The Good, Bad and Ugly MLS Photos

Visual marketing firm VHT recently started a series of blog posts showcasing some very poor MLS photos from around the country for a Wall of Shame, and also features some beautiful photography from their Wall of Fame.

Here’s a sample from the Wall of Shame:

Here’s a sample from the Wall of Fame:

PropertyPreviews users can learn a lot from observing these photos and incorporating both what not to do, and what to do when photographing a listing.   If you’re consistently coming up with results like these Wall of Shame candidates, hire a professional!  The cost of the service will be less than the damage to your professionalism.

So far there have been three editions, and here are links to them all:

First Edition |  Second Edition |  Third Edition

If you’ve any candidates for the Walls of Shame and Fame, let us know if the comments!

PropertyPreviews.com adds Enormo, Vast to Listings Distribution Set

We’ve been busy at PropertyPreviews, and we wanted to let you know you know can reach an even larger audience to promote your listings through our newest media partners, Enormo and Vast.   They join other media partners that include Google, YouTube, Zillow, Trulia, Condo.com, Oodle (which includes Walmart.com, Military.com, MySpace classified, and now Comcast Classifieds), Comcast Video On Demand, and others.

If your listing is in a market that may attract international buyers, Enormo may be a good option for you to promote your listing. Why? Enormo is the world’s largest international real estate website, displaying over 10 million listings (sale and rent) in more than 80 countries. Enormo currently has user traffic of 4.5 million visits a month from potential homebuyers, tenants and investors worldwide.

Vast.com is a free classified site, attracting millions of viewers to its classified sites. Your listings will also appear on Overstock.com, at no additional charge, when you use Vast.com.

We hope you’ll take advantage of these distribution options to help promote your listings.  To do so, get started here.

Good luck!

Why Aren’t Buyers Calling From My Video??

Because some of you make it very hard for buyers to do so!   You want prospective buyers to contact you after seeing your PropertyPreviews video, right? Make it easier for them by adding your telephone contact information in the Phone Book section of your profile.

We do NOT recommend ONLY putting it in the property details for a few reasons:

1.  Other Sites Can’t See It. When we syndicate listings to other sites, they want to display your telephone number(s) and if they are not in the Phone Book, it harder for prospects to find you. A blank will be where they expect your phone number.

2.  Potential MLS Issues. You may violate your local MLS rules by “branding” your listing with your name and or telephone number within the property details.  If you use the Phone Book, we automatically suppress information that may get you in trouble with your MLS.

3.   ePostcard Issues. Your PropertyPreviews ePostcard webpage won’t show your telephone number where buyers expect to see it, and that only hurts you and your sellers.   You drive traffic to this page, so have complete contact info on it for buyers to reach you.

Go ahead and update your Phone Book, and your ePostcard will be updated immediately, as will all sites that received the link to your ePostcard.   Other sites may take a day or two for the new data to be refreshed.  Going forward, all your new videos will have the correct information with no further action on your part.   You can always change, update or add telephone numbers to your Phone Book.

To take full advantage of your PropertyPreviews video, and the power of the marketing we can do for you, please use the Phone Book features in your profile to make it easier for prospects to contact you!

Getting your video on Realtor.com

You’ve created a video on PropertyPreviews.com.

You think it looks great.

You’ve posted it to the MLS and to your broker/agent website.

But have you gotten it in front of the largest trafficked real estate website in the US, Realtor.com?  You want people to SEE the video – that’s why you made it, isn’t it?

Realtor.com does not allow agents to directly post video links to their listings, but we can help you do that automatically.

When creating your listing, be sure to place your MLS ID number in the Property ID # in the LIstings Detail section (see below).  Without it, Realtor.com won’t know to what listing to attach your video.

After creating your video on PropertyPreviews.com, you can “Manage Media” for any listing from your home page.

Once there, you’ll see many options, but we’re talking about Realtor.com, so look for this:

You’ll note there are two prices, one for “Showcase” members, and one for “Non-Showcase” members.  Showcase membership with Realtor.com allows you to easily enhance your listings on Realtor.com with the features buyers want most with up to 25 jumbo photos, full motion videos, open house alerts, and most importantly – multiple leads forms so that buyers can contact you directly.  If you’re already a Showcase member, attaching your video is $5.95.  For non-Showcase members, the fee is $24.95 (because Realtor.com charges us more to post to a non-Showcase member’s listing).    We automatically check to see if you’re a member or not and charge you accordingly.   So just add it to your shopping cart, and you’ll be able to see your cost.   Either way, you’re video is now in front of a very large and active real estate buyers’ portal.

To learn more about Showcase membership on Realtor.com, click here.

Good luck!

iPhone/Android Versions of our blog

Do you use an iPhone, or one of the new Android-based phones?  We here at PP HQ are fans of these nifty devices, and are happy to let like-minded users of these phones in on a cool feature of this blog.   By bookmarking our blog page, when you visit our blog on your phone, you’ll automatically see something like what’s shown on the right.

No iTunes application store mess, just point and browse.

Kudos to our social media masters who got this going.   Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Whiz Bang! Great technology enhances video creation

We love that you love how easy PropertyPreviews.com is to create free real estate video.   There’s a way to make it even easier.   Perhaps you’ve seen references to Eye-Fi on our site, and paid it no attention.

For those of you who make frequent use of PropertyPreviews, and we know there’s a lot of you, this is something you may want to learn more about.

What if you could take pictures of a house, then stop at McDonalds for a bite to eat, and when you got home, all your photos were in your PropertyPreviews account waiting for you.   That’s right.  You NEVER connected your camera or memory card to your computer.   In fact, they’d also be waiting for you on your computer as well.   Sound impressive?  It is!  That’s what an Eye-Fi card does.  If you have a camera that uses an SD memory card, you can replace it with an Eye-Fi card, and all this magic can happen.

Here’s what’s happening.  The Eye-Fi card not only is a 2 GB memory card that stores your pictures, it’s also a wireless transmitter that will send your photos over the Internet to your computer and to PropertyPreviews, all via your pre-designated wireless network (like home or office network).   Some versions of the card come with one-year free Wayport Hot Spot access, which allows you to transmit at some public hot-spots, such as McDonalds.   Once configured, when you’re camera is on in range of one of these pre-selected networks, it automatically uploads photos.

I’ve personally used it, and there’s even more whiz-bang stuff, like geo-coding where the photo was taken.  That means, in addition to storing data like shutter speed, and date/time taken, it can also approximate the latitude and longitude of where it was taken.  This allows you to map the location of it on a map like Google Maps.   This feature is not available on all Eye-Fi models.

For those of you that like focusing your time on buyers, sellers and prospects, and not on labor-intensive marketing (hey, isn’t that why you use PropertyPreviews.com in the first place?), then consider adding an Eye-Fi card to your tool bag.   Once you try it, we think you’ll be as impressed as we are.  PropertyPreviews is proud to be the first real estate partner of Eye-Fi, and we think you’ll be excited when you learn what it can do.   Others think it’s impressive as well.  Eye-Fi has garnered numerous awards, including PC World’s “The 100 Best Products of 2008″ and Yahoo! Tech’s “Last Gadget Standing 2008.”

Learn more by clicking here.

If you’ve tried it, let us know by leaving a comment below.

New Media Partners

We’ve been working hard here at PropertyPreviews.com HQ to bring you more media partners for you to promote your listings, and we have some coming up soon we know you’ll appreciate.  Stay tuned for more details.

To know when these partners are added, you’re free to return to the blog, or you can join our Facebook group, our LinkedIn group, or subscribe to our RSS feed of blog posts, so the new information will get to you right away.   Click here to get started with any of these groups

Letter from Jeff Harris – General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com

Letter from Jeff Harris, General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com

Hello from PropertyPreviews.com Headquarters!

By now, thousands of real estate professionals have seen the many advantages of using our free online service.  I hope we’ve answered the one question on everyone’s mind, but just in case – PropertyPreviews is still a free video creation service, and will always be free!

I want  to share some updates that we’ve just launched on PropertyPreviews.com.  We’ve listened to your suggestions, and we’ve implemented several new upgrades to our site including:

•    The ability to create a new video by adding or deleting photos in the video
•    The ability to delete a listing/video if you no longer want this to appear on your dashboard
•    Enhancements to our photo upload tool – including a gauge that lets you know the quality of the photos you are loading
•    More options for property descriptions – to use in your ePostcard or for flyers and postcards you may want to order
•    Enhancements to our marketplace – including a new subscription-based Enhanced Listings product for ChicagoTribune.com – only $50/month for all of your listings

We’re also excited to announce the launch of our official PropertyPreviews Blog – a site dedicated to helping real estate professionals gain knowledge on anything from new technologies that can help sell properties to prominent market news.  We hope you’ll check it out.

I hope you’ve been following our progress so far.  Join our Facebook group or page to stay up-to-date on all PropertyPreviews news.  Or check out our BlogRoll for a complete list of our social media presence.

Feel free to contact me at jharris@propertypreviews.com.

Best,

Jeff  Harris

How To Measure and Improve Your Listing’s Visibility

Many of you love the distribution we offer, and we’re happy to make that available to you.    Are you measuring the results of these placements?   Did you know that PropertyPreviews.com provides you with free reports that show you how these placements are doing?

When you log in to PropertyPreviews, you’ll see a “Reports” tab at the top of the screen.

Click on it, and you can then view results of consumers who’ve viewed your ePostcards of all your active or inactive listings, you can sort by date, and you can even download these results to Excel (highlighted below) for further analysis or presentation to your seller in a marketing report.  The headings of the report are also highlighted in the illustration below.

What happens if you’re not getting the results you want? Consider Featured Listing distribution for your listings.   Many sites offer them, and are available to you in PropertyPreviews.com.   While many sites accept listings, when they are displayed, there are a variety of factors that determine where your listing will appear in the search results (and that means buyers may or may not find it).   To rise to the top of the search results, use Featured Listings.  These listings are prominently displayed at the top of the search results, leapfrogging all the others who chose not to pay for placement.   More precious buyers in this market will see your listing, and you’ll increase your chances of talking with them.   Isn’t that why you syndicate listings in the first place?

We know these cost a few more dollars, but these are measurable efforts.  If you try it and aren’t getting the response you need, you can stop featuring your listing on a given site.    Why bother?  Well, look at how you use search engines.    When you do a search, do you find what you need on page 1 or 2 of the search results, or do you go through pages and pages to find what you need?  Chances are you go with the top few results.   Wouldn’t it be great if your listings were at the top of a buyer’s search results?

Beat the odds and consider sprinkling in Featured Listings in your marketing plans.   We bet you’ll be glad you did.

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