How to order. The Room Planner will automatically be added to all tours produced AND approved, on or after March 15, 2010.  There is no need to do anything! You should expect to be Planning rooms on your tour within 1 business day after your tour approval.

If you would like the Room Planner added to an existing tour created before March 15th, call or email us and we can add it to your tour for only $10. (50% off the retail price!)  Just call 866-810-3816 option 3 or use the form below and select the Room Planner option.

Floor Plan Online is proud to offer Premium Marketing tools for top of the line Real Estate Agents. Our Products are Simple to use, Effective with buyers and Affordable – feature rich with out a long term contract.

New to FloorPlanOnline & Want to Get Started? Click here to Register Fast and Free!

If you do not want this tool on a specific tour, its easy to remove.  You can elect to not have it created for your tour as you place the order, under Tour Upgrades – see the Tour Upgrades box right after you confirm your tour to remove it from your order.  Alternatively, the Room Planner can be removed if it has been added to your tour by going to Manage Orders>then Edit Tour>then Edit Photos on FloorPlan – just drag the RoomPlanner icon to the right under Pictures Library and save.

I have to say I have just gone through my first listing in my Real Estate Career.   In my prior career I worked for a large WW wellknown Vendor and I was a product manager for technology products.  I am so impressed with the toolset, quality of service the product and processes deliver, and especially the customer service.   This has been the best value and service I have leveraged in my Real Estate Career and I can not imagine not doing a listing without IT!!   Your team is doing a GRAND job and I had fabulous responses from Tree and Elena on the questions I submitted with immediate response time.   Thanks again.  Tami

With the Corporate/Sub account structure, you can have one person manage the office tours, for example, but each agent can get access into their own account.  The corporate account sees all tours for each sub account.  You can also place tour orders out of the corporate account for any sub-account.  Just select the drop-down on page 2 as you are placing an order.   This account structure is quite handy for companies that do some of the work for agents.

We can also set things up so the corporate account pays for all sub account tours.  Please call us at 866-810-3816, option 3 if you would like to set up a corporate/sub account structure or you can always send us an email.  Just use the form below.

-Cheers,

Kris Cone

In addition, we added two printable one-page handouts on FloorPlanOnline under Tools>Marketing Downloads.  One is for the Seller that you can leave as a handout and the other is something you can print out and hang up at your office.

Agents that have incorporated the FloorPlanOnline Marketing System into their listing presentations often get the listing – EVERY TIME!  It can help demonstrate to the Seller that you know how to market a home, and in the most important place – ONLINE.  After all, 96% of buyers in the key buying group use the Internet to search for homes.  Don’t let your seller’s home be left out!

If you do not see a version for you company, just let us know and we can try to customize something for you.  Just use the form below or on the Listing Presentation Template page.

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) — A congressional watchdog panel warned on Thursday that mounting commercial real estate losses could endanger the banking system and thwart economic recovery.

A total of $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans will require refinancing in the next four years, the Congressional Oversight Panel said in a report. More than half of those loans are underwater, written for properties whose value has dropped like a rock.

Click here to read the full article.

-Kris Cone

According to comScore, of the 234 million cell-phone users over age 13 in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, Motorola-manufactured hardware dominated the market of all mobile users.  Among smartphone operating systems, Research In Motion (“RIM”) had the largest smartphone market share at 41.6 percent. But the real competition heating up is between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android system, which both had slight gains. The iPhone now sits at 25.3 percent of the smartphone market share.  Android increased to 5.2 percent in December, although its share was still the lowest.

Click here to read more of the article.

www.TheStevensEstate.com

The Stevens Estate in New Jersey. Erica can be reached at 908-625-8488 or erica@ericalevey.com

Click here to read the full article.

1. What website features buyers value. 97% of buyers thought photos and detailed property information were helpful (not sure what the other 3% are thinking here…?).   89% thought virtual tours were helpful.  I would like to think if they all saw a FloorPlanOnline tour, that number would be close to 100%!   I would also like to point out that other companies have done research around online content, and several studies have indicated that Photos score the highest in terms of essential content and floor plans score #2!  So, if your listing does not have its Floor Plan Online….it should.

2. More and more Buyers are Online to search. The first step taken by far in the home buying process was go online to look for properties for sale – 36% listed this as the first step taken.  This was double the next highest action, which was contact a real estate agent (18%).

In addition, 90% of all buyers used the Internet to search, while 93% of first time buyers used the Internet. Again more than any other source.  In the key buying group of 25 to 44 year olds, 96% of the respondents used the Internet to search.

3. Websites used in the Home Search process. The most used site by far was the multiple listing service (MLS) website.  This could be a factor that agents typically email listing info to their buyers, so it is pushed to them.  Some MLSs have their own consumer oriented search site…but I know some do not.  The total list of websites used by Buyers (percentages are for All Buyers surveyed):

• MLS – 60%
• Real Estate Company website – 46%
• Realtor.com – 46%
• Real estate agent website – 45%
• Other websites with real estate listings (Trulia, Zillow, etc) – 30%
• For Sale by Owner websites – 17%
• Newspaper website – 9%
• Real Estate Magazine website – 4%
• Social media websites (Facebook, MySpace, etc) – 1%
• YouTube – <1%

It is interesting to note that the types of sites used by different age brackets did not differ much at all. The top site for all groups was the MLS, followed by the company site and Realtor.com.  Also, there is a lot of hype about social media and YouTube…but this is not necessarily translating into buyers using these sites for searching.   For example, between the age groups of 18 to 24 and 25 to 44, only 1% said they used social media websites.  The 45 and over crowd said less than 1%.  Surprisingly, 2% over 65 said they used YouTube, while all the other age groups responded with less than 1%.  Now, this does not mean there is no value to social media or YouTube…these outlets just need to be used in the right way and for the right reason.  I also think there is some search engine benefit to posting content on these sites.  Note…we will address the YouTube video posting issue in 2010.

4. The Internet is getting results. 36% of respondents FIRST found the home they purchased via the Internet search.  This was the same as through a real estate agent, and up from 32% last year.  No other source was higher. Print newspaper was down to 2% now….ouch.  Also, 77% of buyers drove by or viewed a home after finding it online, while 61% walked through the home.  Another interesting stat – 28% found the agent they used to buy the home online.  There was also a high correlation in people that used the Internet to search and those that used an agent to buy – 79% used an agent to buy.

Implications – I think  what all of these stats boils down to is YOU need to be online and you need to have the best online content for your listings, because chances are, if you make an impression online, you are going to get a buyer to call you, drive by or tour your listing.  The first step is getting the right content. People want to see photos and floor plans.  All the other fancy stuff like spinning 360s, deep zoom, property videos with voice over has actually scored lower on the desirability scale.  In some cases, like voice over and music playing when you first open a tour scores negative.  People want to see the essentials quickly and easily.

The second step is get this content distributed to the KEY places people search. Your virtual tours need to be linked to your MLS (use the unbranded link – in many markets we do this for you automatically), on Realtor.com (we link the tour for you automatically….and it is FREE if you are a Realtor.com Showcase member), your company website and your website/blog.  This will get you 95% or more there. You can then use our tools to link the tour to your Facebook site, Twitter, and more.  Realtor.com has a nice Facebook widget to add your listings to your Facebook profile.  We also are posting listings to Google Base now.  We will be working to add more sites like Zillow, Trulia, Craigslist, etc. in  the coming months (however you can do this now manually).

In addition, talk to your company IT people about posting the company tours to Zillow, Trulia and others.  As part of this make sure your virtual tour links come through with the data feed. Most if not all of these sites can include the virtual tour link…but the company needs to send it along.  As I stated in a previous post, your company should really be posting tours to these other websites….There is a hierarchy Zillow and others use, and companies like us are the last on the list.  So if we link a tour to Zillow, for example, and your company pushes the listing there, it will push our link off…and if the company info does not include the tour link, your tour will not get exposure on Zillow. So, push your company to post listings to these other website portals and make sure the virtual tour links are included. You paid good money for the content and you deserve the most exposure!

All for now…time for the weekend.  Thanks for reading

-Kris Cone

As always, please feel free to contact me.

Linda is an agent with Reece and Nichols in Kansas City.  She has used FloorPlanOnline from the beginning….so I would like to think we had something to do with her success, but I am also sure her hard work and dedication to her clients and community contributed to receiving this great award! Linda can be found online at www.KansasCityLifestyles.com (note, this site is something I put together for her using Wordpress…..it is a great tool for real estate agents.  Contact me if you want more info).

We  found out last week when we are all vacationing in Maui as a family.  I took a video (using my iPhone, so not the best) of the announcement by Catherine Clark, Linda’s broker. Just play the video below to see more (Hawaii was awesome, by the way… ).

If you have news about you or someone else that uses FloorPlanOnline, we would also love to hear from you.  Just email us and we can create a blog post and possibly even create a press release to mutually benefit both of us!

Best regards,

Kris Cone