Archive for the ‘Real Estate Technology’ Category

We at limeyboy are big BIG fans of the real estate agents we work with blogging. Why? Simple, search engines love them.

However we hear too often, and understand, that real estate agents simply don’t have the time to sit by their computer to write.

With a smart phone and a wordpress app installed you can now do it from anywhere. Like this is being done from my car now!

Real Estate Blogging Schedule.

Having been helping real estate agents with technology for the last 10 years, we know that if we suggest anything too time demanding it simply won’t get done. Actually this is something we are entirely in favor of. Your job is to sell real estate, not become a geek. That’s our job!

Therefore, our mantra to our blogging real estate agents is, write a little, and write often..

How little, look at this post. How long did it take. 5 minutes.

Use Google Maps to find houses and apartments currently on the market.

Search for nearby schools, restaurants and public transport, explore the neighborhood in Street View or simply get directions from the property to your favourite places – all from a single map!

Make sure your listings are on googlebase!

So, we’ve committed, we’ve moved the ‘office files’ to the google cloud. The ‘office’ is now wherever we are.

Yesterday, we picked up a new laptop for the office. There was nothing to migrate, no files to move, or back-ups have to be done. We just logged into our cloud account and there it is. Where we left it.

A few years ago there was lots of talk about hot desk-ing, working in an open plan office environment, everyone brings their own laptop, and works somewhere on a large communal table. Cloud storing takes this one step further, in that the ‘your-ness’ of your laptop is no longer important.

…the ‘your-ness’ of your laptop is no longer important.

The other great thing about cloud storing is that as you set permissions for accessing it at the ‘door’, sharing your stuff becomes effortless. OK, so nothing really new there, in an office you can already network a folder, or a even a file, but whenever we did this within the Microsoft Office environment it was very clunky. We could share an individual file in the office, but only one of us could have it open at a time. The other person would close it, and then we could open it and take a look. But, although the files were always locally stored on our computers, there were many times when our computers weren’t in the same office.

With cloud files being assigned as shared with defined users, we can work on the same files simultaneously, see who’s editing what, and no one has to be remotely a). near the office, or b). on our own laptop.

In addition to the sharing through collaboration during the files creation, the cloud also makes it easier to share the final product. We’ve been working on a slide presentation for a meeting, we’ve been able to collaborate on the creation of the file, and then having delivered the presentation we can effortlessly share a link to the presentation online. With programs such as Power Point, sharing the behemoth was almost impossible due the file size limitations in email. Let google do the heavy lifting, and simply share a link to your work, not the whole thing.

Oh, and one more thing. The laptop we bought was an Apple, as our files are created in the cloud’s software, we didnt have to load any programs either…

So a friend stayed over with us the other day. They came with their laptop to do some work to prepare for a presentation. The did that. They left, and went to present. All was well, until they realized that the only part of their computer they took with them was their power cord. Sure enough, there was their laptop by the door.

In a scramble of panic they asked us to email the file to them so they could at least open the file on someone else’s laptop, and then figure out how to get that laptop hooked up to the LCD projector.

As we were trying to attach this enormous file to an email, and send it to multiple email address in the hope that at least one wouldn’t bounce such a monster file we once again thought about google docs. Having all these files, stored in one place, our laptops, our computers continues to seem a ridiculous concept to us know.

We are currently in the process of preparing a large presentation ourselves, which we are using google’s presentation app from google docs. Though everything in their program ‘sweet’ (sic) is very paired down, I have yet to find a function that needed that isn’t there. In a way, there is something refreshing about having less choice.

Do i really need 20 alternative fly-ins for my text to enter the page on each click?

With less gizmo’s, I find myself concentrating more on what I am trying to communicate.

The other joy of google docs is its in-built sharing function. More on that to come.

We strongly endorse google docs for real estate.

We’ve been huge encouragers of our agents blogging. However we always think its imporant to get some level of commitment from the agent, that they will be able to post at least once per week. An empty blog is both an underwhelming experience and potentially undermining of the website that linked to it. 

 

More would be great, but only if something that merits posting comes up. Blogging, simply for the sake of it, is as painful to read as it is to write.

So we’ve been setting up our agents with blogs for some time now and then following up with both initial training, talking about what makes a good post, and then how to create content thats both compelling from a human and algorythmic perspective.

If the blog’s out of date, how do we know the sold listing data is current?

What we’ve always felt has been lacking somewhat is the visual and link between the blog and the website. This transition can all too often feel somewhat disconnected and clunky. Well, that’s recently changed as we’ve begun to develop our own real estate wordpress themes. Our latest can be seen here.

Look I think it’s time to move on. It’s not about you, it’s about me…(you haven’t grown, I have). I think we are just at different places in our lives, we want different things…

Breaking up is so hard to do, relationships are habits. Some are good, some are bad, they become the norm. But at some moment in time, you look at:

• where you have come from,
• where you are,
• and where you want to go,

It’s just time to start slowly packing things up to transition to your next life, holding off on booking that vacation, and perhaps not repainting the hall just yet.

This is kind of where the office is today when we think about Microsoft. A few months ago we need to replace one of our office computer. With Windows 7 imminent, but not yet launched, it was not as straightforward a decision as it usually is. We knew we’d have to upgrade with a disc that Dell, promised they would said, (we’ve heard that one before), but nonetheless, the new machine was needed. So we bought a Vista machine with a free upgrade eligability at some undefined time in the future.

So the new machine arrived and we starts transferring all this data from one machine to the other. Now, we are diligent backer-uppers. So we never worried about loosing data, it was just that to have large amounts of data locally stored, which then had to moved from the old machine to the new seemed, at that moment very outdated. Wasn’t the point of the internet to decentralize data? To store the data in between two computer rather than on one of them.

We also spend a lot of time moving data around. We have files on a server, that we individually make changes to, then save them, then someone else on the network can open them, make changes and so on…

falling in love again…

At this low ebb, google popped up with Google Voice, which we’ll talk more about in another post, but we love it. Absolutely, we are besotted once again. The google, world view seems to becoming more coherently into view with better grouping of what were seemingly disparate products.

Time spent within Google Voice, lead to us getting reaquainted with google docs. Though heavily stripped down versions of the Microsoft Office suite, the fact that are stored online, by definition all of a sudden seems immensely appealling. Having your voicemail a tab away just sweetens the deal even more.

So, as it stands, we are transitioning over to google docs, we already commited to google voice. What out Microsoft Outlook, your days may be numbered!

We love this. Love it love it love it. Looking back on it at the time, it didn’t feel wierd or innefficient in having an office number, a cell number and a home number. We would leave  messages for various people leaving various combinations of numbers depending on who we were calling. We’ve been doing this for years. Wouldn’t think twice about doing it.

Then we were introduced to google voice. In a nut shell, you sign up for a number at google, which ‘claims’ to be local, (not that mine matches any of my office, cell or home town codes). Once you have it, you enter in all phone numbers  you have, office, cell, home. You then give out your google voice number to everyone from then on.

In it’s simplest form, when someone calls your google voice number, you can set it to:

• ring all your phones
• ring specific phones if you assign certain callers to certain number, eg. clients to the office number, golf buddy to the cell etc.

When you pick up the call, you can set it to tell you who’s calling by the caller saying their name, you are promted to either connect the call, or send to voicemail. If you send to voicemail, you can hear them leave the message live, after which you can mark it as read. (Just like an old fashioned answer phone. Haven’t we come along way…not)

If the call goes to voicemail, it will transcribe the message, then send your the transcription via text message, and or email with a link to play the message online.

And lastly, in case you needed any more reasons, you can call internationally really cheaply too. We can call the UK (limey land) for 2cents a minute from our cell phones.