I did an interview today at the Opus Hotel in Yaletown with Marni Wedin from CityTV’s Realty TV. We sat in the bar and discussed real estate, where agents are going in 2008, what technology should be focused on, plus lots more. It was a 20 minute or so chat that will be cut up to about 4 minutes and aired on January 3rd @11pm, January 5th & 7th @ 9am.
Right now, within every listing in your Ubertor control panel you will see a tab called “Craigslist”. (tab name may change) This tab has some code on it that you can cut and paste into other websites. This feature was built with Craigslist.org in mind but as you can see below, it can be pasted almost anywhere. I took the code from JeffandSteve.com’s website and pasted it below. Check out how it breaks up the information, adds the photos, links back to the listing on the agents site and adds the agents contact information.
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Here is what it looks like:
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For Sale: Los Altos 4 Bedroom Single Family Residence
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579 Lassen Street Los Altos 94022 »map »more details |
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 579 Lassen Street, Los Altos |
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 Family Room |
 Master Bedroom |
 Dining Area |
 Hall Bath |
A tranquil location very close to the Village complements this charming home in North Los Altos. The flexible floor plan is perfect for an extended family, or the home could be converted to a duplex for extra income.
Four spacious bedrooms are accompanied by five full baths. The expansive living room is accentuated with new, deep pile carpeting, large window providing bright illumination, and a warm fireplace. Enjoy cooking in the bright and spacious kitchen which offers abundant maple cabinetry, 4-burner gas range, large window viewing the rear yard, and roomy informal eating space. A large family room features a warm fireplace, access to a kitchenette and central courtyard for outdoor entertaining, and a dedicated full bath. A large hall bath has a pedestal sink, shower over tub, and tile flooring. Serving two additional bedrooms, a second hall bath features a pedestal sink and shower over tub. The property is zoned for multiple units and can be converted to a duplex (buyer to verify). Secure parking is provided in an attached two-car garage. The living area is approximately 2229 square feet, and the lot size is 6969 +/-square feet (per county records). Highly regarded Los Altos schools include Covington Elementary, Egan Intermediate, and Los Altos High.
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As I mentioned in August, you can add a customized favicon to your Ubertor website. You can add this feature anytime within the enhancement link in the control panel. Our lead programmer Piotr emailed me a website that allows you to quickly and easily create a favicon from any image. It is a free tool. Check it out here.
What is a Favicon?
A favicon (short for ‘favorites icon’), are litle icons associated with a particular website or webpage, shown next to the site’s name in the URL bar of most browsers. The most common sizes for favicons are: 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, 64×64, 128×128.
“The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index(sm) (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services including internet access providers, internet search engines, web hosting, website design, and internet retail commerce.” …more….
I wonder which real estate technology companies will be included?
Ever wonder where the day went? Do you have days where you realize that it is 5:00 and you feel like you have not accomplished anything?
Check out SlimTimer.com. We have been using it for quite some time with our whole team and find that it has significantly helped us track our time and make best use of each and every day.
Signup for an account. It is free and start using it to track your day. After a week or so, check out the reports section to see where your time is going. You might find that your loosing a lot of time to meetings, client phone calls, personal calls, web surfing, etc.
Plus, get your assistant to use it. It will really help you track his/her time and ensure that you are getting your moneys worth.
We use it to track manual tasks. This way we know what task is taking too much time and what tasks to automate. For example, updating a customer credit card used to be a manual task, it seemed to be taking lots of time for our client service team so we automated the process so that clients can update their credit card instantly within their Ubertor control panel. We only realized the actual time it was taking due to Slim Timer. Before we tracked it, it just seemed like a quick little task that took 2 minutes. It seems that 2 minutes ads up.
What part of your real estate can you automate? systematize? reduce? delegate?
Warren over at TechVibes.com brings our attention to a video clip of The Lab with Leo where they discuss MyRealPlace.com and its potential effect within the real estate industry.
Plus you can see the Ubertor TV interview with MyRealPlace here.
We have been working with video the last few weeks and it has been quite fun. A few days ago we video taped some Ubertor agents about their experiences with our system. We have more content to work though and they will start to show up on the Ubertor website but for now here is the first one. Check out Macdonald Realty’s Ian Watt, Jacky Levi and Adriaan Schipper from RE/MAX, Julie Miller from Prudential and TRG Realty’s Jacob Krause.
Marketing guru Seth Godin responded to some questions that I emailed him about the real estate business. I was curious to know what he would do if he were a Realtor. I asked him 3 questions and you will see his responses below. Seth is the marketing mind behind The Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, The Dip plus much more.
Ubertor: If you were a Realtor what one way would you market yourself differently?
Seth Godin: It wouldn’t be marketing, it would be what I DO. I would specialize obsessively. On a neighborhood or a market segment. I’d only sell restaurants, or condos, or to the gay community. I wouldn’t start doing ANYTHING where I didn’t have a good chance to be the best in the world at it.
Ubertor: What mistake do most Realtors make when marketing a home?
Seth Godin: They act like invisible middlemen. Here’s the question: if you had to charge a 7% commission instead, how would you justify it?
do that.
Ubertor: How would you pick a Realtor to sell your home?
Seth Godin:
Someone I trusted
Someone respected
Someone who was the clear and obvious best choice!
If you looking for an always entertaining, good read, then check out Seth’s blog. He always has something to say that is interesting and entertaining. Be sure to subscribe to his blog email feed.
Here is a video with Rodney from Reachd.com interviewing yours truly about the creation of the Vancouver Real Estate Technology Meetups. Keep in mind that this is our second attempt at video and the ending is a little abrupt. 
Rodney Bartlett the AdWords Instructor of Reachd.com interviews Johnathan Lyon the founder of MyRealPlace.com at the last Real Estate Technology Meetup about his business.
