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Showing posts from September, 2013

OMS Small bug fixes including Notes, Files, Performance Reports

We’ve squashed a couple of small bugs in the OMS, this includes: 1) Deleting links from the property files & links section sometimes threw an error. 2) Adding notes on a new contact and then immediately opening up another contact shows the 1st contact’s notes (this was just served from memory so all notes were saved correctly). 3) Performance reports per agent for national groups. This sometimes didn’t display statistics for all agents. 4) Update agency logos in setup: This is now limited to office administrators and manager user roles. 5) Office members editing for national groups: fixed an issue where members where sometimes duplicated in the view.

New: setup sales tracking templates in the OMS

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As mentioned in our previous blog post , new sales tracking functionality is currently being rolled out in the OMS and today the sales tracking template configuration is made available. PROVIDING A HIGHLY FLEXIBLE TRACKING SYSTEM A flexible tracking, reporting and collaboration system is critical to provide a smooth and stress free property buying & selling experience and keeping everyone involved in the property transfer process up to date. We realize that every agency or franchise group operate differently and need to define and optimize their own processes related to the sale of a property. If you have admin access to the OMS, you can now configure and play around with the new sales tracking templates and provide feedback. New commission tracking, offer to purchase capturing and tracking reports will also be rolled out. Access the template setup in the OMS at: Setup / My Office / Sales Settings. TRACK OFFER TO PURCHASES WITH VARIOUS TEMPLATES You can configure multipl

Reinvent sales tracking for your office – join us on this journey!

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We've reinvented property search with the New MyProperty . Our next task? Reinvent sales tracking for the real estate industry and your office. Here is a unique opportunity to provide feedback as we gradually roll out the newly developed sales tracking functionality in the OMS . We'd love to get your input to ensure this adds as much value as possible to your agency or group. Watch this blog space and our Facebook page for updates to follow where you can then comment and provide suggestions. And if you have any thoughts right now on sales tracking, you are welcome to email us on solutions@entegral.net

Overview of the auto listing expiry, notifications & reports in the OMS

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How does the auto-expiry work? The OMS automatically checks listings about to expire every day and notifies you through the Live Inbox. If you are the listing agent you will receive an alert 1 week before the listing expiry date. Office Managers/Administrators can also view mandates about to expire for the whole office. Simply click on the notification to open the listing, or click on the checkbox to action it as ‘read’. When the mandate expiry date is reached it will auto-expire the listing and remove it from websites: The expired property is still accessible from the advanced search menu and if you sign a new mandate you can easily re-enable it. There is also the expired listings reports in the ‘Quick Search’ on the OMS you can use to view expired stock for individual agents or the whole office: Under the stock reports you can also draw PDF style expired stock reports and define how you want to group and sort the report:

Share files on any property listing, with anyone

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Following on the new OMS document library file sharing , you can now also share files attached to any of your property listings with anyone. Simply open a listing’s files & links, click on a file and hit the ‘ share’ button: Now add any other files if you want and click on the link to go to the sharing screen. From here you can select how long those links should be available for download. Simply copy and paste to your email, or use the ‘show direct links’ to copy and paste links to an instant messenger program like Skype: The time limit feature allows you to share files only for a selected time frame you set, ensuring those sometimes confidential files you share don’t live in cyberspace forever. Once the time has elapsed anyone trying to download that file will get an ‘access denied’ error. This feature is quite useful if you want to share internal files associated with a property with clients e.g. buyer, seller or attorney. Sending files the standard way through e

Share files with anyone, with the new OMS document library enhancements

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Now you can share files from your OMS personal or office document library publicly anytime, anywhere, with anyone, they don’t even need to have an OMS account. Simply go into a folder, select a file (or multi-select multiple files with the ctrl key), right-click and select the new ‘Share File(s)’ option as shown below: You will be taken to the next screen where you can select how long you want to share those files including 1 hour, 1 day or 7 days options. This security feature allows you to safely share files with selected people for a certain time period only. Once the time has elapsed, the links you’ve shared will no longer be available to download. The file links can be copied and inserted anywhere you like including email or shared direct in for instance an instant messenger application like Skype. For this you can click on the ‘show direct links’ link if you want to send someone the direct file link. The new sharing function allows you to easily share selected large

Separate Flatlet and Pets Allowed fields pulled through to MyProperty

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The Separate Flatlet and Pets Allowed fields captured on the OMS Property Details screen will now pull through to MyProperty . This will work for new property listings loaded today or listings being updated.

Private Property interface – rentals update

We’ve updated the rental interface to Private Property where rental listings will now delete correctly from Private Property if it is deleted on the OMS. Capture once, list everywhere Entegral interfaces to all the major property portals in South Africa and Namibia including free and paid partner portals: http://www.entegral.net/content/p179_products-property-portals.aspx We are currently negotiating a free interface to a new partner property portal for possible launch in October. We will keep you updated and make an announcement closer to the time.

MyProperty featured properties tweaks

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We’ve lowered the minimum price for featured properties on the MyProperty home page to R1.5M while the rental section has no minimum monthly price limit set. We try to filter for only good quality listing here, so make sure you load high quality photos and descent property description and details. We are also updating these featured property listing more frequently now. If you have a unique property you would like to suggest featuring on our Facebook page (already liked by over 22,000 people) please let us know by dropping an email to our editor at news@myproperty.co.za

The New MyProperty POI search, the technical challenges we faced

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The new MyProperty has a unique Point of Interest search facility as demonstrated in the video below (or just try the property search yourself with this link ). We wanted to reinvent property search and make it easier to find your next home by simply typing in anything close to the area you are interested in: This was quite a tough technical challenge to solve. A visitor can search any suburb, road or place (as indicated by the search heading) and we had to find both geocoded and non-geocoded properties in that area. At the same time the embedded Google map will show the location after it is selected and in many cases even highlight the area, e.g. Hermanus below: The challenge, how do you ensure fast searches? Property portals (and other websites where any type of search is done and visitor traffic is significant high) would normally cache search results and serve up the same content from the web servers’ memory for everyone for time periods, rather than querying the datab

Improved news articles editing with thumbnails

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We’ve improved the layout of articles editing in the OMS with key fields including title and summary in one tab, and the content in another tab. A new thumbnail feature was also added that allows you to upload a thumbnail image to your news articles as shown below. The system will automatically resize your photo. Thumbnails can be integrated on news articles for websites hosted by Entegral. It is free of charge for template websites while custom websites will carry a small upgrade fee. Here is a sample of how this thumbnail feature looks on MyProperty’s featured property news articles: