We have just released the RealBird Map-based Property Search covering the whole United States. This service uses data from Google Base and is completely private labeled for you. It is a new user interface view for our almost one year old RealBird Property Search service and adds a new option for providing a lightning fast property search experience for your website and blog visitors.

Just like with the previous versions of the RealBird Property Search (full screen tabular and sidebar widget option) you can create unlimited, preset search engines that target not only your market but other niche audience as well. (E.g. you can set up searches for REOs, ocean view luxury properties, equestrian ranches you name it)

Before the brief tutorial, see two live RealBird Map-based Search widgets below:

Ocean view homes and condos for sale in Miami Beach (courtesy of Janie Coffey)

The example above is preconfigured for Miami Beach and filtered with the "ocean view" keyword search.

San Francisco South of Market Lofts for Sale, all property types (Courtesy of Joe Parsons)

This example centers on South of Market in San Francisco and uses the keyword search "loft" for full text search filtering.

The two examples show how to create niche map search widgets so that you can embed relevant results in your blog posts. Of course, you can create more general searches if that is what you need for your application.

We are going to write more tutorials on the RealBird wiki on how to best utilize the RealBird Property Search. In the meantime, see the main functionalities below:

Create map-based searches for any map extent and zoom level with any search criteria pre-configured

As shown above, you can set up unlimited, preset, general or niche searches with your service. The steps area easy: log in to RealBird and go to the Property Search section. The system provides you with a default map search. Then use the "Search" and "Location" modules on the bottom right on the map itself to configure your search. Pan and zoom as needed. Once you are done, click the blue "HTML" icon, again on the bottom right on the map and copy the embed code from the pop-up.

Share your searches on social networks

You and your visitors can easily share a search on social networks and social bookmarking sites. At any time during the home search process, one can click on the "+" sign at the bottom right on the map and the current search (criteria and map extent) can be shared with a few clicks. It's a good practice to share your niche searches on Twitter, Facebook and other major networks to create some initial buzz.

How to embed it into your ActiveRain and Localism post

The embed code can be easily added to your website and blogs. Furthermore, the width of default code is set to 100% so you can post it on ActiveRain and it will automatically adjust the width for Localism and your outside blog as well, without any modification. Of course, you can always override the width and height of the widget. If you want to provide a full screen map, you can use the "green arrow" icon at the bottom right of the map to generate a permalink to the current map extent and search criteria and use that link as a regular Url in your blog post or in your website. Because the embed code is a regular iframe HTML snippet, you can use it on most blogs and websites including Posterous, Typepad, Blogger etc.

How to get the RealBird Map-based Property Search

The map-based search widget is available for RealBird PRO members. For only $99/year, it is one of the most affordable private-labeled search engine out there. Make sure to log into RealBird to see our current special. For existing RealBird PRO members, this is a free upgrade.

Existing RealBird Pro members:

1. Log in to RealBird 
2. Go to the "Property Search" section
3. The default page here is preset with the map-based search widget centering to your zipcode
4. Pan and zoom in or out or use the Location button to jump to the proper location
5. Use the Search button to set and submit search criteria if needed
6. Finally, use the blue button that reads "HTML" at the bottom right on the map and copy the widget code from the popup box
7. Paste this code in HTML view into ActiveRain or any other website or blog

RealBird free members and new registration

1. Log in to RealBird or create a free RealBird account
2. Go to the "Property Search" section
3. The default page here is preset with the map-based search widget centering to your zipcode
4. We provide you with a demo so that you can try your own map-search, set location and search criteria and preview matches.
5. The free RealBird service shows a "This is a demo..." message when trying to click-through to the property details, but you can see all the other search functionalities otherwise
6. Check out the top right area of the sidebar in the member area for our current promotional price. Follow the "Upgrade" link there to upgrade your service to RealBird PRO instantly

We hope you find this new RealBird service as amazing as we do. We worked a lot on it :) Should you have feedback or questions please do not hesitate to comment, call or email us. We are here to help.

Enjoy !

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

The following video tutorial by Jeff Link demonstrates how to set up the RealBird Property Search for your market and how to embed it into your website, ActiveRain or any other blog for that matter. The video shows the usage of the regular RealBird Property Search widget and also the blog sidebar widget.

Thanks Jeff for the great tutorial. 
If you are not yet a RealBird member, please make sure that you register via Jeff's affiliate link

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

Let the hype begin: It's pretty much certain at this point that Apple will announce its tablet computing device today in San Francisco. At least that's what everybody and their neighbors are saying. We'll see. There is not much we can add to the speculation, but once the specs are out, we'll post about possible benefits of this device for real estate professionals. So rather than endless speculation, we decided to add here another - completely unrelated - tool, Collecta's real-time twitter widget. To keep this post somewhat related, we track the Twitter buzz about Apple with this cool Collecta widget below. Check out the speed of refresh and new tweets !

You can create your own real-time Twitter widget with Collecta on this page. Specify your search term, set the widget size and grab the code. It's that simple.

Enjoy

-- Zoltan
RealBird.com

Well, call me a bragger, but I just could not stop myself of sharing some stunning numbers with you. More importantly, these numbers are achieved not by us only, but by you - RealBird members - and your clients, the proud owners of their for-sale properties.  

So let's see RealBird's Y2009 by the numbers (selected metrics from the vast information that is available, focusing only on the RealBird Listing Publisher service, excluding the RealBird Property Search and other web properties):

• 16,415 is the total registered RealBird members since the launching of RealBird
• 2,772 (or an average 7 new members per day) is the new member registrations in 2009
• $4,306,729,732 is the total dollar value of the listings currently promoted via RealBird (exlcuding rental, pending and sold properties) - that's 4.3 billion dollars worth of inventory advertised on RealBird just in 2009
• 14,450 listings are the total number of new listings published in 2009
• Listing unique view increase from 2008 to 2009: +41.56% (source: Google Analytics)
• Listing page view increase from 2008 to 2009: +75.40% (source: Google Analytics)
• Average time on a listing website increase from 2008 to 2009: +10.83% (source: Google Analytics)=

Finally, here is an eyecandy. A chart of the distribution of the top 10 referring destination sites where you RealBird listings are either automatically syndicated to or shared to by other means (widgets, embed code, social bookmarking). These are also 2009 numbers across all the listings of all the RealBird members:

Just like for our fellow celebrities at the Oscar gala, our list of gratitudes is very long so for the sake of keeping this post reasonably short, let us thank all of you at once - RealBird members and you clients and the ActiveRain community as well - for using, supporting and sharing RealBird and for such a great year. It's our mutual effort and hard work that took us this far. Next year, let's double these numbers, shall we? 

Both Gabe and myself  @RealBird  wish you and your loved ones a Very Happy and Successful New Year !

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

We wrote about this RealBird feature earlier, but I thought I share a video tutorial with you as well. Janie Coffey created the video and it also demonstrates other best practices, such as picking the right title and using ActiveRain channels and categories for your post.  Thanks Janie !

More video tutorials on the RealBird Tutorial wiki

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

Rebloged from the RealBird posterous blog.

TechCrunch reported that Google will send out some 190,000 QR stickers (barcodes in short) to local businesses, which can be used by iPhone, Android and other mobile users with capable devices to look up information at the spot. With Google's recent push into real estate search by introducing property detail pages (places) for Google Base listings, it made me think that this can and will be very powerful for real estate as well. Plus I had a recent, related discussion with John Slocum about mobile users at property location and he suggested a similar vision of next generation real estate signs as well:

The simple concept is to have the same type of QR sticker -barcode - posted on your sign at the home and mobile users can look up information about the property including interior pictures, current price and such right there, right then with a capable mobile device. Maybe Google will end up selling these barcodes for "places" or give it away for free or maybe we will, but somebody should.  

What do you think?

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

We have created a public Google Calendar for our upcoming, free RealBird Webinars because we are organizing them more and more often and writing only blog posts about them was not effective anymore. Some of our readers and members could not attend previous events and asked us about upcoming webinars and we did not have a repository to use as a reference. Until now. Please see the embedded Google Calendar below. You can add the RealBird Webinar Calendar to your own Google account, Outlook or other iCal compatible calendar and get notified on upcoming events. 

If you see a webinar date that you would like to attend, just click on the event and then the "More details" link at the bottom of the pop-up to access the registration link.

While creating this calendar, it also made me think how you may be able to utilize it yourself for your own business. Here are some ideas:

1. Create a public Google Calendar for a particular listing and add your upcoming open house dates to it. Finally, embed the calendar into your RealBird single property website under its own tab
2. Create a public Google Calendar called Open Homes and use it as a repository for ALL of your listings open houses and link the events to your RealBird listing websites
3. If you organize seminars for home buyers or sellers, you can create another Google Calendar titled accordingly and add your events (online and offline to it)

One of our favorite members - Janie Coffey - put together a set of video tutorials on how to best utilize the RealBird service. I included below one of her screencasts about an advanced (but simple) technique using Ping.fm with RealBird to quickly distribute your RealBird single property websites to multiple social networks and social bookmarking sites - with one click. 

Introducing the RealBird Tutorial and Case Studies wiki

We started a new website - a wiki hosted by Zoho - and posted the first set of RealBird tutorials. It is a work in progress and we are adding new content ongoing. We are also planning to open it up for our RealBird members so that you can post your own case studies with links to your RealBird property websites, examples and of course to any other websites you wish to promote. You will be able to create a profile page for yourself too. Currently the RealBird wiki can not be edited by the public, but if you wish to participate while we are finalizing the wiki and help us extending the site with tutorials and examples, please send us an email and we add you to the group of authorized editors. Your input on how to make this wiki a great help center is highly appreciated. Thanks

See the RealBird Tutorials and Documentation Wiki here 

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

Just a quick reminder that we are conducting a new, free Webinar next Wednesday about how to best utilize RealBird.

Topics include:

• Win more Listings! 
• Promote your Listings more Agressively! 
• Find more Buyers! 
• Brand and Promote your Real Estate Practice! 
• Leverage Social Networks like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter to stay connected with your sphere of influence! 

Mike Mueller is doing some advanced customization with the RealBird Facebook application for his clients. Beautiful !

You can connect with Mike at www.AreWeConnected.com