I presented at a RE/MAX office this week and met with several FloorPlanOnline customers. We appreciate your business! One was Mary Lou Roels, www.marylouroels.com. She mentioned she and her co-listing agent Robert Lotz did a tour and got great results with FloorPlanOnline driving sale activities …here is what she had to say:
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Love Floorplanonline- a team mate and I listed a 1.4 million dollar home in Redmond and wanted the best marketing we could find to showcase this gorgeous 7000+ sq. foot home with a 3000 sq foot indoor pool and hottub. Pictures wouldn’t have captured this exquisite home. The first person that walked through the door bought the house. The second person put a full- priced back up offer on the home. Both parties used the link to show the home to their family and friends.
My international clients find Floorplanonline perfect for their spatial design mindset- they shop online through the internet for homes, and being able to see a floor plan has made the difference in what they want to see when we go out to view homes.
Today, Realtor.com operator Move Inc. said it has renewed the content agreement with MSN that allows consumers to access Move’s property listings and related information via MSN Real Estate. Combined, Realtor.com and MSN Real Estate reach 18.6 million unique consumers each month, Move said, citing comScore data. Hitwise and comScore consistently rank both sites among the nation’s top 10 most visited real estate websites.
This is good new for FloorPlanOnline users.
First, if you are a Showcase member with Realtor.com, you get more distribution to MSN as part of this relationship. Second, if you are not a Showcase member, you can still reach these users by paying our $20 linking fee (which they charge us), and you can get your tour attached to your listing on Realtor.com and the other sites it powers. Either way, the tour shows up under the four main photos as the TOUR button. We have to link the tour for you. For those with few listings, it is likely more cost effective to not be a Showcase member. Call Realtor.com at 800-878-4166 to discuss options.
However. Now that we are also creating an exact video file of the tour’s virtual WalkThru video, this creates further reason to be a Showcase members. Showcase members can login to their Realtor.com control panel and upload the video to your listing. When you do this, it adds a VIDEO button below the Photos as well. You have to upload the video – there is no way for us to do this for you (we have asked Realtor.com several times now….). If you add a video, your listing gets further preferential search treatment.
All you need to do to download the video is login at Floorplanonline.com, go to Manage Orders, then click the VIEW link under Marketing Materials. If there is a Download Video button, click it and select the AVI option. Save on your computer, then login at Realtor.com and edit your listing and upload it! It should be ready within 40 minutes. If your listing does not have a video, go back to Manage orders, click on the Edit Tour link under Tour Editor, click on Edit Video, and then click the Save & Close button. This will queue the video up for production. It should show up in your account within 1 hr, but it could take longer, depending on the time of day and how many other videos are being processed.
A recent study by Seattle-based Redfin, an online brokerage, suggests that homes with higher quality photos sell for a higher sales price, and get more views, than homes with lower quality or no photos. According to their analysis using MLS pulled data, homes with professional photographs were found to be viewed, on average, 61 percent more online than others in that price range shot with a lower-end camera. The listings that used digital SLR cameras also commanded a 47 percent higher asking price per square foot, according to the Redfin analysis.
However, Digital SLR cameras were only found to increase the likelihood of a sale for listings $300,000 and above. In other words, buyers don’t seem to judge a house by its photos as much for homes under $300,000. Digital SLR cameras don’t appear to be too popular in the real estate market, even when shooting luxury listings. Eighty percent of the listing analyzed were shot with a point-and-shoot camera; only 15 percent of the listings used a digital SLR camera.
What’s most surprising, only about half of the listings in the $1 million-plus range were shot using a professional SLR camera, nearly split with low-end camera usage in that price range.
Click here to read the fill article on Realtor Magazine.
We wanted to get your feedback on the new landscape oriented tour design we are working on. Please view the below sideshow, read the description, and then make your vote. Pleae note we are working on making some of these changes, like how the contact info, photo and logo show, on the current web-page oriented design.
Click on the sideshow for the full screen version
We appreciate your feedback – Please make your vote!
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Move Inc. to offer listings syndication through its Realtor.com website via ListHub
Realtor.com operator Move Inc. finalized a deal Monday to acquire Threewide Corp., operator of national listing syndication platform ListHub. The acquisition comes on the heels of an amended agreement between Move and the National Association of Realtors concerning the operation of the Internet’s most popular real estate portal, Realtor.com.
In addition to giving Move more leeway to redesign the real estate site, the amendment also gave Move permission to syndicate listings data to third parties such as online portals, real estate listing sites and other “designated destinations,” if instructed to do so by the multiple listing service or broker supplying the listings.
“By acquiring Threewide and elevating the ListHub brand to a primary product offering at Move, we’ll combine Move’s core competencies of listing aggregation, relationship management and the delivery of effective marketing services with ListHub’s leadership in national syndication and market intelligence,” said Steve Berkowitz, Move’s CEO, in a press release.
The innovative Premium Virtual Tour company FloorPlanOnline has done it again.
FloorPlanOnline continues to offer additional features and functions to its tours and single property websites…without charge. Real Estate Agents may now check a simple box and an automated process creates and posts a YouTube video of the listing online into the FloorPlanOnline YouTube Channel or….your own (or company’s) channel! It’s very simple to use – just use our normal video editing tools and save your changes. Best of all, this enhanced tour distribution service is FREE. The video will be available for download under Marketing Materials generally within 1-2 hours after saving your changes (time varies based on the number of videos in the processing queue). In addition, we also create a video file that can be used to upload into your Realtor.com Showcase listing. For now, this is something you must do as Realtor.com has no automated process for tour companies to handle this job for you.
More adventurous Realtors may opt to select different music, type in captions for each photo and edit photos to create a more personalized YouTube video. In order to take advantage of the new YouTube & Realtor.com tool – FPO customers should log in and edit their linking profile by checking the box to include the linking to the FloorPlanOnline YouTube channel. Then just make sure it is selected on the order as you place create a new tour.
This new tool works on all new tours created as of Monday, Aug 30th 2010. Click here to view an example video on YouTube or just play the sample below:
As with most enhancements and improvements to FPO tours, there is no additional fee for this feature. Other companies charge up to $20 or more, just to put a video on YouTube. On top of that, they charge up to $49 or more for the same virtual tour we price at $29. As long as your tour is active, including tours that have been renewed, you can create a video file and have the video uploaded to YouTube. Please read our FAQ below for more details on how to create a video file. Additionally, word from the FloorPlanOnline development department is that further options and YouTube related tools are being tested and tweaked for launch before the end of the year.
Why should you link the tour to YouTube, or Realtor.com? More online exposure. Most people are not going to YouTube to search for properties. In fact, according to the most recent NAR statistics, less than 1% of buyers in the survey sited YouTube as a source for online content. Realtor.com was one of the highest websites, however. However, putting the video on YouTube can help with search engine optimization…so your tour gets found, and you get it sold!
To learn more, just click on one of the FAQs below to read more details (click again to hide the detail).
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That’s FloorPlanOnline – Simple, Effective and Affordable.
