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Showing posts from March, 2011

OMS Referral module – View enhancements

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We’ve enhanced the Referral module default view screen to be more user friendly and added one or two new features: 1. Sent and Received referrals are now visible in one view (previously a dropdown selection) and is colour coded to show you sent or received referrals. 2. Referral Statuses are now separated by tabs (new, open, etc). This makes it easier to view referrals based on status. The ‘All’ tab is a consolidated view which shows all referrals. 3. A ‘updated in the last’ view was added to filter for referrals updated in the last x months. Previously all referrals were shown. 4. The export function was changed to a dropdown list and we’ve added export to CSV as an option to the existing Microsoft Word & Excel exports. The Referral Module is available to Enterprise (National) clients as part of the OMS , or as a separate system .

Mobile search is growing….really fast! Do you have a mobile real estate website?

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Locally there are about 2 000 000 unique mobile searches performed each day, representing about 25% of the total search market. Incredibly, this number rises to 65% on the weekends. Mobile search is growing fast, with Google reporting that mobile queries are up 500% in 24 months and searches on Android are up 300% from last year. Info courtesy gottaQuirk Blog . If you don’t have a mobile site for your real estate agency or group, what are you waiting for? Order one of Entegral’s template mobile sites http://www.entegral.net/?c=products_websites – we’ve recently cut hosting and setup costs and is very quick to setup. If someone enters your website address in their phone, they will get routed automatically to your mobile website. You will also enjoy automatic updates of new features and tweaks we do .

MyProperty mobile enhancements

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We done a few upgrades on the MyProperty South Africa mobile website . You can now search for property by Ref number (thanks Caroline for the suggestion). It’s now also easier to select areas when using the drilldown search, and on the property details we have made a separate ‘contact agent’ button to allow for more text area input when making an enquiry. Still on the property details, we now also include the full property description . We’re also testing a new features ‘use my current location’ on the keyword search page, that will insert your current location into the text search area. This is only available for phones supporting it and is currently a beta feature (we will decide whether to keep it after some testing).

OMS audit trail view corrected

We have corrected a problem where organisational managers couldn’t view the audit trail for users in one of their offices. We’ve also enhanced the audit trail to record the action when user account settings are saved in the OMS.

The OMS is Internet Explorer 9 ready

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  Internet Explorer 9 represents a major improvement on the previous version 8. You will for instance notice a new cleaner look & feel , but also notice that there is a major speed improvement when browsing web pages. We can also confirm that the OMS works perfectly fine on Microsoft’s latest browser and if you’ve used IE 8 before, you should notice a speed improvement (e.g. opening properties or contacts will be faster. All key functions were tested including property capture, property quick search and brochures. If you find any problems we’ve missed in our testing please be so kind to report it to our Helpdesk. You can download IE9 here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ZA/internet-explorer/products/ie/home

Beware of buying external links for your real estate website

Google’s recent Farmer and Panda updates penalizes sites who duplicate content or have low quality links from external sites.  Until recently, this was a great strategy to improve (Google) search rankings, not any more. More detail info on the Google Panda update can be found here: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641987 Real Estate agencies should therefore be extremely careful of using these methods to promote search engine rankings. With the latest Google search algorithm updates this can lower your search rankings substantially and have a dramatic effect on your business bottom line. - Only link from good quality sites - Don’t use any form of bulk link updates to external sites - Don’t pay for links on external sites unless they are reputable sites

OMS referral module new referral types

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We have added 2 new referral types to the referrals module: 1. Tenant referral 2. Landlord referral The capture screens are similar to the existing buyer and seller referrals. We are currently tweaking the ‘view referrals’ screen, the update should become available in the next 48 hours. The OMS Referrals module is available to enterprise clients (national groups) or as a standalone web application for any real estate group.

OMS menu and field changes

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The top part of the OMS menu has been updated and the dashboard, briefcase and sign-out icons have been replaced with hyperlinks. The old icons were a bit confusing, especially for first time users: On all capture screens the edit field will now highlight in a light yellow colour when you are editing that field, which makes editing a bit easier:

Feed to jump.co.za temporary offline

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Our portal partner www.Jump.co.za have recently upgraded their website and busy re-importing data into their new website. The OMS property listing feed will be available soon. Update : Jump informed us the import has finished and property listings are now available again on the website.