Realivent's Blog

Listing Polls

Ken Realivent (Realivent) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:20:11 -0500

Have you ever wanted quick feedback on your listing or product ? For example, what do people like most about the property ? How did they find the listing ? Would they recommend it to a friend ? What about pricing feedback ? Realivent's new listing polls can help you answer those questions. For example, you can see a listing poll example on our right sidebar here. "I want to upgrade my home, what upgrade will give me the best ROI ?"

Here is a sample:

Of the 74 votes, 54% of the people thought that the kitchen was the best ROI compared to 28% for bathrooms followed by 9% for the master bedroom. Sure, you already knew that but it makes a difference when you can see the results changing in real time on your own site instead of reading it online elsewhere. If you have a loyal following and good readership, the numbers should provide better insight into your question. The key to getting good results is asking the right questions and framing the right answers. You have total control over your poll.

Ask very specific questions and provide answers that will invoke feedback that will validate your questions. We have two types of polls:

1)Listing polls - to get feedback on specific listings , some examples are:

a. Pricing

b. Feedback after showing

c. How did someone find the listing

d. Best feature

2)Standard polls - to get feedback on any question

a. General opinion

b. Trends

c. Market feedback

After you've created your polls and have a good representative number of votes, you can log back into your Realivent account to see your poll summaries. You can keep track of all your polls and refine your questions to continue to refine your research. Let's get the polls started, here's how: 1. Login to your Realivent account 2. Go to the new "My Polls" tab 3. Create your new poll 4. Get embed code 5. Paste into your blog or website, embed it everwhere (A note on embedding - the height may have to be adjusted if you have more answers. In this case , change the height parameter to 600px. 650px, or any other value that will make the poll height fit your page) That's it! Sit back and watch your poll results fly in.

How to Quickly Add and Manage Featured Listings Pages in Wordpress

Ken Realivent (Realivent) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:49:40 -0600

There are lots of ways to add listings to your Wordpress blog to promote your listings. You can add listings directly to your blog posts, embed widgets and flyers and also create special pages dedicated to the listings themselves. However, if you are using Wordpress, there is an easier way that keeps your readers on your site while maintaining the soft-sale strategy - by using a Featured Listings Plugin and Sidebar Widget.

Featured Listing Plugin Features:

Native within Wordpress so clicking on your listing does not send you to a 3rd party site
Sidebar widget highlights the property beds/baths and price
Details page consists of
- a)Large photos and thumbnails
- b)Your Agent Contact and Photo
- c)Request more information contact form
- d)Birds Eye view as well as standard map
- e)Neighborhood Demographics with charts
- f)Payment Calculator

Here's a step by step on how to add the Featured Listings Plugin:

Step #1 Download and install the Featured Listings Plugin

Step #2 Unzip and upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins/ folder

Step #3 Login to your site and go to the "Plugins" tab and activate your new plugin

Step #4 Configure the Featured Listings Plugin

a. Sign up for a Realivent account to manage your listings (all of your listings will then be pulled into your Wordpress blogs from here)

b. Go to your Featured Listing administration page and add your Realivent username

c. Give your Featured Listings Page a name and click "SAVE"

Step # 5 Configure your Featured Listing Sidebar Widget

Find the Featured Listings Plugin in your Sidebar toolbox and drag it to your preferred sidebar location.

Be sure to click update or save before exiting.

That's it! If all of this was done correctly, your site should now be showing your listings both on its own page and on the sidebars. This keeps your listings visible on your site while not being too overly obtrusive to your site readers.

Here are some sites that are using this plugin:

GreaterTampaBayRealEstate

Key2DenverHomes

Roots2RealEstate

MyLifeStyleRealtor

Next post, how to manage your listings and the Recent Transactions Plugin. If anyone needs help getting this setup, please let me know.

How to Create Full PDF Web Pages that Require no Downloading

Ken Realivent (Realivent) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:53:16 -0500

We've been asked recently about how to add property disclosure documents and floor plans to blogs and websites. There probably are a number of different solutions that many have used before, but we just discovered a way to make them more easily accessible (no downloads) and instantly viewable (at full page width). The tool that we're using here is Scribd. I've seen many people used Scribd before in real estate to share: Property Flyers Trump University Lessons How-To-Manuals But the same tool can be used to embed full width reports and supporting documentation for your property. Here is a sample inspection report at full width on a property site: Full Inspection Report Page Here is a sample floor plan page at full width: Floor Plan Page Sample This can be easily done in a few steps: 1)Upload your PDF Go to www.scribd.com and login to upload your PDF file 2)Resize your embed code to your page width (in our samples above the width was set to 950 pixels wide) and desired height by clicking on the "advanced" option next to the "Embed" option: 3)Login to your blog and "Write" a new page and select your "Page with no sidebars" Here's a quick tutorial on how to create a full width page with no sidebars. 4)Embed your code from Step #2 above and make sure to click on "HTML" before you paste the code. Finally save and update your page. That's it, the finished product should look like this : Full Inspection Report Page

How to get a Single Property Website with a Personalized Domain name for $1.99 per year

Ken Realivent (Realivent) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 10:54:40 -0500

How to get a Single Property Website with a Personalized Domain name for $1.99 per year

Step #1 Start Your Single Property Website

Currently we are offering a Limited Time Special to get FREE Single Property Sites (Completely Ad-FREE)

Just find your custom domain name/URL special and forward it to our system or point your domains to our servers and you've got a custom domain on a Single Property Site!

( We will show you how to do this in the next few steps)

Start a new Site Here

Follow the process and enter your business and listing information.

In a few minutes, you should end up with a site similar to these samples:

http://1520thomas.realivent.com/

http://34sun.realivent.com/

http://827adams.realivent.com/

Step #2 Find the Domain Specials

Sometimes Yahoo and GoDaddy run domain name specials which you can get for $1.99 per year (there are some restrictions)

This is an unbelievable price! If the special is not available at Yahoo, try GoDaddy.com or any other domain service that you are familiar with.

This example will focus on Yahoo domains because we use it a lot and it is a fast and simple process.

GoDaddy.com should be as simple. If there are other recommended services, please let us know.

Step #3 Search for your custom URL or domain name.

Step #4 Purchase Domain

Step #5 Complete Your Custom Domain Process

There are 2 ways to complete your custom domain process.

1. URL Forwarding - this is the easiest and fastest.

2. Pointing your DNS settings to our server.

We will focus on #1 since you can do that in a few minutes and do not have to wait for the DNS settings page to appear..

A)Click on the "Go to: Domain Control Panel" as seen in the snapshot below:

B)Click on the Forward Domain Option

C)Click on Forward Domain

D)Enter the address of the Realivent Single Property Site that you just created:

i.e. "123mainst.realivent.com" into the box forward box as seen here...

E)Congratulations You're Done!

Check back at your custom domain name in a few hours and you should see your new site up and running.

It may take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours for your custom domain name to forward to activate but your site should already be up and running

If you need to see the live site immediately, it is already running at the Realivent URL: "123mainst.realivent.com."

That's it, start marketing it everywhere.

These Single Property Sites are Featured Packed with:

1. Native Featured Listings Widget

2. Financial Calculator with Full Amortization Schedules and Widget (Interactive Tool)

3. Complete Professional About Me Page

4. Property Watch Lead Generation Form (Lead Gen)

5. CMA Lead Capture Form and Widget (Lead Gen)

6. Chat page for instant communication pre-installed - (Call to Action) more details in another post

7. Neighborhood Information

8. School information

9. Bird's Eye Map View

10. Schedule a Showing Form (Call to Action)

Don't forget all the tools on the On the Featured Listings Page

Start one Today

What would be useful information to add to single property sites ?

Ken Realivent (Realivent) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:24:01 -0500

We have the pleasure of speaking at the upcoming Bloggers Connect conference this year about widgets and doodads and we're wondering what types of useful information would home buyers and sellers want to see on individual websites and how can agents use these sites to capture new leads ? Currently, we've enabled agents to create single property sites in about 15 minutes complete with:

CMA lead generation forms and widgets
Property watch lead generation forms and widgets
Mortgage Calculators with a comprehensive amortization schedule
Featured listings widget
Professional Profile Pages
and Video

Here are some listings that were recently put on single property sites:

http://1520thomas.realivent.com/

http://34sun.realivent.com/

http://827adams.realivent.com/

Sample with Video: http://3901lick100.realivent.com

Here are a few more functions and pages agents are adding to make their sites more useful:

Adding a blogroll to their main site.
Adding additional disclosure pages for download
Adding local school information
Adding a local amenities map
Write blog posts and linking them to the agent's main page.

What else would be useful to put on these individual property sites ?

How about widgets ? What types of widgets would make your sites more sticky ?

How many vendors do you use to market your homes online for each listing ? How long does it take ?

Ken Realivent (Realivent) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:33:40 -0500

Virtual Tours - prepare photos, upload them to virtual tour program, give descriptions - 30 minutes

Online Flyers and Email Flyers - 30 minutes

Creating Individual Property Website - 30 minutes

Write a few blog posts about the property - 10 minutes

Syndicate your listings and posting to Craigslist and other online classifieds - 30 minutes

Prepare Print Flyers - 20 minutes

What if you had only one place to enter you listing and get all your marketing done in 15 minutes ?

Here are some samples of what can be done in a few clicks:

http://1520thomas.realivent.com/

http://34sun.realivent.com/

http://827adams.realivent.com/

Would this help you streamline your online marketing ?