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
Clicky - our favorite web analytics service - released an iPhone version earlier today. As you may know already, the RealBird Listing Publisher single property website builder and syndication platform integrates with Clicky allowing you to have a detailed view of how your property websites perform online. With this new release, you will be able to see your property website statistics using your iPhone (and iPod Touch). Even better, you can show it to your clients and at listing interviews for new sellers. Together with the iPhone support of RealBird, you are now able to demonstrate your listings and the web analytics information as well, without ever having to open and boot your laptop again.
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