RealBird Blog

How to embed Obeo virtual tours into RealBird single listing websites

The new Obeo virtual tours can be seamlessly embedded into the RealBird single property websites as the example shows below. Obeo did a great job upgrading their virtual tours, they are good looking with many different visual options.

See the live RealBird listing website below as an example:

Click on the "Virtual Tour" tab to see it in action.

More notable features on Michelle Young & Michelle Boulot's RealBird listing website :

1. Great use of the background image visual customization feature. Online visitors have a short attention span, especially when they arrive to a listing website through home searches on major portals. The background image in this case captures attention, makes the site stand out and as with previous examples, communicates one of the main characteristics and selling point of the property instantly ("exceptional view")
2. The embedded Plugoo chat enables visitors to chat live with the listing agent. Plugoo is one of our favorites. It is light-weight and connects to your existing IM client: GTalk, Y Messenger etc. No need to log into another service every day and your visitors can use the online widget without being on the same IM network as the agent is.
3. Altos Research market stats chart ("Market Stats") tab shows an upward trend in median price for the zip code. Great impulse for the visitor to consider making the call sooner than later.

This site is as close to perfect as it gets, in terms of utilizing and benefiting from the flexibility and many features RealBird has to offer of for listing presentation and promotion. Good job, Michelle & Michelle.

To embed your own Obeo virtual tours into your RealBird listing sites, copy the the following iframe code into the "Embedded media" section of the property website editor:

<iframe src="http://www.obeo.com/Public/Viewer/Default.aspx?ID=463882" style="border:0px" width="100%" height="600px" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Replace, the highlighted Obeo virtual tour ID with your own of course. It's that simple.

-- Zoltan Szendro
Create your own Single Property Websites on RealBird for free, in minutes

Eight-figure properties marketed through RealBird

Check out these recently posted 8-figure properties marketed through RealBird.

Single Family Home in Guilford, CT for $13,750,000
by Robert Scott

Single Family Home in Indian Creek Island, FL for $32,000,000
by Mott Marvin Kornicki

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com

Driving directions with Street View - makes sense

The Google Map's driving directions now includes Street View to aid your navigation. The concept makes a lot of sense. One of the hardest things in getting from A to B using regular flat maps and satellite photos is knowing all the tricky turns one may encounter and not having any visual reference while driving. Google now makes it easier to overcome some of these obstacles by providing detailed close-ups of your turns and surroundings through Street View.

Here are some issues I still see:

1. Coverage is still very limited to make Street View a standard for consumer navigation
2. I could not find any information on how often Google updates an already photographed area and how often they add new coverage. Out of date imagery might be a problem if one picks an obsolete visual reference.
3. While standard, "flat" driving directions can be printed and you can take those directions with you on the road (still the most common way of using online directions unless you have a GPS system in your car), the interactive Street View might be no help, once you leave your computer. You still have to memorize those reference points
   

What I'd like to see in terms of new features:

1. Access to this new feature through the API. One can develop similar custom application with the already available API, but it is unnecessarily complex. Google could just extend the current Directions API to make this implementation a no-brainer with their existing routing API. I guess they will, shortly.
2. GPS Navigation version. Again, I guess, this is already in the works, but having Street View available in car navigation systems can make a lot of sense. It is more of a user interface design challenge, than getting the data there. Current navigation systems are optimized for providing enough information while trying to keep the driver's eye on the road for most of the time. Showing Street View on the car's GPS screen can be very distractive, unless some smart UI is designed.
3. Mobile version. Once Street View hits the mobile devices, the biggest value I believe is in aiding navigation. Actually, while brainstorming with myself, I found, that probably the most useless IPhone application would be the one, which shows Google Street View at your current location on your IPhone. Rather than just looking around, you would stare at your IPhone screen to see what surrounds you. For aiding navigation on the other hand, with the proper user interface, Street View can be valuable on mobile devices as well. It could help you identify surroundings to help you decide whether you are on the right track to get from A to B
4. I still believe, that the most important technical addition to the current Street View technology would be to enable developers to add interaction and project media into the Flash component itself. Rather than just controlling the imagery, one could enhance it with additional information, just like you do with regular Google maps through the API.

In any case, just like we anticipated, Google is pushing Street View very  seriously and we can assume that a lot of new announcements will be coming on a regular basis.

See Google's introduction video below:

As many of you might have read it on our ActiveRain post, RealBird is featured on the Google Maps API blog (actually one of our clients RealBird listing website using Street View).

Make sure you see the chain of events which led to being featured on Google using the power of blogging.

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com

Browse among all the RealBird single property websites

In the on-going effort to add even more exposure to your listings advertised through RealBird, we have created a simple, but fast and easy-to-navigate website to browse among all the RealBird single listing websites.

It's a no thrill interface, but I really like the ease of use and fast navigation. See it for yourself

Link to http://listings.realbird.com if you dare so that search engines notice it faster.

There is much to do on this site, such as options for search, related neighborhood info, agent yellow pages, RSS feeds per locations etc., but I believe it is already a nice addition to the map-based search option we have been providing since last August.

Stay tuned for new distribution partners and new features to be announced soon: Subscribe to the blog feed

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com

Note: While this listing search interface has non-intrusive advertising on the top and bottom, your single property websites never do.

Give it up to Mike Lefebvre - the ActiveRain video contest winner

Great amateur video production and out-of-the box listing marketing using real estate video on YouTube. I would not be surprised if he continues producing more videos and creates a series of this for his future listings.

-- Zoltan
RealBird.com

Single property website marketing - offline

Imagine what your current and future sellers' reaction will be when you present them a stack of high-quality, beautiful business card size color prints with their property photo, property features and street address domain names on it. Now imagine that you have hundreds of these cards and you can leave them at business card boxes at Starbucks and other public places, at open homes, you can distribute them through your sellers or show these listing cards at listing interviews. Or you may drop off a few at the seller's neighbors. Listing cards are complimentary marketing tools to your standard letters-size listing flyers and while they serve the same purpose, listing cards can reach advertising hubs that a flyer size presentation can not. There is no way that you can leave large flyers laying around at local coffee shops and restaurants unless you have a permission or association with the owner, but you can easily leave listing cards around at different places without any disturbance.

Standard business cards are boring. Most likely, there are dozens of other agents advertising their general contact information and canned pitch at the same place and from the consumer perspective, they all look the same. When hiring an agent, besides the power of referrals, the most important thing a client will look at is what you can do for them. A listing card delivers this message immediately (at least in terms of listing marketing) while a standard business card with your name and contact info does not.

The benefits of using listing cards are the following:

1. They can get more buyer leads, because they can reach local advertising hubs (coffee shops, restaurants etc.) that standard larger flyers can not
2. They communicate your commitment of providing advanced listing marketing, hence increasing your chance of winning new listings
3. They also promote YOU, not just your current listings
4. They work even after you sold the property as they will keep bringing traffic to your sold single property websites which will present the new prospects all the magic you can do for them if they list with you.

Creating great looking listing cards is actually very easy, quick and cost effective:

• Create a single property website with RealBird - FREE - Time it takes: 10 minutes
• Get a street address domain through the RealBird Domain name store - $15 - Time it takes: 5 minutes
• Create a listing card - $19.99 for 100 cards (+- depending on the vendor) plus S&H - Time it takes to create: up to 15 minutes
• Distribution - FREE - Time it takes: up to you,  spread them during your regular routine visits with your sellers and to local shops and restaurants.

For less than $50 you have a stunning and effective marketing tool in your hand. Go and impress your sellers.

Our favorite providers are below, they have different offerings, so make sure you check all of them out:

Moo: Minicards and stickers with really cool card holders

Zazzle: Real US postal stamps with your listing photo, bumper stickers and more for more out of the box experience

VistaPrint: One of the biggest online printing outlet with more standard offerings, but with deep discount and free test prints

One more thing, make sure to keep a few of each listing card to yourself, so that over time, you can build up a portfolio you can show to new sellers.

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com

Thanks for the inspiration from Mirela Monte, Jannie Coffey and Tina Merritt, three very smart real estate professionals and expert marketers.

Two colorful ones from Florida

Two Mini Single Property Website Widget picks. Don't you just love the colors !

-- Zoltan
RealBird.com

Street View API released - 28 hours later we are online

Google finally released the Street View API  yesterday. It is pretty neat, although it came short of my expectation of allowing 3rd parties to add hotspots and flash media into the Panorama itself. Maybe with their next release. Nevertheless, the API is clean and powerful and even allows animation controlled from Javascript. We've been promoting Street Views embedding into single property websites and blogs for real estate estate neighborhood presentations, but from now on, the API eliminates the need for the manual tasks.

Hopefully, Google will speed up the addition of new cities. Through the new API implementation, new coverage will be automatically added to the RealBird listing websites, even if coverage is currently unavailable.

This is indeed a great, great feature for real estate. I bet, many new applications will pop-up now that the API is available. Check out the RealBird examples below to see how powerful this new neighborhood tool is when integrated into single property websites.

Denver, CO auction - check out the bargain alert also !

Boise, ID single family home

-- Zoltan Szendro

RealBird.com

Altos Research Market Intelligence

We had so many new features released with the RealBird Listing Publisher 3.0 that we did not have time and space to elaborate on each of them just yet. In upcoming posts, I will introduce the unique concepts behind many of them, including team marketing, new SEO features, virtual open homes and using viral marketing widgets in unusual ways. Let's start with one of our favorites: Altos Research charts  embedded in your single property websites. 

Through Altos Research powerful charts and reports your visitors can receive an instant and visually meaningful insight of the local market condition, right on your single property website, with an easy way to contact you for the full market intelligence report. It's a perfect mix of information transparency and lead capturing.

The core value of listing syndication is that you push your listing information a few click closer to online locations where the actual home buyers and sellers hang out. You reach out for them using technology, rather than sit back and wait for them to come on their own. It is proactive marketing at its best. The RealBird Listing Publisher - with the integrated MLS search and now with the embedded market intelligence charts - syndicates more than just your listing, it delivers your other real estate services and your value-adds to the edge of the Internet, using your current, active listing as a delivery mechanism.

This is such an important feature, that it certainly deserves a more detailed feature overview. Scott from Altos Research created the presentation below explaining the benefits of the integrated RealBird and Altos Research offerings and the feature set of their full subscription services.

As a special offer, they provide a 25% discount for RealBird members.

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com

Disclaimer: We receive referral commission from Altos Research if you buy their services through us. Having that disclosed, I strongly suggest that you consider their full offerings over the free charts embedded in your RealBird sites. I can't imagine any buyer or seller who would not be totally blown away with the market insight you can provide through your Altos Research services.

RealBird Listing Publisher 3.0 released

It's been a while since our previous major feature release of the RealBird Listing Publisher single property website and listing syndication service. We have been adding and improving features on-going, like support for the Google Street View widget and Microsoft Bird's Eye View, embedded slideshow and new default theme, and today, we have a major upgrade to announce with many unique and powerful presentation and marketing features. See below the list with examples.

Virtual open house - Live chat with your visitors

For the first time, you can use your single property websites as interactive presentation tools; effectively: virtual open houses. You can engage your visitors right on the spot, interactively, real-time, before they browse away to check out other listing websites. The new Listing Publisher provides you a way to add  3rd party chat widgets of your choice. Just like with the 3rd party video and slideshow support, we do not limit you to a particular provider, use one of our recommended services or add your favorite chat application. You can use Plugoo.com, Meebo, or Kyte.tv for audio and video chat, LivePerson.com for proactive chats or any other services you prefer. Many of these chat services also run on mobile devices so you will be able to participate in conversations even while you are on the go.

Tip: You can even provide live shows and market reviews using ustream.tv or similar services. Just like with syndicating the embedded RealBird MLS search tool, and getting additional real estate services one step closer to potential clients, you can  use the distributed single property websites to capture traffic for your live real estate shows. The options are pretty much endless.

I highly recommend to add the Plugoo.com chat widget to your RealBird sites, at least. With Plugoo, you can keep using your regular IM (Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo Messenger) to interact with your property websites' visitors, even from your mobile devices.

Example: Tina Merritt's listing : Popular Baylake Pines

Real-time market stats and lead capturing - powered by Altos Research

We met the guys at Altos Research more than a year ago, and we have been talking about integration ever since, but never got the time to actually do it. This time we pulled it off! For over 6,000  zip codes in the US we are now automatically include a "Market Stats" tab, a large, up-to-date median price chart for the zip code and a lead collector for your visitors to request more market research data. Within 1 hour of the release, one of our client received the first lead via this service. IT WORKS !  This is one of my favorite new features. New markets are added ongoing, so even if it is not yet available in your market, keep this feature on, we will include the charts automatically as soon as your market is available.

Example: Stunning Custom Home in Keller, Texas - www.705wickhamcourt.com

Mini Single Property Website widget to embed in sites and blog posts

The Mini Single Property Website is a new, powerful listing widget in your viral marketing toolset. If you like the original slideshow widget, you will love this one. Besides being nice and effective it has two major improvements. It is a viral widget: it provides you and your audience a way to quickly and easily grab and share it on social networks, social bookmarking sites and through email. The widget also maintains the visual theme of your single property website including the unique photo backdrop feature and custom color theme. No more boring widgets, spice it up as much as you wish. Stay tuned for new  RealBird viral marketing widgets coming soon. We are already working on some. See the current set of real estate widgets RealBird provides.

Example courtesy of Janie Coffey

Update: Embedded widget removed due to some bug with the Typepad blog hosting platform. Thanks for Rick at Phoenix Real Estate to point this out. We found the fix. the widget is back again below

See it in action on Janie's Horse Properties blog or see one embedded in this Philly real estate blog

What's nearby: powered by Google

This new feature turns your single property website into a local information hub. Your visitors can easily map any points of interest around your property with the built-in Google Local Search. Most importantly: schools and city amenities. Check it out on Bill Gassett's Medway, MA single property website. E.g. Enter "schools" in the text box on map and get instant nearby results.

Bargain alert - Notification if your list price is below Zillow's Zestimate®

The new Zillow API mashup will show a bargain alert on your site if your list price is below Zillow's Zestimate®. It is an automatic marketing pitch for grabbing the attention of the visitor, using the industry standard Zillow Zestimate® for emphasizing bargain pricing. If you property is priced above the Zestimate®, the feature becomes automatically hidden. We only use Zestimate® when it helps you with your online marketing efforts. This is an optional feature, you can turn it on and off, just like with most of the RealBird features, but I think this is an excellent tool as it merges the best of the features of RealBird and Zillow and only used when it benefits your marketing efforts.

Example: Highlands Ranch, CO listing  or Wonderful Ranch Home

Printable flyer with a twist - private labeled driving directions included

Many of you have been asking for it and now we have the solution: a printable version of your single property website. We also added an invaluable tool to it. You clients can print driving directions together with your flyer branded for you with your photo, logo and contact information. A new editor is provided in the member area which lets you configure the description and feature highlights. Having an optimized content for printing helps you create a flyer which prints pretty without changing the content on your full-featured property website and also helps you with search engine marketing by providing a second version indexed by search engines with related by slightly different content.

"Listing slug" - excuse us for the name, but this is powerful SEO

We borrowed the term from the Wordpress blogging platform, which uses "post slugs" for blog post Url customization. The concept is the following: having relevant keywords in the Url may increase search engine ranking. Having some variation between your property title's keywords (also important SEO content) and your Url keywords may increase ranking even more.  Besides helping you getting better ranking, this feature can also help you with better click-through rates once your property site is found by search engines.  Google and the other search engines also highlight keywords in the Url on the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) which increases click-through rate. By default we use your property website's title in the Url, but for even better keyword targeting, you can override the single property website's Url keywords with related, but slightly modified terms. This is an advanced feature. If it is confusing, you can just skip this feature. RealBird will generate this for you automatically using your listing's title. To access this feature, use the configure tab in the listing editor.

International distribution

Through our syndication partnership with DotHomes ( a UK company ), we are now bringing international exposure for your listings. This is an automatic syndication feature. Publish your listings on RealBird and they will be automatically distributed to DotHomes.com (They are in the final stage of the implementation so it may take a few more days from the date of this post to have your listings appear)

Tracking more details of the property website activity

For those of you who are crazy about web analytics, we added more tracking via Clicky's new Ajax tracking code. Please note that this feature is only available for Premium Clicky subscribers.

Private labeled real estate yellow pages

Last but not least, we have released our first service of a series of upcoming team marketing tools. The RealBird Private Labeled Yellow Pages lets you private label the RealBird real estate yellow pages portal at SearchOnMaps.com. See the example below. Enter a US city, zipcode or address and see the private labeled portal.

Benefits:

• Branding and lead generation
• Team marketing - the RealBird community markets each others' listings
• Backlinks to your site and blog from a portal with high PageRank
• Single property websites are co-branded also
• It's free

Example widget:

See it also on Katy Schaff's blog embedded in the right sidebar

If you like to be featured on this blog by showing one of these features on your own RealBird listing sites, just comment on this post with your RealBird link included or send us an email.

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com