For Realtors, military members are in high demand because they move often and the home buyer tax credit has been extended to April 30, 2011 for military personnel. On average, one-third of those who live off-base are homeowners. If your market is within 60 miles around a military base, you can now advertise your active listings free of charge to this highly desirable audience through a new military classifieds site (SargesList.com). FloorPlanOnline has partnered with SargesList.com, which has been heralded as the “Craigslist for Military.” While it is similar to craigslist, it has more functionality and helps military identify who is in their network for a more trusted interaction.
Reaching moving military BEFORE they move can be challenging. Since move season is just heating up and word is getting out about SargesList, make sure you get your listings posted soon (and automatically enter to win an iPad this month). Registration and basic listings are free but there are upgraded features you can purchase. If you are interested in being an exclusive advertiser for your military area, contact info@sargeslist.com for more information. With over 500 installations around the world, check and see if the installation near your market is available.
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.
I saw this article in USA Today that refers to a little known requirement passed as part of the health care reform law. Click here for the full article.
It will require YOU to issue Form 1099’s to anyone you buy $600 or more from in a year! Doesn’t matter what you buy for your business, or from whom…. Previously, this Form 1099 requirement only applied if you paid $600 or more to contractors that worked for you. So, if you buy a $700 computer from OfficeDepot, you are going to have to issue a Form 1099.
WHAT IS CONGRESS THINKING?
In my option, this is going to be next to impossible to implement. As a small business owner, I have enough to deal with, yet alone creating and issuing hundreds of Form 1099’s. I already do this today for the different service providers and other services I buy…but now for anything I buy? Come on.
This will impact real estate agents….and if you do not have Quickbooks….I suggest you get it…because you are going to need it.
Well, the dust has settled from our weekend release of the new tour. The release went surprisingly well….probably one of the best releases we have ever done in terms of few issues and the issues getting fixed quickly. I did want to point out a few things that have come up today regarding the new tour and tour conversion.
1. Portrait vs Wide-screen View. Depending on your screen resolution, you may see a little different content view for photos, video and the floor plan. If you have a screen resolution of 1024 pixels wide or less, you should see the “Portrait” version of the tour, which has photos in a 4:3 aspect ratio (similar to the old TV size before we had wide-screen TVs) and the Floor Plan View is the embedded floor plan vs the side by side floor plan view. We have set it up this way because the content would have to be very small or it will run off the page to the right. So to provide users with these screen resolutions the best view, we alter what they see to the Portrait view. Users with screen resolutions larger than 1024 will see the Wide-screen view which has photos in a 3:2 aspect ratio (what most digital SLRs shoot today) and 16:9 photos will be supported with an ability to mouse around the photo. In addition, the Floor Plan View will have the photos (here they are in a 4:3 aspect ratio) side by side with the floor plan, similar to the old tour view. You can always change a Portrait version to a wide-screen by adding &ws=1 to the end of the tour lnk, such as www.seetheproperty.com/presentation_v2/presentation.php?order_id=61383&mode=branded&ws=1 ….so if you do see the portrait version, you can see how the Wide-screen will look.
We have noticed that on some computers, the widescreen version is not showing up as the default view when it should be…the Portrait version is, so that is something we are working to fix.
2. FloorPlan/Photo Icon issue for tours created between April 15th and April 30th. For tours produced between April 15th and April 30th, we have done some work to ready the floor plan for the new tour by making a version of it in Flash, so it can be zoomed in if it is used in the new tour. Right now, if you convert a tour produced during this time frame to the new FPO 2.0 format, the floorplan on the tour is automatically changing to this flash version. This causes all of the photo icons on the floor plan to be mis-placed because it is a different size and file type. Therefore, be aware that if we convert the tour, the photos may need to be repositioned. You can do this for free or we can do this for the $20 conversion fee – if this issue was brought up to you before the conversion. We are working on a fix here.
3. Content Area View-ability. On some computers you may not be able to see the complete content area without scrolling. We are aware of this issue and are working on a fix to adjust the size of the content window if your vertical screen resolution is 900 pixels or less. We will make the content area a little smaller so it fits on the screen without scrolling.
4. Some Internet Explorer Issues. On some computers, the Photos and Video may not load…you may get a blank area. It appears to be an issue with Adobe Flash. The simple fix is go to www.adobe.com and download the most recent version of Flash. Install the update, close out your browser window, and then open it up again and try the tour. This seems to fix the problem. We are investigating what changed, as it was fine last week….this could have been caused by a recent Windows Update. The tour works in Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Go figure…another issue with Microsoft software???
We have had some great comments so far. Please send us comments, testimonials, complaints and more!
I have talked to a lot of customers recently about situations where they have multiple accounts and need access to those account. So I wanted to let you know we support what we call a Corporate/Sub Account structure. Normally, when you register with us, you create an individual account. However, you can create a corporate account, and then once you have a corporate account, you can create sub accounts (this is done in the corporate account under the Manage Sub Accounts on the right when you are logged in), or with the corporate account info, an agent can create a sub account underneath your corporate account. All they need is the Company customer ID and the company password. The option to register as a sub account is located on our registration page, or click here.
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.
