New Update Sticker for iProperty Products

New iProperty Real Estate Portal – property details page

The property details pages on our new real estate portal provide a balance between an open, clean look and logically placed tools to assist visitors with their property research.

We placed a focus on the media area, and turned it into a tabbed, multifunction area that may well be most important place to a first time looker – they can quickly assess with a glance at the price, then images, videos and location whether it’s the right property.

Real Estate portal, property search listing details page

The tabs in the media area allow visitors to look at the image gallery slideshow, with built in features accommodating a larger, popup view – as well as videos/vr tours, map, streetview and walkscore. Presenting information in this way does away with small maps, boxes with maps, walkscore and other funky buttons scattered around a long page that requires a lot of scrolling.

Instead, it’s broken down into just a few core areas:

  • Property Tools (favourites / comparisons / calculators / social sharing)
  • Media with images, maps and videos
  • Summary information – price, rooms, key features
  • Long description
  • Agent contact information.

Seeing as iProperty isn’t cluttered with advertising banners in every spare mm of space on the page, it makes for a pleasant browsing experience. We welcome your feedback and thoughts on the new site – fire away, we will be constantly improving this site over time.

There’s some other features on this page that we’ll be covering in some upcoming posts.

New Website Sticker for iProperty Products

Property in Demand, an investment property site with membership feature

Another website developed recently by iProperty, Property in Demand’s new site focusses on investment property and features a membership facility to access the very latest hot properties in their portfolio.

Powered by iDashboard, the real estate listings are simply tagged as private if they are for members only – and 2 levels of preview are offered on the site.

Every time a member signs up, they are automatically placed in their iDashboard contact database for marketing purposes.

Property in Demand’s website features a scrolling preview grid of properties on the homepage for visual impact – paired with the functional benefit of being able to refine the listings displayed and hover over items for more detail.

Real estate website design by iProperty

New Website Sticker for iProperty Products

McDonald Real Estate website

McDonald Real Estate’s new wordpress powered website takes the core features of our package with various customisations adopting it to their requirements.

We worked on a custom design for their homepage, including a featured article slider to promote their news and core messaging with large images and a link to unabridged articles. We incorporate our powerful search and featured property viewer, and large graphic links to find an office, sign up for property alerts and view the McDonald TV feature (that we’ve covered in this McDonald TV article).

McDonald RE’s site is a multi-office site, with data being fed to it from multiple iDashboard accounts. It even accomodates a feed from another data supplier for one of the offices.

Agency staff are sorted by office tabs, and are managed from within the iDashboard system as far as how they are ordered on the page (drag and drop ordering), their bios, images, and testimonials. We can also control, for individual staff, whether they appear or not, whether there’s a link to rentals, properties for sale, or no properties at all. It is all really flexible – with the power of wordpress, our advanced wordpress plugins and templates and matched with iDashboard we can pretty much achieve anything your agency needs.

New Update Sticker for iProperty Products

New iProperty Real Estate Portal – search results

iProperty’s new real estate portal features a search results page that can easily be adjusted to suit the user. With Grid, List and Map views, there is plenty of scope to suit any visitor’s preference searching for properties with eye-catching and easy to read layouts. All modes have a common, left hand refine search box that is used to limit the amount of properties displayed and hone in on the most relevant homes.

Whenever a visitor leaves the site, the last selected viewing mode is stored, and set as the default view for the next visit. Sharing a similar philosophy to the homepage functionality, iProperty’s portal remembers how you like it and keeps it that way!

The map view shows a summary of all properties underneath the map in the familiar grid format – and when you mouse over any of them, the Google Map refocuses on the property and shows its location.

Lastly, underneath the Refine Search box is the Property Tools area. Each button expands on click, and displays any saved searches, favourite properties, comparison properties and inspections to view.

 

New Update Sticker for iProperty Products

New iProperty Real Estate Portal – my properties

Continuing on from our first post announcing the launch of the iProperty Portal and covering the homepage search facility, we’re now going to go through the My Properties section at the bottom of the homepage.

When you first open up iProperty, you’ll see a preview of six Prestige Properties being cycled through an animated view finder. When you click the 3 other tabs to its right, you’ll see a courtesy message notifying you that these areas – Favourite Properties, Comparisons Properties and Inspections – come to life after you’ve interacted with the site a little.

Additionally,  after a little interaction within the site you’ll notice the Prestige Properties tab changes.

As soon as you’ve performed or saved a search, bookmarked a property as  a favourite or selected any properties for comparison (from the Search Results and Property details pages), the Prestige Property tab changes to Property Matches whenever you return to the site. For example, if you’ve been looking for property in Pascoe Vale, Victoria – the Property Matches view shows the latest properties from Pascoe Vale, ordered by relevance if you’ve entered in price range, bedrooms, bathrooms and other attributes.

This means on the homepage, on your return visit you are greeted with  a featured property display with properties that are likely to be relevant to you – rather than some expensive, random properties that simply have lovely photographs!

We wanted to make the homepage as functional as possible for any user’s return visit. The My Properties box is also used as a storage area for properties that have been selected as being of interest by anyone researching their next real estate purchase. It’s quite simple, any property you select as a Comparison Property, Favourite Property or add to your Inspection list appear on the homepage for your review at a later date – using the same tabbed slideshow. Having this toolbox in an easy to use, visual form on the homepage makes property research a breeze.

If a visitor wants to quickly go over the details of a favourite property, or double check the inspection time of a property – all they have to do is select a tab on this useful homepage area. In our next blog post, you’ll see how this functionality is echoed in the search results pages.

 

New Update Sticker for iDashboard Products

Enhanced portal support

Following on from our major update earlier this year, we’re now beginning the process of implementing the full feature set of external websites into our system.

The first group of portals we’re tackling will have 50 new items of information sent across, improving your listing performance on the following websites:

  • realestate.com.au
  • abcrealestate.com.au
  • allhomes.com.au
  • homehound.com.au
  • homesales.com.au
  • millionplus.com.au
  • myhome.com.au
  • onthehouse.com.au
  • realestateontheweb.com.au
  • reiq.com.au
  • rent.com.au

What this does is allow you to leverage the smarter searching capabilities of the major sites, such as realestate.com.au. Potential buyers can search by features such as in the screen shot to the right, and your listings will be matched appropriately.

As we don’t want to flood these portals with too many updates, we will be progressively pushing out these updates for all current listings over the next couple of weeks.

Read more about how we send your listings to other websites:

Ready to take your agency to the next level? Contact Us now!

New Update Sticker for iProperty Products

New iProperty Real Estate Portal – homepage search

iProperty is proud to announce the release of it’s new real estate portal.

Take a look at www.iproperty.com.au. In the coming weeks we’ll walk you through small sections of the site and introduce some of it’s new features.

We’ll kick it off today with a quick run-through of the homepage search.

Australian real estate portal - properties for sale and rent

First of all, you’ll be hard pressed not noticing the design change! We’ve gone for a vibrant feel while keeping the overall interface simple to work with. We’ve run with Residential, Rural, Commercial, and Development property tabs at the top that are in line with the playful header brand graphic that helps reinforce what the portal’s about.

The searching doesn’t come any simpler. The buttons and fields highlighted in the light colour are all you need to get started – starting with the basic Buy / Rent controls, suburb and price range. From there, you can refine what you’re after with the dark green options box to the right. This is where you can choose what property type to search for (Houses, Apartments etc), and limit the number of Bedrooms, Bathrooms and Car Spaces returned in your search.

Beneath this is our convenient save search feature. After you’ve entered in a standard search you’d like to reuse – simply click this button and give your search a name. Once you’ve done so, you’ll instantly noticed the large “Search” button has been reduced to also accommodate a “Use Saved Search” button. Clicking this brings up a list of all saved searches you’ve stored earlier. Try it out, it’s really easy to use. We’re keen to hear your feedback, feel free to post your comments on it here.

We’ve also got an email alert system in development,  we’ll cover that as soon as it’s released.

For now, we hope you enjoy the new iProperty portal – and stay tuned for a series of posts that covers the rest of the functionality. Coming next, the handy “My Properties” section on the homepage.

New Feature Sticker for iDashboard Products

Easier Mail Merging

The latest release of our agency management system, iDashboard, now features the ability to insert mail merge fields directly into your email using a new popup.

When you’re composing an email, simply click on the Mail Merge icon, and select the field you’d like to insert.

We’ve made the full range of merge fields for a contact available in your emails, so you can fully customise your bulk emails to each recipient with just a few clicks of the mouse.

When iDashboard sends your email, all your merge fields are automatically filled in for each mail recipient. We’ll also make a note against the recipient in our CRM so you know when and what was sent to them.

You can find out more information about our emailing and merge system here:

Need a more powerful agency management system for your agency? Contact Us now, and start marketing like an expert!

New Feature Sticker for iDashboard Products

Smarter Searching inside iDashboard

As part of our continual efforts to build the best agency management system possible, we’re now providing the ability to search through all our listings for specific features in iDashboard.

To use this new ability, simply type in what you’re after in the search box of our Real Estate area within iDashboard. For example, a potential client calls up and requests properties which have both a pool and a basement. Simply type in “pool basement” into our search box and we’ll show all the properties with both of these features!

Even better, you can do the same thing when sending emails, or when generating reports. Simply click on the icon to choose your properties, type in your features, and then click on “Add All”. Instantly all your properties with pools and basements are in your email, ready to send to your new client.

It couldn’t be easier!

Read more about what you can do with listings in iDashboard:

Need a more powerful agency management system for your agency? Contact Us now, and start take control of your area!

New Website Sticker for iProperty Products

New Procorp site – with property listings, house & land packages, home designs & more

Another of iProperty’s latest efforts is the new Procorp site. 

We started out by discussing their requirements and in doing so formed a new strategy to simplify their web presence.

Previously, we’d run all of the sites for Procorps different arms (Design, Builders, and Real Estate) as separate entities. To reduce this complexity, we figured out a way to run them together as a whole and utilise our iDashboard agency management platform to power all of the data fed to  it. With different offices each running of 1 of 4 iDashboard accounts, they can each upload content, photos and floorplans for House Designs, House and Land packages, real estate listings as well as managing staff that appear on the sites grouped into different office tabs.

Using the WordPress platform, we also incorporated areas Procorp can manage and update themselves, providing a finance blog area for the finance team, a large home page featured content area and general news items. We worked together with Procorp and while we designed and built the general layout – the end result is a culmination of design elements, workflow and navigation ideas from both parties.

Check it out at www.procorp.com.au! Great working with you Janelle!

New Website Sticker for iProperty Products

Inline Media Biz – new marketing and membership website

A while back we launched a new marketing and membership content website for Inline Media Biz. We’ve been working with the team at Inline Media for around 18 months now and so far have been their solutions provider for some of their web-based social media offerings.

Early on, iProperty built Social Media Hub – a Ruby on Rails application designed to interact with key social sites. Used by the Inline Media team, Social Media hub allows administrators to create new members, insert profile information, photos and usernames for their members’ Social Media accounts. In addition, they can tweet, write blog posts, upload FlickR photos, see analytics and watch YouTube videos. Social Media hub feeds all of the sites and exported all of the posts into the Agent’s blog sites.

For Inline Media, Social Media hub presently powers around 40 blogs and social profiles for real estate agents. We built the blog sites to suit, with built in anayltics, adjustable title tags for SEO, various blogging categories, a profile page and a hookup to our iDashboard Real Estate software – allowing current property listings and featured property listings to be inserted into the blog. In addition, YouTube videos are streamed into the blog, as are FlickR photos, and the Agent’s latest efforts on Twitter.

Mid year, InlineMedia approached us for a way to help market their offerings and provided an area for blog content, videos and file downloads.  We designed a marketing site in WordPress that features membership account creation, member protected articles and a self managed downloads area where the team can upload PDFs, Videos and other resources for agents. The homepage shows off a Thought of the Day, various featured articles and the latest downloads for visitors.

New Website Sticker for iProperty Products

Real Estate Websites 101 – simple property search results

After well over a decade of building real estate websites, a little bit of common sense and direction from customers and clients have culminated in the search result page we provide in our standard wordpress website packages. None of it is rocket science, in fact – you’ll probably find it all very familiar. And that’s the ticket. Familiarity is what makes a website easy to navigate.

Our standard package covers the fundamentals:

  • A left hand side column with a refine search feature. For agencies with a lot of property in their portfolio, this is essential.
  • Refine search is not overloaded with features, making it quick to understand and reduces the clutter. We place suburbs, inclusion of surrounding suburbs and price fields at the top.
  • Large property image thumbnail – many sites have small thumbnails that make it hard to assess a property quickly without clicking through
  • Generous property description area with clear suburb and price headings
  • The ability to bookmark a property so that you can quickly scan the listings and view all bookmarks later.
  • 10 results per page – requiring only a little scrolling and for your average agency, only 2-3 pages of results for a search on all property for sale or rent.

Stripping the results page back to its bare essentials makes for a great website to navigate, and one that has the potential for limitless designs that can be applied to it. Take a look at Central Coast Select’s result page and tell us it’s hard to look at!