MyCaribbeanSun.com is a new property portal that has just launched it's new By Owner system aimed at Caribbean Vacation Renters. We are extending an offer to Vacation Property Owners in the Caribbean to take advantage of our new system with a free 3 month Trial.
The highlights of the Portal are as listed below, so if you or anyone you know would like to take advantage of this Free Trial, just send me an email at alison@MyCaribbeanSun.com to be included. We upload all your information for you.
3 Months Free Trial on TheFull360 Vacation Rentals Brings Bookings directly to you. We will deliver or your money back!! Limited time offer No annual commitment
Dear Caribbean Property Owner/s, WE would like to extend an opportunity to take part in our invitation only 3 month free trial offer to put your vacation rental on MyCaribbeanSun.com, you will receive one- to-one service to make sure that your property is...
Set up on an interactive, multi lingual website, where it will be...
Enhanced with a visual and audio media presentation and videos...
Advertised on a syndication network of over 100 targeted online search sites (with the opportunity to add any that you request)...
Made available on iPhone and other mobile devices for out and about viewers/seekers. Be part of the largest worldwide real estate network with 206,399 members.
Firstly we have arranged for your vacation rental to now be syndicated on to the top global property sites, we have developed an XML Feed that will automatically propagate your homes onto these sites. We have negotiated with these syndication partners to create a huge exposure engine for our client’s rental properties. (you can view the complete list on our site under “Syndication”.
Additional tools to further enhance your property exposure, are a new iPhone search application called “homeseeker” which utilizes GPS technology to pinpoint areas and bring up your property in the search results. So for example, if someone is visiting in the Caribbean, their iPhone will pick up your vacation rental, along with the tours and additional video etc. and view all this on their iPhone and click to contact you.
The YouTube feature, which embeds local video of both your property and it's surrounding area onto your property page, ie. Video’s of the islands, and other local area attractions.
The Blog and networking widget, which you can use on your social networking or blogging sites, the widget features a mini portal for people to search for rentals.
Each property has it’s unique URL, and we provide you with login details so that you can view your stats on each of your properties. And lastly, we send you a monthly report of traffic and enquiries on your properties... All enquiries are forwarded to you. Just let us know if you would like to take part…limited spaces available for each island.
We will enter all data for you and photographs….and within a couple of hours your listing will be live on our multiple sites.
Lets face it, we hear over and over that most property searches are now on the internet. With this in mind, do you think you are creating the best online visual presentation of your listings?
It is really worth every penny to invest in a high quality Digital SLR camera. Unless you have the money to hire a professional photographer, you don't need to skimp on this valuable tool. It still astounds me the poor quality of photo's agents will put up on their listings. Images need to be crisp and high resolution. This is your first opportunity to capture the attention of potential buyer's, so make sure you provide them with the best.
More is better than less. Take lots of photo's, from different aspects of the rooms/views, I usually shoot at least 100 photos of a property.
Ideally create a panoramic 360 tour, this really gives the viewer a feel for the place. Do make sure you use a decent stitching software program, there is nothing worse than jerky 360 tours, it makes you feel sick if the player does not show a smooth flowing tour.
Take photo's of the neighborhood and amenities if available, and views from the property, such as street scenes in both directions.
And finally shoot some video if you have the know how, include video of local area amenities such as shopping areas and parks, recreation facilities and any picturesque local landmarks, you can put them up on YouTube and if you don't have the ability to include a player into your online listing presentation, at least provide a link to it.
All of the tools needed to create your own 360 panoramics are part of the VistaTour system.
As syndication partners for Point2Agent, I thought is was a good time to mention the great offer Point2 still has going for agents without a website. Point2 offers a free site for 6 months and then only $10 a month for the standard level of membership.
They do a great job in providing a website that is customizable, and an excellent format for displaying your listings. They also syndicate your listings through thier syndication partners (VistaTour being one of them).
They offer a National listings service and you can network with other Point2Agents and subscribe to their "handshake" system. So even if you don't have a lot of listings yourself, you can still generate leads from other agents listings that are participating in the HandShake network. There are some 200,000 Point2 agents you can work with.
With Point2 you can chose the level of membership you need, Standard, Professional or Premium.
VistaTour is another option for Point2Agent Members to take their listings to the global advertising level. We have specifically designed the additional tools to help you generate more leads, tools for your blogs and network sites, tools to create your own stunning 360 property tours and much more.
To find out more about Point2Agent visit the following link http://agent.point2.com/ , and if you are already a member of Point2, visit VistaTour Network for an overview of the valuable tools VistaTour can offer you and your business.
I began doing real estate just over 2 years ago and I've been told that I got in at the wrong time. I'm tired of all the negativity on the news in regards to the economic status of the country and the declining housing market. Personally, I'm ready to change my current financial situation. I've created a group where we can coach each other. What we are doing is setting a goal of "100 Days to Change". I've got the support of other real estate professionals who want CHANGE too. What we are going to do are various proactive activities which will propel our business. Every day I will reach out to individuals in my group and provide direction. By working as a group I believe that we can provide support to each other and coach ourselves to CHANGE. If you would like to be a part of this group then please subscribe to this blog and we will begin our 100 Days.
There are no obligations to participate in this group. It is being offered as FREE. All you have to do is want to change your current financial situation, desire an increase in your real estate business and committ to yourself.
Please ReBlog this post to optimize the visibility of this free self-help program.
You may or may not have heard the term "Web syndication" and no doubt you have heard of Radio and news syndication. Web syndication is when a feed is created from one website content to another often through XML feed. With listings syndication, the information posted on a site on a particular property is then fed through syndication to one or more sites.
VistaTour is a syndication partner for Point2 Agent, if you have a Point2Agent site you know that you get to chose from a list of syndication partners to feed your listings onto their site. Sites such as Craigslist and other well known property sites showcase your properties without any additional entry on your behalf. Thus you are reaching out to a much wider audience.
VistaTour goes a little further with this process, we negotiate on behalf of our subscribers syndication deals to generate more leads. So if you have a particular site or portal you would like your property listings featured on we handle this for you. With your own "Syndication Management system" VistaTour assigns you your very own Syndication manager.
With the current list of syndication partners Point2 and VistaTour have created a worldwide network of partners on your behalf. Of course you could go about arranging this for yourself, contacting over 50 partners, arranging the XML feed to be developed for your website to propagate your listings onto each of the partners sites, but believe me, this would cost you a heck of a lot of money and time. You could also manually enter your properties onto a couple of sites but how valuable is your time?
I literally spend hours and hours each day blogging, updating and posting on networking sites and reading a good deal of posts on ActiveRain.
Lets face it, anything these days that saves us time and is repetitive is a godsend.
I wanted to share a tip for those who post multiple blogs on sites such as blogger, facebook, wordpress etc.
The beauty of ScribeFire is you only need to create the blog once and then you can post it to all your other blog sites. ScribeFire is an application created by the same people as FireFox. This is an amazing time saving tool for all habitual bloggers. Unfortunately I have not figured out how you can auto post onto AR yet, so if anyone uses ScribeFire and knows if and how this is done please share with us.
But for those who wish to check out this valuable tool go to the following link for a simple download http://www.scribefire.com/
The following is an explanation taken from the ScribFire site.
ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs. Here is a list of the blogging services that are compatible with ScribeFire: http://www.scribefire.com/help/supported-services/
To date there have been 1,996,121 total downloadsof ScribeFire and over 1 billion downloads of the FireFox browser.
ScribeFire currently supports the following services:
* WordPress.com (http://www.wordpress.com)
* LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com)
* Xanga (http://www.xanga.com/)
* Windows Live Spaces (http://spaces.msn.com)
* Performancing (http://www.performancing.com)
* Jeeran (http://www.jeeran.com)
* Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com/)
* MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)
* b2Evolution (http://b2evolution.net)
* Splinder (http://www.splinder.com/)
In addition to the hosted services mentioned above, ScribeFire also supports custom blogging platforms which are usually blogging software hosted on your own server. The currently supported blogging platforms are:
* WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/)
* Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/)
* Drupal (http://www.drupal.org)
* Textpattern (http://www.textpattern.com/)
* Roller (http://www.rollerweblogger.org)
* Blogger (http://www.blogger.com)
* MetaWeblog API (Any blogging software that implements this API)
A friend of mine emailed this to me and I wanted to share. I don't know about you, but this would sure slow me down! People slow down and try to "straddle" the hole, then breath a sigh of relief when they don't destroy their car! This is actually a speed control device that is in use. Scroll down and look at all three pictures. And it is much cheaper than installing speed cameras.
And Now......
Brilliant optical illusion, great idea for neighborhoods too!!
From billboards to the Real Estate Guide there are many ways to rack up advertising costs rapidly, over my 10 years in real estate I have spent money on all sorts. I think overall the best results I saw was from my first website. Back then few agents had a site and the search engines were relatively tiny.
Over time I have seen trends come and go as they do, ranging in price and effectiveness. Still by far the best results have been through the internet marketing I have done.
The company I work for now is an online listing marketing company, but listening to one of our sales agents calls yesterday I was pretty shocked to hear an agent say, I don't do marketing!! Well I bet his clients would love to hear that don't you think?
Whether you spend money advertising or your time and effort such as blogging, surely you have to be doing something to sell your listings? Even just sticking a sign in the yard is marketing at it's most basic level.
From my listing appointment days I remember that one of the first things a client wants to know is how the heck are you going to make sure my house sells? What advertising are you going to do for me? Well now there are much more sophisticated online methods, high quality media presentations and lots of images, video Tours and Listing Syndication.
And for the record I think the most ineffective marketing we used was a "Billboard', it was darned expensive and generated more rude remarks than business....but oh well we tried!!
As for the "I don't do marketing" guy, get a grip or get out of the business, you are really hurting your clients if this is true.
Now more than ever real estate twits are working twice as hard. Do you really have time to tweet all day while you’re showing 18 houses, writing multiple contracts, and consulting with your clients? If you do, great…don’t bother reading the rest of this article. The Real Estate Tweet Plan is only for twits looking to organize and better balance social media marketing strategies.
RE TWEET PLAN DISCLAIMER: This plan may work great for those with little time in their day to tweet. But for some, taking time to organize tweets may actually be more time consuming that just tweeting off the cuff. This is NOT a plan for spontaneous tweeters and those of us that have adopted Twitter as a member of the family. This plan is for twits that want to tweet but are finding it hard to do so during their work day. Just remember, this is one Real Estate Tweet Plan example, what does yours look like?
Real Estate Tweet Plan created for @RENonna:
(1) Choose Twitter Check-in Times - @RENonna checks in with Twitter every morning with her coffee from 6:30-7:00am and every evening after dinner with her glass of red wine from 7-8pm. During those times, she (1) learns about her followers and chooses to follow back or not, (2) selects new followers she’s interested in and can learn from, (3) updates her tweetlists, (4) looks for helpful resources/media, (5) schedules her Daily 5.
(2) Start w/ your Daily 5 - @RENonna’s Daily 5 (which are her interest & expertise topics) include: (1) short sale advice & tips, (2) Pleasanton (local) events, (3) seasonal homeowner tips, (4) great buys (deals uncovered while previewing), and (5) weekender attractions. Other real estate specific topics could include: neighborhood stats & info, local tax and legal updates, credit tips and advice, etc.
(3) Make a Tweetlist(s) - @RENonna creates a list of pre-planned tweets that she will either sporadically tweet or schedule throughout the day. Here’s her Tweetlist for a given day:
Tweet 1: Short sale tip: Remember to consult with your CPA - could make the difference between a tax consequence, or not.
Tweet 2: Pleasanton Holiday Food Drive, donations of non-perishables can be made here: http://budurl.com/tat5.
Tweet 4: Local steal found on tour! Pleasanton charmer- 1234 Rose Ave, 4 bd 3 ba, 2450 sqft, .25 acre lot, walk to downtown, bank-owned $325,000!
Tweet 5: Ice skating in downtown Walnut Creek begins this weekend, check here for details: http://budurl.com/erdd
(4) Schedule Tweets – Keep your tweetlist at your desk or on you if you’re mobile. If you don’t want to manually tweet, use Tweetlater or Twuffer to schedule your tweets. Schedule them for time periods you will be focusing on work tasks only (or if you are on a business trip, vacation, etc). For example, @RENonna set up her Daily 5 to be tweeted from Tweetlater at: 9:00am, 10:30am, 1:15pm, 2:30pm, and 4:15pm. @RENonna also created Bud URLs for all the resource links she shares so she can track her follower activity. If she notices that she’s not getting much local traffic from the morning tweets, then she may choose to schedule more tweets in the afternoon.
(5) Create an auto-welcome message - @RENonna would like to personally review and choose her followers. But she won’t be able to do that working in the field showing homes most days. So she plans to investigate her new followers during her Twitter Check-in times. In the meantime, she would still like to send a basic ONE-TIME “thanks for following” or “welcome” message to her new interested party. So @RENonna composed a welcome message, “Thanks for following me. Nice to meet you, virtually!” and set it up as an auto-welcome message from Tweetlater to all new followers. NOTE: @RENonna is only sending a quick welcome message, NOT auto-following back. She waits until she can personally review new follower profiles, Websites, updates, etc. to make her choice on whether to follow back or not. OFF THE HOOK: Instead of just creating an auto message…include a “Welcome Video”.
(6) Supplement w/ spontaneous Tweets – In between your scheduled pre-planned Tweets, you may find yourself with an occasional opportunity to conversationally tweet. Do it! Or if you have an experience or current event that you want to share, by all means, share away. You can also use your Twitter Check-in times to converse and share your most recent thoughts, ideas, ramblings, or happenings. The point is, when you can and want to share, get back in the Twitter conversation. Twitter will be there…most times.
ONE LAST TIP: Be sure to aggregate your Tweets on your real estate blog and other social profiles. (my example)You can get more mileage out of your Tweets by sharing them beyond the Twitosphere –with your blog readers and other networks (Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.).
This post is dedicated to Jeremy Blanton...who never gives up! Seriously! You rock!
(First, sorry for my latency in posting of late. Was away with my wife Amie on the trip of a lifetime to NYC! Travels are over; getting back to business.)
One of the questions I'm getting A LOT is "What's up with Twitter?" and "How do I use Twitter for business?" Let me say at the outset it is an amazing app with manifold uses. Companies as large as Dell have created a business model around it and solo entrepreneurs (real estate agents included) are proving its case as another channel for business development.
It's my aim to answer the above questions, at least in part, by not only sharing my own thoughts, but providing links to others who've addressed these as well. It will take me far more than the 140 character limit Twitter allows. :-) In fact, this will be a multi-part series.
Let's start by attempting to define Twitter.
Wikipedia Definition
First, the wikipedia definition: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
OK, stop right there! What the heck is "micro-blogging?" While I don't know who cooked up the term, it's a suggestion that Twitter is a blogging tool, one limited to 140 characters. Hence, "micro" blogging.
Why 140 characters? Because the guys who dreamed up Twitter (Biz Stone and Evan Williams, the same guys who created Blogger) saw it as an SMS (text messaging) tool. In other words, it was first conceived as an application for mobile devices, but one with a web-based interface.
Even though it started that way, Twitter's user-base largely ignored the SMS side of things in favor of the web-based version. At one point, due to bandwidth and thru-put demands on Twitter's servers, SMS capabilities were actually shut off. Essentially, Twitter started out as one thing and became something else. (More on that in a moment.)
Better Definition
A better explanation was one given to me by a gentleman (whose name I don't recall) I met at a social media conference in Houston a few month back. He referred to Twitter as a "high latency instant messaging application."Huh?
Twitter is like Yahoo! Messenger or AIM or any number of instant messaging applications, only you aren't compelled to respond immediately, if at all. Hence the term, "high latency."
Best Definition
In my opinion, Twitter is best defined as a social instant messaging application. "Social" in that you friend others who then see your posts and follow them (the term in Twitterese is, in fact, "follow," though it means the same thing), and "instant messaging" in the sense that it has that feel to it.
What it really is is a conversation stream that you jump into at any given moment in time and start talking. Participation is the price of entry. (More on that in a later post.)
More from Wikipedia
"Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them," says wikipedia. "The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Twitterrific or Facebook."
Twitter's Evolution
As mentioned above, Twitter started out as a mobile application, but morphed to something that was largely web-based, thanks to its users. And, I mean, let's face it, if you're following a few hundred people, do you really want to get text messages from everyone of them? You can pick and choose who to receive such messages from of course, but even if you've limited it to a handful, if they're avid Twitter users, you're phone will still be dinging all the time. In my view, it's overkill. If you like the SMS component, that's fine, but I'd limit it to a select few.
Back to the evolution...
Speaking of the user-base, Twitter's founders have been fairly well-receptive to the way Twits (one term for Twitter users) are using the app. For example, at some point people started using the "@" symbol to address a single individual via their Twitter handle (e.g. @pchaney). It was a way to delineate that the message wasn't for everyone, but for that specific person.
It wasn't long until Twitter incorporated the activity as part of its functionality. Not only that, they added a direct messaging capability enabling users to send private messages to individual users.
That's enough for this post. I'll be back tomorrow soon with another talking about how to use Twitter, explaining proper "Twittiquette" and sharing the rules of the road.
In part 3 (yes, there will be a part 3 and a part 4; I told you it would take more than one post.) I plan to delve into some of the applications that have developed around Twitter thanks to its API (A geeky acronym which stands for Application Programming Interface. It's a way for one application to be used by or integrated into another.)
Part 4 is where the water really meets the road in terms of how to use Twitter for business. I'll provide some practical, real life examples, including some from fellow agents. Look for that early next week.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
Alison Scott (Vista Tour)
With the current list of syndication partners Point2 and VistaTour have created a worldwide network of partners on your behalf. Of course you could go about arranging this for yourself, contacting over 50 partners, arranging the XML feed to be developed for your website to propagate your listings onto each of the partners sites, but believe me, this would cost you a heck of a lot of money and time. You could also manually enter your properties onto a couple of sites but how valuable is your time?
But for those who wish to check out this valuable tool go to the following link for a simple download 
;)
;)
