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Showing posts from September, 2009

More MyProperty South Africa tweaks: property tag cloud

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Today we've made some more backend tweaks on the new MyProperty website , and also enhanced the property tag cloud feature on the home page to include province links as indicated in the image below. Clicking on a province link or map area will highlight the particular province and display the most popular towns. We've also made a few SEO enhancements and making improvements on the database for faster property search results.

Did you know - fascinating facts about the internet

Over 31 Billion searches on Google every month - where is your real estate website ranked?

Improved export to Excel on Active Properties

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We have improved the export to Microsoft Excel function on the active properties screen in the OMS. The data layout in Excel is better and will also include all properties in the active listings view rather than the first or selected page (was a issue with some users).

Improved download library for OMS

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We've made available a much improved download library for our Enterprise (National/Group) clients. A 'new download library' link is available on the existing download library. We are busy transfering the files from the old to the new component. We will enable the new library tonight so all your offices/agents will be able to access the new component tomorrow. The improved download library makes it easier for file uploads, to create folder structures and to rename or remove files: More about the OMS Download Library: The download library is an integrated part of the OMS and allows sharing of files between offices and agents in a group. It is currently offered to our Enterprise/National clients.

MyProperty spam protection - no more unwanted enquiries

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With the release of the new MyProperty South Africa website , we've implemented a new spam protection feature on property enquiries . Whenever someone makes an enquiry on one of your property listings, they need to complete a CAPTCHA or 'challenge response' field. Only when they enter the alphabetic characters correctly, the enquiry form is sent to you (through email, sms and OMS entry) . Did you know? CAPTCHA stands for: "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"; Google recently acquired the company that first invented the Captcha technology;

MyProperty featured property rotation

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The MyProperty South Africa website featured property section gives estate agents excellent exposure to newly loaded property listings . It will rotate to new properties loaded every 60 minutes and take the last +- 10 properties loaded in the OMS or imported through our external interface. Be sure to load a couple of good quality photos and property description for your property to feature - the MyProperty engine is continuously tweaked to filter only the best quality properties on the home page.

Excellent SEO traction for new MyProperty SA website

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It is still early days to determine the success of the new MyProperty South Africa website search engine optimisation work but we still enjoy good traction in the major search engines for popular keyword searches. Here are some examples: #1 in www.bing.com for the keyword search "property in south africa" #1 in www.google.co.za for the keyword search "Property in South Africa" #1 in www.google.co.za for the keyword search "Houses" We are monitoring the enquiry rates on the new website on an ongoing basis with our aim to improve the "enquiries per property" rate for our clients with the new website. MSN Property (powered by Entegral) is also enjoying an increase in traffic thanks to regular prime spot banners on the MSN South Africa home page. With Entegral's OMS solution estate agents can advertise on all South Africa's major property portals and affiliated partner portals from one easy to use online system.

New MyProperty website updates

We've loaded a couple of updates to the New MyProperty website today including: Performance improvements, iSearch function is now faster (text search area at the top); Refine search (on property search results) now works a lot smoother; Sometimes not all properties reflected in the search results; Photo width on properties details. On some properties the main photo overlapped into the price/description area; We've inserted an OMS login link back into the header; We're getting there - thanks for everyone's feedback so far! We're not resting till everything is 100% correct.

New MyProperty Mobile website BETA up!

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Hot on the heels of the New MyProperty South Africa website comes the new MyProperty Mobile website in BETA release @ http://mobi.myproperty.co.za Yes, there are lots of tweaks we need to do, but considering we already had lots of public enquiries on properties through this mobi website in the last 2 days we are confident that this will be an excellent online marketing extension to the full MyProperty website once fully completed. Visitors can now browse a scaled down 'mobi website' of MyProperty on their mobile phones, view property details, photos, make enquiries and read real estate news . The powerful search function we dubbed 'iSearch' (short for intelligent search) is also implemented on the mobile website, allowing complex property searches to be performed using natural language text. Simply type in what you are looking for e.g. ' roodepoort houses for sale 3 beds under R1M ' or ' douglasdale,fourways,bryanston to rent up to R5k ' ....and the m

FNB Quicksell interface running smoothly

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After sorting out a small bug in the FNB QuickSell Interface it now exports listings to the QuickSel l website smoothly as can be seen in the screenshot below. If you are signed up to export listings to the QuickSell website, you can mark those listings in the OMS online marketing screen . If a listing you've previously marked didn't export to the site, simply open up a property and go to the online marketing screen - click the save button and the listing should be available in +-10-30 minutes on the Quicksell website.

MyProperty searches now shows latest listings first

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The default search order of Property searches on the New MyProperty website have been changed to show the latest property listings first . This was done as a first step in an aim to improve the quality on the new website. Visitors still have the option to sort the results by price ascending or descending order. Listings loaded in the last 15 days will get an automatic 'Just Listed!' banner to further promote them in the search results, as can be seen in the following screenshot: Further updates to improve the quality of listings on the website may include but is not limited to: number of photos on a listing and property description & other features entered.

New MyProperty website is live

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We are proud to announce the launch of the New MyProperty website It is packed with new features including: iSearch : an advanced natural language property search, a first for South Africa Automatic maps on Property Details showing the area location of a property More streamlined design with advanced SEO techniques that will significantly up our visitor rate over the next few months Social network integration including facebook , twitter and more Property basket feature which allows visitors to save properties to a basket for later retrieval We have one or two surprises still to come including free mini websites for estate agents - watch this space for more info! With the new website more updates and refinement will be be done on a continuous basis. We are for instance working on a comprehensive map search facility .

New spellchecker on property features

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We have added a new integrated spellchecker on the property features screen. Simply press the spellchecker button and the system will check your property description. Errors are highlighted in yellow with suggestion words and the option to ignore or add to your dictionary. Every user in the OMS has their own custom dictionary - so words you add (e.g. your estate agency name) will only be used for you and no one else for future spellchecks. New copy, paste, undo and redo buttons are also included and the property descripion, items included and excluded have been moved to the right side of the screen.

Referrals & Operational areas updates

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Extra validation was inserted into the referral module - the system will now check that at least one contact number is entered before proceeding. The referral module is currently offered integrated into the OMS for our Enterprise clients. We've updated the opertional areas section under setup to allow for a all suburbs selection. This is usefull if you operate in all suburbs in a specific town. Operational areas are used in various parts of the OMS and client websites although it will mostly be used for future features in the OMS.

Improved news editor

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We have loaded a new news manager on the OMS. The changes are mostly with the editor control and image manager which makes it a bit easier and faster to load and format news items and attach, resize and crop images.

Corrected status change problem on inactive property listings

We've corrected a problem on the OMS where listing mandates changed from inactive to active (e.g. for sale or rental) didn't save correctly.

Now easier to mark properties for export to Private Property and FNB Quicksell

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If you are exporting your listings to Private Property or the FNB Quicksell website, you can now simply select a checkbox on the property listing to mark it for export. Open up the listing, click on the [online marketing] tab, select the corresponding checkbox and you're done! (You will off course need accounts with Private Property or Quicksell to export from the OMS)

OMS inline help

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A little feature we are working on between all the other important stuff is inline help features for the OMS. We've implemented it in the new property wizard screens so far. It allows direct help to the specific page or function you are viewing - no more browsing around in a help file trying to find the right answer to your problem.

New MyProperty website to launch with advanced property search

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We have implemented the advanced search function with multi-suburb selection and location map on our beta website: http://mpbeta2009.myproperty.co.za The mult-suburb function allows visitors to select more than one suburb to search on. This solves the limitation on the current website where you can only search one suburb at a time. The map will automatically update based on the country, town and suburb selection.

Updated OMS Property Wizard Capture

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An improved Property Wizard module has been loaded on the OMS. The wizard has been extended to 9 easy steps and the screens cleaned up for easier capturing. Improved validation on screens including better highlighting of required/problem fields with description of the validation failure: Show date information can now also be captured as one of the steps of the property wizard: Online marketing screen provides an overview of all the websites where your property listing is syndicated to. We've spent some time ensuring pages load faster and that the next/back navigation buttons work smoother . The update is one of several updates to follow over the next few weeks to improve property listing capture and editing processes.

New property details screen for agent/office websites up soon

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We are working on a new property details page for agent and office websites. This is a redesign with the following new major or updates to features: Better property features view through scroller bar on the description ; Bond calculator, currency exchange, email property icons / links ; Moved the additional property photos up to sit with the main photo ; Area map feature which will automatically show the area location of the property; There will be no setup or additional fee for existing clients except in cases for older sites where we have to do an extensive upgrade and a minimal upgrade fee may be applicable; New property details screen (sample only): Note: we've also corrected a small problem on the featured properties component available on websites where one of the featured properties did not display if certain characters were used in the property description.

MyProperty beta website up

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We have the new MyProperty South Africa beta website up and running at: http://mpbeta2009.myproperty.co.za The site will be launched soon pending some tweaks we are busy with. Our biggest new feature (appart from the much improved SEO) is the iSearch function where you can search in natural language e.g. Randburg houses with 3 beds under R1.5m or even search a couple of suburbs e.g. Lonehill Douglasdale Paulshof R1.8m Have a look at the content we generated for all areas e.g. on Krugersdorp : http://mpbeta2009.myproperty.co.za/suburb-results/property/for-sale-to-rent/2_south-africa/2_gauteng/103_KRUGERSDORP.aspx Property details have auto-generated area maps and there is plenty of RSS feeds available on agent and office portfolios, areas and news.