Did you know we have a referral network on ActiveRain? Sure do. In fact, each week there are quite a few referrals made on the network. How does it work? Let me show you.
The most important part about the referral network for you, the person reading this wishing they could get a referral from another ActiveRain member, is to be made aware of when a referral is posted. In order to be made aware of when a referral is posted, you'll want to create a referral alert for yourself.
It's pretty simple, but something that every ActiveRainer should take 5 minutes to set up.
(Some of you may actually have one set up and not even know it. There was a time when we automatically set them up for your based on the city in which you placed your profile, however we stopped doing that back in 2009.)
The first thing you need to do is find the link on the left hand side of your 'my home' page that says 'Referral Network'. Once you click on that link, you will land on a page that has some options in the top left. They look like this image below
Click on the one at the bottom that says 'Referral Alerts'. Next you will click on the 
button. It looks just like that on the page. That takes you the page where you actually set up the alerts.
Start by naming the referral alert for your own personal reference. As you can see, in my example below I named my alert 'Seattle and Bellevue Referrals'. The next step is to select what you are. In this case, I'm an agent looking for referrals being made to an 'Agent/Broker'. Below that is my ability to define the region for which I wish to receive referrals. In this case, I added the city of Bellevue, and am about to add the city of Seattle. You'll see next to 'Locations' that '1. Bellevue, WA' is already there. That's because I used the drop down menus, and once I was drilled down to Bellevue I hit the 'add' button. If I were to hit that button again in the example image below, I would also add the city of Seattle to the referral alert.
Next I select my property types, easy enough. When selecting my 'minimum price range', please realize that the system will match me with anything in my minimum price range AND anything above that. So I selected '$200K to $300K' but I will also be alerted of referrals ABOVE $300K. However, I will not be alerted to referrals in the $100K-$200K range. A similar thing happens with 'Max Time Frame'. It will match me with anything in my range, and lower. So I have selected '6 months to a year', but I will also be sent referrals who have a time frame less then that. Then 'Minimum Referral Quality' works the same way. It will give me whatever category I select, and anything better then that. I'm setting the minimum, it's giving me that, and everything above that.
When I'm done, I go ahead and hit the 'save new alert' button and viola, my alert is set up. Now, any time someone enters a referral in the system, I will be notified via email that an alert matching the criteria I set up is available and I will have a chance to contact the person making the referral.
You can set up as many referral alerts as you wish on the system. So get out there and do it and you could be the next lucky recipient of an ActiveRain referral. I can promise you this though, if you don't set one up, you'll never be the person who gets the next referral made through the referral system.
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