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Use PayPal Credit to Pay for Virtual Tours

Use PayPal Credit to Pay for Virtual Tours

by | Mar 29, 2023 | Real Estate Info

Use PayPal Credit to pay and get 6 months no interest!

Since we are integrated with PayPal, you can use PayPal credit as the default payment method for your PayPal account and use that to pay for virtual tour services.  As long as you pay the charge off in 6 months, you get the float and no interest for this timeframe!  This can be a great financing tool for new listings that will close in a month or two.  And it does not cost you anything and there is no administrative things to work out between you and us.  It’s built into PayPal already.  If you don’t have PayPal Credit set up yet, just click the button and apply to get a decision in a few seconds.

Apply for PayPal Credit

See the video on how easy it is to set up.

How to Easily Customize your Story

How to Easily Customize your Story

by | Jan 18, 2023 | Listing Tools, Real Estate Info, Tour Updates, What's New

With the new HomeDiary PRO management system, it’s never been easier to customize the look of your tour, or Story, as we like to call it.  Here’s a few things you can do with the Presentation page, our new real-time Story editor.  See below for a video on how you can do these edits.

  • Preview and select different Themes
  • Customize the Hero section (the first thing you see) by adding a title or banner, show/hide the property description or show/hide property features
  • Select a different Hero Image than the first image in your Photo/Video Gallery
  • Customize the Property Description with a basic text editor with Bold, Italics, bullets and numbered lists
  • Show or Hide content sections
  • You can even preview how the Story looks on different devices, including mobile phones

Use the slider to see the before and after view of the tour

See the Video on how easy it is to customize and enhance your Story

You can also see the sample tour I was working on by clicking here.

If you want to customize your tour more with branded content (only on the branded version of the tour), check out our detailed blog post on the topic here.  With our patented Brandkeepr feature, it’s a great way to leverage your tour to get more business, and differentiation, for YOU!

If you want to learn more about our new digital closing gift (and more), the Diary, check out this post.  It’s great for your new buyers, or even long standing clients.

Holiday Special on The Diary

Holiday Special on The Diary

by | Dec 6, 2022 | Homeowners, Listing Tools, Real Estate Info, Real Estate News, Technology

Looking for a meaningful reason to reach out to your top clients this holiday season?  

We have an awesome promotion on our new Diary product that allows you to create a HomeDiary for your client, add content into it, and then invite them to receive the gift of our home management app that will help them increase the value of their home over time, and save a lot of hassles, and money, along the way.  

We are reducing our introductory price for the Diary between now and January 31, 2023, to just a one-time fee of $15, normally $29. No other subscriptions or fees to keep adding to the Diary over the course of homeownership!

The gift of the HomeDiary app is the perfect reason to touch base with your clients this holiday season.  Call them, tell them about the app you’re going to give them, and maybe add in a hand crafted home value estimate as part of the content you add into the Diary.  But first, ask them if they have done any improvements, like a new bath or kitchen.  This will give you extra data to provide a differentiated home value than those automated AVMs. Provide the value estimate as a Timeline entry with the value determined in the amount field and the CMA as a PDF attachment (or if you have a link, add that too).   See our Implementation Guide for how to add these improvement values to your estimate, and other example use cases of what you and your client can do with HomeDiary.

What do you get?

A sponsored Diary where you can collaborate and curate content for your client’s HomeDiary for the life of the ownership of their home.  Add the closing docs, reminders (like the Closing Statement for tax time), a “To Do” list from the inspection report, or just post a photo of a cool marble slab you know your clients would love for their upcoming kitchen remodel. 

Once you unlock the Diary for collaboration, you can put content in over time for no additional cost for the life of your client’s homeownership!  You are positioned as the default home pro, and your info is just a call, text or email away. 

PS. you also get a free HomeDiary account for your own house.  So add receipts, documents or create a floor plan to show your clients the cool and helpful info that can be part of their Diary.

homediary sponsor

Video on HomeDiary for Homeowners

What does your client get?

A fully functioning HomeDiary, complete with 3D Designer, our drag and drop floor planner and room design tool.  It’s like HGTV, but for their home.  If you have access to a floor plan source, we can convert that into 3D Designer for a one time fee of $30 ($45 total price for the Diary with FloorPlan). Or, you can use our iOS app to scan their home in 5 to 10 minutes and get back a customizable 3D floor plan in 1 to 2 days, priced at $55 until January 31, 2023.  Just ask your client if they have a source they can send you and upload it, and we will convert it into a 3D floor plan. 

Our Holiday Promotion, in summary:

  • Basic Diary – $15
  • Basic Diary+FloorPlan from source – $45
  • Basic Diary+FloorPlan with scan app – $55
There will always be a free version of HomeDiary for a homeowner to use.  It is private and secure by default, but you now have the ability to put content into their HomeDiary with this new feature.  See an idea for a client?  Toggle to their house in the HomeDiary app (or login using your favorite browser) and post an Idea, Reminder or Timeline entry.  Anything you can do for your own home can be done in your client’s home via the app!  All data can be exported out by the homeowner as needed and they can share content cards via the app. 

The Diary opens up new and exciting communication channels between you and your clients. Think of the difference in the relationship created between giving a calendar annually to your clients vs posting a photo of that cool marble slab you found into the Ideas section for your clients’ upcoming kitchen remodel.  It shows you’re invested in their homeownership experience in highly personal and targeted ways, and it keeps you top of mind as their agent who is there to help guide them in their homeownership journey. In other words, it puts you top of mind with your sphere of influence, about 10% of whom will move this year.  That could be 30 to 50 transactions, just by being remembered and present as the person they should be using to sell their home. 

Want this for all of your agents? We do have office and company subscription options where the base Diary is free to the agent, as the company pays a monthly fee on behalf of all agents.  If you are interested in the Office program, please contact us at sales@homediary.com or call 206-384-4400, option 2.

Add Branded Call to Actions & Content to your Tour

Add Branded Call to Actions & Content to your Tour

by | Oct 18, 2022 | Real Estate Info

Add branded photos, ads, or custom call to action slides/images on your tour

Having to have an unbranded tour you put into the MLS kind of sucks, right?  You spend all of this money and then you can’t showcase your brand.  But don’t worry, you can, and in more places than you probably think.

We actually have a pretty amazing solution to help market you and your services in more places, leveraging your virtual tour.  It involves combining our photo/video editing tools along with our patented Brandkeepr functionality.  Together, you can create a custom call to action photo (i.e. an ad) or text slide that will only show on your branded tour, and with our Brandkeepr magic, people viewing the tour from the top sites like Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com will see the branded version, and this custom content you created!

Keep reading to see how to set it up, including a couple of videos.

Normally, this content would be a “no-no” on the unbranded tour.  Even a photo of you with the house could be construed as “branded” content. However, because we dynamically convert the unbranded tour back to branded on the top sites people use most with Brandkeepr, we can feature any kind of content on that branded tour.  To make this work, there needs to be a way to designate what content has branding, and we luckily already have a setting for this in our photo/video editor, so you can designate if a photo, video clip or text slide contains branded content.  If it does, mark it as such, and it will only show on the branded tour.

This process leverages the massive traffic of the real estate search portals and directs it back to your branded lead capture page – your virtual tour.  It has proven to get people more business as you will see in our testimonies.

, Use cases:

  • Your company offers 1% cash back if the buyer buys with your company – feature it (like the image at top). See How to Set it Up below.
  • You offer a free home warranty if they buy through you – create an ad image and post in the photo gallery and/or video
  • You want to show a custom animated logo or intro/outro video
  • You have a custom video featuring YOU as the actor or voice and want your branding shown, and known. 
  • Any other special offer or service if someone buys/lists with you.
  • Market they get a free HomeDiary with 3D Designer for their home!
  • You want to show a custom call to action slide to schedule a private showing – easy, use the +Add Slide option
  • You want to feature you and/or your brand in the photo gallery or slideshow video (either in a photo or intro video clip) in creative and unique ways to help differentiate you – just upload and mark as branded

You can do all of this using our photo/video editor in conjunction with Brandkeepr (which is on, and working by default). The end result is the majority of viewers of the tour you put in the MLS will see the branded version of the tour, because the majority of traffic for real estate search is to 4 sites – Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and Trulia, as you see in this Brandkeepr graph.

image of top 10 real estate search sites

See this tour for an example of what it might look like to add an animated logo, an ad image for the 1% cash back, show you at the front door of your listing, or just have a custom call to action slide for a private showing (currently only shows in the video, but we may change this to add to the photo gallery as well).

Check out the difference.

Or, use the slider below to see the branded and unbranded view of the same tour.  Pretty cool…

How to set it up.

All you need to do is upload the content, and then mark that it contains branded content, like you see in these screenshots below.  When you do, this content will only show on the branded tour’s photo gallery and slideshow video.  Photos will show on both if you check both boxes.  Any video clips and the Text Slide will show on the video.  Easy, and yet super effective.

If you want to use our Call to Action template to create your own version, see the Canva section below.

Video on How to Set It Up
Q

Branded content to your tour & still be in compliance with your MLS!

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branding set up for a photo
If you add a text slide (the +Add Slide button at the top) with your branded content, just select the branded content toggle too and position the slide where you want it to show.

Custom Video with your branding.

You can also embed a Youtube or Vimeo video on the tour and select Branded, and it will only show up on the branded version of the virtual tour.  Just scroll down to the Custom Video section on the Media Page and select +Add

Story Media HD Pro 2023 03 22 10 31 21
Then add a title, select which video platform the video is hosted on, and then select where to show it.  If it contains branded content, then only check Branded.  The video will only show on the branded version.  If you have an unbranded version as well, you can do the same thing and only show it on the unbranded tour.

You just need to paste in the video ID – vimeo – its the numbers at the end like = 356888497.  YouTube is more alpha like =XCcCkVvDu-U.  We handle the embedding on the tour. 

With Brandkeepr, when someone clicks the tour link on Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com or even your company website or your personal website, it will show the branded virtual tour, if you set those domain names up under your Brandkeepr settings.  It is that easy, the Brandkeepr magic does the rest.  PS, your site does need to be secure (HTTPS) for this to work.

Custom Video

The end result is you have a branded lead capture page (your tour) that features the great content you created, you and your additional services or differentiators to get more and more people coming to you, to buy, or sell, just like Valerie experience with her additional $75,000 pay day!

As I can attest, FloorPlanOnline can help you get more business.  

I received a call from a potential buyer who saw one of my listings online.  While the home sold quickly and she was too late, she was so impressed with my marketing presentation, powered by FloorPlanOnline, she not only hired me to sell her high-end home, but I helped her buy her new one, too. That one listing was responsible for an additional $2.5M in sales.

I would not have gotten the new client by providing just photos.  This buyer specifically called me based on my FloorPlanOnline presentation. That’s why the FloorPlanOnline platform is my go-to team for creating amazing content for my sellers, as well as a tool for new buyers through its HomeDiary integration, which can be a channel of new business too. 

Valerie MacKnight

Broker/Realtor, Windermere Real Estate

How to use Canva

Canva is super easy to use – just upload a photo and drag it over to the photo area and it will replace the placeholder image with your image.  You can change the colors, add elements, logos, change the text, etc.  When done, download as a PNG file.  Recommended size is a 3:2 aspect ratio (DSLRs photo size) and our tour is optimized for that view.  Something like 1920×1280 pixels, which is the size of this template.

You should be able to use the template with a free Canva account.  However, I highly recommend the PRO account because it does unlock the ability to create additional content like short little videos great for Instagram or Tiktok as well as great property marketing brochures.  Sign-up for a Canva account here.
Video on how to use the Canva Template
Q

Canva is a powerful took to help you create marketing content

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Create your Canva account and then click here to use our Canva template to create the Call to Action image

Virtual Business Card. If you would like to create a virtual business card with a QR code (thanks to covid people actually use them now) and add it to the Call to Action slide like I show in the video below, or in the post header image, check out this video, and use this template as a start.  Just make sure you change the phone in the html text to your phone number.  The html code for the QR code is: <a href="tel:2063844400"></a> – just change the 2063844400 to your specific number.  When the QR code is scanned it will dial the phone number.

QR code with Call Me

Note, you can also put this on your website so when someone clicks on it, it will dial the number.  If you want to add some text, like “Call us at” then you would use this html and add the “-” between numbers to make it look nicer.  <a href="tel:2063844400">Call us at 206-384-4400</a> It will display like this: Call us at 206-384-4400

Video on How to Create a Virtual Business Card
Q

Use the QR Code app

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If you want it to pop the text message rather than the dial a phone, then use this code

<a href="sms:(countrycode)(number)">

So for my example number it would be  <a href="sms:+12063844400">

Just copy and paste this into the URL field for the QR Code generator, and it will open Messages when the user scans it.  Try this one below that will open up the text message app on your phone. If you want to add Text US to your website, then it would be this code <a href=”sms:+12063844400″>Text us at 206-384-4400</a>  that would display like this: Text us at 206-384-4400

QR code with Text Me

I added another page in the template for the QR Code with the Text Me vs Call Me…so all you have to do is change the numbers in both and edit colors, etc… Just find the QR Code app under the More … (the 3 dots) menu at the bottom and use the code in the URL field.  Make sure you test it.

Finally, if you really want to be a nerd, give them both options like below (this is page 3 of the template). Pretty COOL, I must say…but I am a nerd.

QR code with both
HomeDiary PRO Platform Webinar

HomeDiary PRO Platform Webinar

by | Oct 18, 2022 | Real Estate Info

Replay of the HomeDiary PRO Webinar

This is a replay of the webinar held on October 18, 2022.

Want to learn more about the HomeDiary PRO platform?

View our Google slides below, or check out some other helpful pages.

  • Difference between HomeDiary Sponsorship and Ordering a HomeDiary – View post
  • What options are available for Ordering a HomeDiary – View post
  • Want to feature an ad, a call to action or other branded content on your tour without getting in trouble with the MLS Branded Police – check our this post.

The HomeDiary PRO Platform Overview

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