by Kris Cone | Oct 4, 2016 | Listing Tools, Real Estate Info, Technology, Tour Updates, What's New
Introducing Claim Home, powered by HomeDiary
Now every buyer can claim their new home right from the FloorPlanOnline virtual tour. With the click of a button, the buyer sends a request to you as the listing agent to approve giving a copy of the photos and floor plans (including the 3D Space planner) to the buyer in their own private HomeDiary account. Now, that great content created on the “For Sale” side of the transaction can live on with the “For Living” side! No other virtual tour platform has this capability because no one else has their 
own 3D floor plan tool that can do the amazing things the FloorPlanOnline tool can do!
Right now, the Claim Home feature is live on the Full Screen tour. We will be working to add it on other tour versions. If you want it on your tour now, simply go to Edit Details from the Manage Tours page and select the Full Screen tour option, then save at the bottom. The Claim Home button will then show under tools as you see in the above screen shot.
Then just look for the approval request from the buyer. You can also point out this feature to the buy side agent as a courtesy to them and their client.
We are currently working on some market research as part of our participation in the NAR REach program around HomeDiary options and integrations with some of the tools you already use, such as transaction management platforms, CRM systems and even some larger regional brokerages. So stay tuned for some interesting things to come as we approach the National Association of Realtors’ annual convention.
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CZKBowhbHZ0?rel=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
by Kris Cone | Apr 20, 2016 | Real Estate Info, What's New
We are very excited and honored to be part of a group of companies selected to REach® Real Estate accelerator’s class of 2016 by the National Association of REALTORS® (“NAR”), the largest trade association in North America. The REach® program is run by Second Century Ventures (“SCV”), the technology fund and strategic arm of NAR. The goal of the program is to help companies refine their product, strategy and process and to accelerate the exposure across the more than 1 million REALTORS® in the United States.
After a detailed selection process that included more than 200 company applications, HomeDiary, powered by FloorPlanOnline, was one of 8 companies chosen for bringing it’s 2D & 3D floor plan virtualization platform and digital recordkeeping tools to any home. You can read NAR’s press release here. Through the FloorPlanOnline platform, REALTORS® have been able to differentiate their listings and themselves by focusing on the top 2 things buyers want to see – big HD photos and interactive floor plans. Through a sponsored HomeDiary, REALTORS® will now be able to stay in touch with their clients in a relevant way for years to come as the homeowner manages their home.
“HomeDiary is bringing HGTV-like 3D tools to any homeowner, making it simpler to create a 2D and 3D floor plan for a room or a whole house,” said Alex Lange, operating partner of SCV. “We are excited to introduce HomeDiary to more than a million NAR members while providing the company with access to experts and influencers in the real estate industry to help accelerate their already-amazing toolsets.”
“Over the course of the next few months HomeDiary will be refining the go to market strategy and product options for the Closing Gift, a new product that will bring 3D floor plans to any newly purchased home,” said Kris Cone, CEO of FloorPlanOnline & HomeDiary. “Our focus is to make it easy and cost effective to get a 3D floor plan for any home, starting at free! We will also be leveraging our FloorPlanOnline infrastructure to be able to visit virtually any home throughout the US to create a floor plan, complete with our drag and drop RoomPlanner tool, as well as other tools to enable homeowners to document and manage their home.”
Homeowners can get started for free at HomeDiary.com. Options for REALTORS® will be coming soon, so stay tuned!
by Kris Cone | Jan 15, 2016 | Real Estate News, What's New
We wanted to share some exciting news with you about our recent deal with the Florida Association of Realtors and its 115,000 members. You can read the release here on Yahoo Finance.
The deal provides a general discount to members who subscribe to the FloorPlanOnline Subscription program. In addition, all subscribers get to use the new cool 2D and 3D floor plan tool with roomplanner for FREE! Now, any listing can have a 2D and 3D floor plan, and it will not cost an arm, or leg, to get it! For agents that have an appraisal sketch, marketing brochure or other draft floor plan sketch, they can upload the image as a background photo and use the system to scale and trace over the image to get an accurate, to scale floor plan in minutes (see our video tutorials for more). Plus, you can use our system to trace over a Matterport scan to do the same (we have a specific video on how to do that our our video tutorials page)
The benefit or redrawing any source floor plan is we create a clean 2D floor plan for viewing and print marketing, a 3D Floor Plan model that has top and first person views, and it includes the RoomPlanner tool that allows the buyer to ultimately save the floor plan and use it as a tool for when they move in!
We also offer full service in the South Florida area with HDR photography standard. See an example Full Service tour for the Florida market here.
by Kris Cone | Jul 23, 2015 | Listing Tools, Technology, What's New
I just saw this blog post on Linkedin, and thought it was an interesting, and applicable read, to what we are doing with helping to market real estate. It basically says a human has an attention span of 8 seconds, so if you can’t capture the user within that timeframe, they move on. You can read the full post here.
The post says to follow these rules for content marketing some parts copied verbatim):
1. Capture the attention quickly. In our case – the tour has to load quickly to display the content.
2. Content needs to be engaging (e.g. shareable) in the ecosystem it lives in. Eg We focus on floorplan content, something that buyers want to see as it shows how their family can live in a home.
3. Content needs to be authentic. For FPO, each house is different and unique.
4. Employees are your best ambassadors: with FPO, we run an employee-owned company and strive to provide helpful, US-based customer service.
5. It’s a marriage, not a one night stand. If your brand starts producing content for social media, its a commitment to your audience, not an experiment.
I relate this 8 second stat to tours out there today. Matterport has received a lot of press in the last year….yet from a user perspective, it can take 20 to 30 seconds, or more, for it to load. And then, the user has to point and click, spending valuable time, just to screen a property. Don’t get me wrong, it is cool technology, but is it the right technology to use as THE base marketing tool? I say no. Per independent research, buyers want to see #1 – Big Photos and #2 – FloorPlans. Videos, 360s, and everything else are ancillary. That is why we created our Full Screen HD Tour…to showcase a property with big large content and to let people quickly screen properties, to then take the next step.
Look for more to come in the next half of 2015!
Cheers
Kris Cone, CEO/Co-Founder
by Kris Cone | Jul 22, 2015 | Listing Tools, What's New
Great news for non-Showcase agents linking tours to Realtor.com
As of July 1, 2015, linking the FloorPlanOnline virtual tour to Realtor.com is now completely Free! In the past, Realtor.com charged us a fee to link non-Showcase tours to Realtor.com, and we therefore passed on this cost by charging $25 to link to Realtor.com. Going forward, linking to Realtor.com, whether you are a Showcase member with them or not, is free!
We made this change in our pricing system a little after the first of the month, and we did attempt to refund any charges for non-Showcase linking made from July 1 to July 7th. If you find a charge for Realtor.com linking in July that we missed, just shoot us an email at support@floorplanonline.com and we will issue a credit.
Behind Zillow/Trulia, Realtor.com is the 3rd most vistited real estate website, so it benefits you to link the tour. In additon, if you are a Showcase member only because of the tour linking savings (it was free), you might be able to save some bucks now with the nonShowcase membership.
How to link your tours to Realtor.com
It is easy, you just need to do a few things:
1) Update your linking profile to make sure Realtor.com selected.
To add Realtor.com, login, go to Edit Profile and click the Edit Tour Linking & Distribution button towards the top. Then just make sure Realtor.com is checked. Go to the bottom and save.
Then select the box for Realtor.com
2) Add Realtor.com to older tours.
Go to Manage Tours, then select the Edit Details link (it is a blue text link) under the Tour Details column, scroll to the bottom and make sure Realtor.com is selected for that particular listing (and that we have the valid MLS number) and then save.
3) Manually link to Realtor.com
Go back to Manage Tours an on the far right under Tour Actions, select See Tour Linking and hit the relink option to manually link the tour to Realtor.com.
You can also send us an email to support@floorplanonline.com with a request to set this up and relink for you. Note if you have a lot of tours, it might take a few days for us to complete this task.
For new tours, if we have the MLS number at the time you Approve & Publish the tour, the virtual tour will get added to Realtor.com within a few minutes automatically. It shows both on the small thumbnail view as well as on the lower right of the main photo slider. Granted…it is not that visible, but at least it is there on the listing!
Call2Action Photo
As a reminder, you can get more people clicking on the virtual tour by uploading the unbranded version of the Call2Action photo into your MLS photo gallery, which then will make its way to Realtor.com, Zillow and other sites to call out to the user to click on the virtual tour link. Click here to read more on the Call2Action Photo.
Note for the Northwest MLS
Some MLS systems (namely the NWMLS in the Seattle area) make you jump through some hoops to get your listings pulled into Realtor.com in the first place. If your listings are not on Realtor.com, we can’t link the tour there. So you need to make sure Realtor.com pulls your listings in from the MLS first.
What you need to do:
The following forms need to be completed and faxed back to MOVE® at 480-556-4508.
1) REALTOR.com® Designated (BDCP) – Broker Data Content Provider Agreement
2) NWMLS Form 110 – Data License Agreement – This needs to be downloaded directly from the NWMLS website
3) Realtor.com NWMLS Broker Website Agreement
You can also contact Realtor.com directly at
REALTOR.com® Customer Care: 800-878-4166
E-mail: CustomerCare@REALTOR.com
by Kris Cone | Jun 9, 2015 | Real Estate Info, What's New
We want your opinion!
Help shape our future product and service roadmap. Please fill out our survey.
Take our Survey
