Ubertor Real Estate Blog

Get expert advice from an Ubertor specialist on how to use the basics of the system. This is a great start for all new Ubertor users eager to learn how to begin maximizing their website for the most return. This is a live guided tour of Ubertor’s control panel – so if you’re on the fences about Ubertor’s software, click in and join the tour. See how easy it is to get a website up and running.

Join in 2 easy steps (Live Tour is FREE):

1. Register for the Live Tour on August 3rd, 2010 @ 10:00 AM PST.

Simply click on this LINK at the time of the LIVE TOUR and JOIN!

2.  Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) – a headset is recommended. Or, call in using your telephone.

Dial +1-702-473-3463
Access Code: 823727

The live tour will go over the following topics:

1. Logging into your control panel (1 minute)

2. The Dashboard – Overview of cool tools to get your site running (9 minutes)

* Google Maps – Map your listings with 3 different views
* Google XML SiteMaps – Get found on Google faster than others
* Feedburner – Get your blog going with Feedburner
* Google Analytics – Start tracking the number of people coming to your site
* Favicon – Change your favorites icon

3. Crafting your own page (15 minutes)

* Adding content
* Adding photos
* Adding videos

4. Power marketing your listings (15 minutes)

* Display your photos
* Adding files, like floor plans and strata docs to your listings
* Mapping your listing on Google
* Giving your listing its own domain (URL)
* Adding music to your listing
* Have an open house? Advertise the listing as an open house
* Virtual Tours
* Get your listing on Craigslist – and looking good!
* Adding your own filmed video to the listing

5. Unveil the power of CSS and how it can help you mastercraft your website (5 minutes)

6. What is Twitter? How to use it with your website (5 minutes)

7. Q & A (10 minutes)

**1 LUCKY attendee will win $57.00, just for taking the tour!**

TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube has changed their maximum time limit for uploaded videos from 10 minutes to 15. For most Ubertor clients this time restriction has not been a problem, but there is always the odd video that was just too long that you wanted on YouTube. Well, now you have more flexibility with YouTube. For clients using Ubertor’s Combustion Video platform, there is no time restriction on videos uploaded to Combustion Video. Either way, a welcome change to YouTube!

With the recent Ride to Concur Cancer (a ride from Vancouver to Seattle) and the upcoming GranFondo (a ride from Vancouver to Whistler) there has been a lot of talk these days about the cycling world. I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day and he had mentioned that he though the demographics of cyclists were made up of higher than average net worth individuals. I thought this might be an interesting niche for Realtors to target so I reached out to Jacynthe Simard, the Finish Line Manager of the RBC GranFondo Whistler. I asked her the demographics of the cyclists enrolled in the GranFondo and how could people get involved. Here is what she told me:

Demographics: Predominantly male , median age of 45; well-educated and affluent (>50% HHI at $100K+/ year).

Volunteer needs: We are looking for over 100 volunteers to help our with a number of activities: event set-up/take down, hydration station, family zone, bag check, bike corral, etc.

The benefits of volunteering for the RBC GranFondo Whistler are:

* All shifts are a reasonable 4 to 5 hours
* Snacks and beverages provided
* Lululemon piece (either a jacket or shirt)
* A Water bottle compliments of RBC
* Front of the line registration to the 2011 RBC GranFondo Whistler
* Letter of reference for volunteer hours
* Be part of the first year of one of the biggest thing to hit Vancouver since the Olympics. This event will be epic for years to come, and you’ll be able to say you were there first.

Interested in getting involved? It might be a great place to market your real estate services. RBC thinks it is a fit. Do you? Maybe as a sponsor or as a volunteer. You can see all of the volunteer opportunities on their website.

More on the GranFondo:

Event vision: Create a world-class event that serves as a premium & unique mass cycling experience to all levels of riders that is both challenging and fun, and motivates people to ride.

What’s a GranFondo: A celebrated tradition in European cycling culture that is fast gaining momentum in North America. A long distance, mass-participation cycling event that welcomes professional, amateur, and recreational cyclists of all abilities

The Details: September 11, 2010. The only mass cycling event to ride the Sea-to-Sky highway from downtown Vancouver to Whistler Village; dedicated North lane for the event.

Finish Line Celebration Description: Riders will finish along Blackcomb Way in Whistler and be guided in to the post event celebrations in Lot 4 in the Whistler Parking area. We’ll dress up the area with a stage and live music, a family fun area, beer garden, delicious food, a stretching lounge, a massive bike corral, a massage area and a lounge for the Alta Classe. We want participants, friends and family, Whistler residents as well as visitors to come enjoy the festivities and cheer on those who will have biked a challenging 120 km from Vancouver to Whistler.

Now within the Ubertor system Approved Vendors can add 3rd level navigation. Actually, they could add 3rd level, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. Not sure if you would need that many levels to your navigation, but either way, the power is there for Approved Vendors to expand your navigation.

Calgary Realtors John Hripko and Josh Nelson have taken advantage of this new functionality and added it to their new Ubertor website. Check out their website, not only have they added a ton of pages to the website but they have utilized the third navigation functionality so that you can dig down into the different condo buildings in different areas.

BC Business Magazines’s Tommy Humphreys wrote an article about how my business partner and I operate Ubertor and the changes we made a few years ago to cut costs while still growing our businesses. Many of these tools can be used within any business. Over the last couple years I have found myself speaking to business groups all over the world on this topic. Check out the BC Business article here.

The Ubertor Concierge Plan, rolled out a little while ago has been a great success. So much of a success that we are adding more to the plan. Currently, if you are on the Ubertor Concierge Plan our special Concierge team will hand upload your listings to Kijiji.ca, Craigslist.org, help setup Twitter.com, provide you with a monthly website audit and complete free directory submissions. Today we are adding Walkscore.com to our list of services provided within the Concierge Plan.

Want to upgrade your website to the Ubertor Concierge Plan? No problem, just click on the live chat support button within your control panel and our client services team will be pleased to help.

Watch for even more coming to the Ubertor Concierge Plan!!

Get expert advice from an Ubertor specialist on how to use the basics of the system. This is a great start for all new Ubertor users eager to learn how to begin maximizing their website for the most return. This is a live guided tour of Ubertor’s control panel – so if you’re on the fences about Ubertor’s software, click in and join the tour. See how easy it is to get a website up and running.

Join in 2 easy steps (Live Tour is FREE):

1. Register for the Live Tour on July 20th, 2010 @ 10:00 AM PST.

Simply click on this LINK at the time of the LIVE TOUR and JOIN!

2.  Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) – a headset is recommended. Or, call in using your telephone.

Dial +1-702-473-3463
Access Code: 823727

The live tour will go over the following topics:

1. Logging into your control panel (1 minute)

2. The Dashboard – Overview of cool tools to get your site running (9 minutes)

* Google Maps – Map your listings with 3 different views
* Google XML SiteMaps – Get found on Google faster than others
* Feedburner – Get your blog going with Feedburner
* Google Analytics – Start tracking the number of people coming to your site
* Favicon – Change your favorites icon

3. Crafting your own page (15 minutes)

* Adding content
* Adding photos
* Adding videos

4. Power marketing your listings (15 minutes)

* Display your photos
* Adding files, like floor plans and strata docs to your listings
* Mapping your listing on Google
* Giving your listing its own domain (URL)
* Adding music to your listing
* Have an open house? Advertise the listing as an open house
* Virtual Tours
* Get your listing on Craigslist – and looking good!
* Adding your own filmed video to the listing

5. Unveil the power of CSS and how it can help you mastercraft your website (5 minutes)

6. What is Twitter? How to use it with your website (5 minutes)

7. Q & A (10 minutes)

**1 LUCKY attendee will win $57.00, just for taking the tour!**

Ubertor client Andrew Carros gets some fantastic exposure for his business as well as his clients property in the New York Times this week. You can see the whole article here – it talks about properties in Vancouver, the prices and compares them to a few American cities.

I had a great chat yesterday with Kye Grace, a partner at deBruyn Design+Marketing about Ubertor’s auto fill categories and how they can effect a real estate agents website. Kye was telling me about some of the results that he was seeing so I asked Kye to drop me an email about his thoughts so that I could re post it here. Here is what Kye sent me:

Over time we have seen time and time again that utilizing MLS reciprocity to place listings from your niche or community on your Ubertor site will not only drive traffic but result in quality leads.

These are all pages that have the potential to be crawled and indexed by the search engines and in turn be found by consumers using the search engines. You’d be surprised how many people search an address or MLS number.

We have clients for whom we perform on going Search Engine Optimization for and I would say on average two thirds of the traffic they are getting is coming from long tail searches such as address, variations of the address and MLS numbers. These are fairly high traffic sites so we know the sample size is large enough to indicate how well they work.

It is important that the listings are filtered in a way that not only ensures as many listings as possible get crawled but that it is actually usable by the searcher. It is important to understand that site visitors and the search engines are not going to go through pages and pages of listings in one AFC. Breaking them down in too more manageable sizes is key. Having one AFC for all of Vancouver doesn’t serve anyone well, having them broken down into one of 40 sub areas does. Everyone can find what they need quickly and easily this way.

A couple of examples of how this can be done is a niche site or in conjunction with custom maps.

Rebecca Permack has niche site targeting the neighbourhood of Burke Mountain, a quickly growing area popular for buyers of both resale and new developments. Being a tight niche there is about 40 homes listed at any given time. Being a smaller number it is easier for the search engines to crawl most if not all of these listings. The beauty of it is her site is a one stop place for buyers or potential sellers to see what is listed in Burke Mountain. She hasn’t broken the listings down by development yet as being new there are only a few resale listings relating to the new developments. Once these properties start to be listed by the original owner each development page will use and AFC to show the properties just in that development. www.burkemountainhomes.com

The other is utilize AFCs to create your own map search. The Experience Real Estate Group in Edmonton wanted to allow people a quick and easy map search so we designed maps for every area and sub area in Edmonton and linked them to the appropriate AFC. Now visitors to their site can come and search their way around Edmonton in just a few clicks. You can see examples of the maps at www.experiencerealtygroup.com with links in the right hand column.

We have a few other sites on the go that drill down as far as a AFC page for each condo building in an area. These are great for tighter areas like Yaletown or Newport Village. Another great way to serve home searchers and ensure you are getting as many pages into the search engines that you can.

Kye Grace, Partner
Digital Strategist
deBruyn Design+Marketing

Get expert advice from an Ubertor specialist on how to use the basics of the system. This is a great start for all new Ubertor users eager to learn how to begin maximizing their website for the most return. This is a live guided tour of Ubertor’s control panel – so if you’re on the fences about Ubertor’s software, click in and join the tour. See how easy it is to get a website up and running.

Join in 2 easy steps (Live Tour is FREE):

1. Register for the Live Tour on July 15th, 2010 @ 3:00 PM PST.

Simply click on this LINK at the time of the LIVE TOUR and JOIN!

2.  Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) – a headset is recommended. Or, call in using your telephone.

Dial +1-702-473-3463
Access Code: 823727

The live tour will go over the following topics:

1. Logging into your control panel (1 minute)

2. The Dashboard – Overview of cool tools to get your site running (9 minutes)

* Google Maps – Map your listings with 3 different views
* Google XML SiteMaps – Get found on Google faster than others
* Feedburner – Get your blog going with Feedburner
* Google Analytics – Start tracking the number of people coming to your site
* Favicon – Change your favorites icon

3. Crafting your own page (15 minutes)

* Adding content
* Adding photos
* Adding videos

4. Power marketing your listings (15 minutes)

* Display your photos
* Adding files, like floor plans and strata docs to your listings
* Mapping your listing on Google
* Giving your listing its own domain (URL)
* Adding music to your listing
* Have an open house? Advertise the listing as an open house
* Virtual Tours
* Get your listing on Craigslist – and looking good!
* Adding your own filmed video to the listing

5. Unveil the power of CSS and how it can help you mastercraft your website (5 minutes)

6. What is Twitter? How to use it with your website (5 minutes)

7. Q & A (10 minutes)

**1 LUCKY attendee will win $57.00, just for taking the tour!**