RealBird Blog

Introducing global settings for your Single Property Websites

We just launched the first version of the global settings tool for your RealBird single property websites

This is a long due feature and now with the first release , you will be able to do way more in way less time and you will be able to utilize advanced RealBird features easily.

Up till now you had to set up otherwise common features every time you created a new property website (other than your contact information set in the profile like your name, social media sites, blog, photo etc.) While these were actually small issues, we realized that when you manage dozens or even hundreds of active and sold listings on RealBird, these few seconds of extra time add up quickly. 

A good example was the very unique and powerful live chat feature that you could use to turn your RealBird property websites into virtual "open houses". Even those people who originally added this feature to their listings, eventually stopped doing it due to the extra time it took to set it up for each new listing.

Not any more, the global settings tool for the Listing Publisher now allows you to set these features once and all your new listings will default to these settings. You can of course apply these new settings to all of your existing listings as well.

Listing courtesy of Ashton Coleman. See it live here

What's included in the first version of the Global Settings utility?

1. You can add the Listing Broker info at once and all your new listings will default to this value. You can change it to something else listing by listing, in case you list somebody's else listing with their permission.
2. You can turn common features on and off for all of your listings, including Google Local Search, showing of your recent blog posts on the property sites etc.
3. You can create an additional page, one that is added to all of your listing websites. A good example is an "About Us" page that allows you to talk more about yourself, link to external resources like your website and even add your Facebook Real Estate Page to establish relationship with your visitors (tutorial)
4. You can add a live chat widget (Meebo, Plugoo) to your listing websites and you can turn those into virtual open houses, your clients will be able to chat with you live while on the website.

What's next?

In our next release of the global settings for listing websites, we will add a website theme customization option. As many of you know, you can customize RealBird listing websites with stunning background designs and make it look completely unique, beautiful and engaging. Right now, you have to do this one by one, with the next version, you will be able to create a global design theme for all of your listings rather than using our default theme and only customize individual listing designs if needed. 

We will announce these additional features as soon as they are launched. Until then, make sure to check out and use the new Settings feature on RealBird. It's a one time task and your existing and new listing websites will be so much more powerful tools for online marketing. 

Well, we hope you like it and that this new feature will make you even more productive. Should you have questions, just email or call.

Thanks

RealBird.com

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

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