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Showing posts from February, 2014

What is the ROI on your real estate agency's marketing spend?

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Article by: Adriaan Grove (CEO, Entegral) PROPERTY PORTALS – RISKING ALL TO BE NUMBER ONE? This is interesting... 50% of USA portal Zillow's operating expenses are sales & marketing related, yet they are making a net loss. Both Trulia and Zillow will spend close to R500m this year in advertising whilst competing for the same customers. That’s R1 billion!  Basically, their increase in marketing is outpacing their user and subscriber growth. They are trying to outdo each other in a highly competitive space, by pumping more money into advertising. Both are listed on the stock exchange, so they are driving the revenue numbers for investors. Do we have a similar situation in South Africa: where excessive amounts are spent by portals on advertising, which must be recovered (from estate agents) over the long term?   SOUTH AFRICA – A SMALL SPACE TO COMPETE IN The EAAB lists about 40,000 agents and 10,000 registered agencies - of course the active agents and agencies are far less.

Brand new mobi sites launched for Entegral Clients

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Keeping it simple always seems to be the best way to go about when developing something new, or in this case, giving a feature a revamp. There's no doubt, especially in South Africa, that mobile is one major player in the online environment and you are most definitely losing out if you do not make some kind of effort to put a user friendly platform out there to target or reach your audience on a mobile device. We've had a mobile website for www.myproperty.co.za for quite some time and to be honest did not pay too much attention to it as this was not the main source of our traffic.  Keeping an eye on our stats for devices accessing our sites we realised more and more everyday that the curve on the graph grew exponentially for mobile devices compared to normal PC's. Hence, a new mobi site was launched. It was designed and developed in such a way that we could use this same framework and template for our clients too.        From left to right  www.rethav

Updates 24 Feb 2014: expired listings search & agent transfers

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Searching for expired rental listings in the OMS advanced search We corrected a problem where not all rental expired listings showed in the search results for the advanced search in the OMS: Technical: the problem was caused by a recent update to the OMS advanced search functionality and only applicable to rental listings that expired. The OMS allows you to save all your historic data including rented, expired, inactive and sold property listing stock. This allows you to look-up the property at a later stage and re-enable it to for sale, rental or auction status. There is no limit on the number of inactive/expired/sold stock an office can have, and won’t affect the speed of the system.   Agent transfers between offices Transfer of agents between offices (a function available to groups) have been tweaked and will now correctly handle the updates to external portals to reflect the agent’s new office. Any listings assigned to that agent will also be transferred automatically. The p

Online marketing update for organisation administrators

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User with organisation administrator access (head office for a group of offices) will now be able to see the correct statuses and external listing reference numbers if they open any of their group’s office listings: The OMS makes it easy to manage data across an organisation with multiple offices. Organisation admin users can create offices, modify agents and pull various reports. They also get access to listing and portal syndication data as shown above. Organisation admin users can manage a central document library for all offices and control lead source lists that all agents can use.

Manage companies in the OMS

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You can now access a company section in the OMS under Contacts / View Companies. Here you can capture companies like bond originators, attorneys and suppliers for your office. You can manage your own list of companies, share with the office or your group of offices depending on your OMS access level. This allows groups to for instance set up a list of shared attorney contacts that everyone can access and use. Companies (including banks, attorneys, bond originators and external agencies) will be used in the new sales tracking functionality.

Choose which listings you want to send to Property 24

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Just launched in the OMS, an improved interface which allows you to choose which properties you want to send to Property24. Uncheck or check the property24 checkbox on the online marketing page of listings and press save, and we'll update your listing within 15 minutes. Watch this space for more partner portals launching this year, or have a look at the list of our local and international partner portals: http://www.entegral.net/content/p179_products-property-portals.aspx

Celebrating 3 years in the cloud

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Just over 3 years ago, Entegral was the 1st real estate technology service provider in Africa to move all of its products over to the cloud. It all began 4 years ago, when we researched and tested various cloud platforms available. We made a decision on Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) and switched over all our products in the course of 6-12 months to take full benefit of the unique cloud features offered. Our property portal, MyProperty , was our first product to switch over in January 2011. Stressful it was, at that stage cloud platforms were still in its infancy and we took a calculated risk with our business. Either that, or being boxed in by local service providers who couldn’t offer the amazing cloud features we wanted. Our monthly bandwidth costs also increased at alarming rates due to huge traffic. In the end, partnering with Amazon paid off, as can be seen in this 2013 magic quadrant from Gartner comparing the top cloud IaaS providers: It didn’t go all smoothly, we had

Updates: PI reports, performance reports, disable agent function

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  Property Intelligence (PI) Reports We corrected a problem where the municipality wasn’t showing in the dropdown: Disable users A problem was corrected where the new disable user function didn’t remove agents from national websites. Performance reports We corrected a listing count discrepancy that showed for a few users on the listing breakdown reports:

3 factors that influences an estate agent’s online reputation

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Running MyProperty South Africa and Namibia, we get regular feedback from visitors on site experience which includes problems like: not being able to reach an agent or being told that the property they are interested in, is no longer available. Based on this feedback and years of experience working in the real estate industry with some of SA’s and Namibia’s top agencies, we’ve narrowed down 3 factors that influences an estate agent’s online reputation: 1) YOUR RESPONSE TIME Research have shown that companies that contacted potential customers within an hour of receiving an enquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as compared to those that contacted the prospect even an hour later - and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer (Harvard Business Review). Not being able to respond ASAP on a potential enquiry can therefore cost you a valuable lead and hurt your reputation as an agent that can respond quickly. 2) OLD LISTINGS Another