readers
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• YouTube

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