RealBird Blog

How to add a full-screen slideshow of your listing inventory to your smartphone

Did you know? Both the new RealBird Inventory Map and the new RealBird Gallery widgets are now fully mobile friendly. You can use both as an embedded widget on your website or real estate blog, but you can also use them on your smartphone and tablet for listing presentations.

Here are the simple steps to bookmark your own RealBird Gallery widget on your smartphone: 

1. Log into your RealBird member area
2. Assuming you have published listings already, click "Listing Marketing" on the top navigation
3. Then click the "Widgets" subnavigation link
4. Then select "Listing Gallery" from the available inventory widget options
5. Select the option to create a link for active, pending or sold listings (or any combination of these)
6. You can also configure the width and height of the gallery widget on this page, which applies only to the embed code. For the purpose of this example, just leave it as is, because we are going to use this inventory slideshow in full screen and these options will be ignored anyways
7. You also have an option to add your RealBird Featured Listings Map widget as the last item in the gallery
8. Once the options are set, click the "Preview and Get Code" button and you will be provided with the permalink for your inventory slideshow. 
9. Email this link to your phone, load it into your mobile browser and bookmark it onto your homescreen.

It's that simple. Now you have your listing inventory at your fingertips: just pull out your smartphone, load the gallery via the bookmark and you are ready to impress your prospective sellers at listing presentations. The gallery is automatically updated when you make changes to your listings in RealBird.

We hope you like it. More to come...

-- The RealBird Team
www.realbird.com 

New Property Slideshow Widget Launched

We just updated the RealBird single property slideshow widget: Instead of the legacy Flash player, the new version is now using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to automatically create a beautiful slideshow for your listings on RealBird. It is now compatible with Apple's iOS and with most modern smartphones and desktop browsers as well, including the old but still in use IE7. See a few examples below:

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

How to get yours:

The existing "Slideshow" link on the Listing Management page will bring up the new slideshow code generator. Similar to RealBird's Craigslist embed code generator, it lets you set some options and preview and generate the code for as many versions as you wish. For this particular RealBird widget, the width and the height are the customizable options currently.

We suggest to use the maximum width of 800px and maximum height of 600px and do not create smaller slideshow than 300/300 pixels. But again, you can preview your settings before you post your slideshow code on your sites, so go ahead, log into RealBird and generate the code which fits your requirements. Here is an example screen of the RealBird slideshow editor:

Here are few things to remember :

• Your slideshow widget is cached for 5 minutes for performance reasons. In other words, it may take up to 5 minutes for your changes in RealBird to appear on the slideshow.
• You can upload unlimited photos for your listings on RealBird, but the slideshow widget rotates the top 30 photos only - again, for performance reasons. 
• Works in most major browsers including the still in-use, but really old version of IE 7 and 8. The slideshow should work identically in the rest of the browsers as well including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE 9 and also on modern smartphones.

These slideshow widgets are automatically generated for your properties in RealBird. Just simply publish your listing as usual and the ever growing visualization goodies are instantly generated for you.

Enjoy !

-- The RealBird Team
http://www.realbird.com 

Meet the winner of the recent RealBird iPad giveaway: Marie Episale

The recent RealBird iPad sweepstake ended on May 31 and the winner is Marie Episale of CENTURY 21 Crest Real Estate in Pompton Plains, NJ.

We are currently processing the gift and we'll post the picture of Marie holding the iPad once she receives it, as we did before with previous winners.

Congratulation Marie !

--o--

 

As a reminder, your RealBird reward points do not expire ! So even if you did not win this time, the more real estate colleagues you refer, the more reward points you'll get. Every point is one entry in the upcoming RealBird sweepstakes. Here are the different ways of getting more RealBird points:

• Login to your RealBird member area
• On the Rewards page, use the social sharing buttons and the email form to share your special RealBird invite link. When new members sign up with RealBird, your referral ID will be registered and the reward point awarded to you.
• Each new member is 1 new reward point (free or PRO members as well)
• Each new member who later upgrades to RealBird PRO gets you 10 extra points
• Submit a RealBird testimonial (about how RealBird helps your business) and when approved and posted on our site, additional 10 points will be awarded to you

Thanks again everybody for participating in the sweepstake

Stay tuned for the new RealBird sweepstake to be announced soon.

-- The RealBird Team
www.realbird.com 

Win an iPad ! The new RealBird sweepstakes starts now

We just reached a great milestone with the 150,000th listing published on RealBird a few days ago. Since then, close to 1,000 more properties have been added ! To celebrate this milestone and also because we love giving away popular gadgets (and the referrals we get in exchange :) we just announced our brand new RealBird sweepstakes.

Here are the sweepstakes rules:

• Prize: the brand new Apple iPad (16GB model, a $499 value !)
• Drawing date: May 31, 2012
• No purchase necessary
• You have to be a real estate professional in the USA, Canada or the UK
• You have to be a member of RealBird (free or PRO)
• Each RealBird Reward Point counts as a distinct entry, the more points you collect, the more chances you have to win
• All existing Reward Points that you may have collected in the past count as well

How to get RealBird Reward Points?

 

We also improved the Reward Program so that you can increase your chance to win:

• You get 1 point for each new RealBird member
• You get 10 points for each referred RealBird member who upgrades to PRO (e.g. 5 PRO referrals equals to 50 extra points)
• You get 10 points if you submit a RealBird testimonial

You can start inviting your colleagues from the RealBird Member area by following this link (login required)

 

Should you want to post a RealBird Success Story, you can do it quickly in the member area, on the "Profile" >> "Your testimonial" page (login required). Your testimonial will appear on the RealBird's public site with links back to your real estate website and your RealBird single property websites. You can see some of the current testimonials here

Meet some of the previous sweepstakes' winners:

Amazon Kindle Fire - Nov 15, 2011

Winner: Roberta Murphy of SanDiegoPreviews.com

Here is Roberta's post about it

Previous iPad version   - Nov 15, 2010

Winner: Charita Cadenhead of Birmingham, AL

She even made a video for us after receiving the iPad !

Previous iPad version  - April, 2010

Winner: Michael Layton from Palm Springs, CA

---

To get started and to enter the current sweepstakes, just log into RealBird and use the Rewards page to invite your real estate colleagues. 

Thanks for participating and for using RealBird. 

Good Luck !

-- The RealBird Team
www.RealBird.com 

Big numbers: 1,007 mobile real estate sites in 2 weeks and over 100,000 property websites since the beginning

Just in two weeks, over 1,000 mobile real estate websites were created on RealBird. That's more than amazing. Thank you all for making this happen !

In the meantime, another milestone has been reached. Actually it was passed without us noticing it a few days ago. We are pleased to announce that the the 100,000th RealBird single property website was created on March 13, 2011 6:24AM. The current count is now at 102,478. It's been growing fast ever since. This count includes both US and Canadian listings.

Over the weekend, we also launched a new feature for the mobile real estate websites. Besides your active properties, your mobile website now shows your pending and sold listings as well. If you had an active listing published via RealBird which is now pending sale or was sold recently, you can change its status through the Edit page. It only takes a few clicks. It will  not only show up on your mobile site under the Pending or Sold category, but doing so will also imrpove your SEO: by maintaining that page for longer period of time and via the cross promotion with your listings that are currently on the market. 

Stay tuned, more updates are on their way...

Thanks again for all of the RealBird members who made this happen.

-- The RealBird Team
www.RealBird.com