Ubertor Real Estate Blog

I received an interesting email today from a company that sells websites to real estate agents. I find the use of our logo in their marketing material interesting, but even more interesting is how they choose to compare their system to ours. Strictly price based, and for the most part incorrect. The below image is what they have sent out:

MyRealPage is choosing to use pricing as their tool of comparison but what I find interesting is that they claim that their service is the exact same as ours and that their websites include these services at no extra charge. I would suggest that anyone interested in looking at our services take our system for a test drive. You can signup on our website and have your website ready in 90 seconds, plus you get the first 30 days free.

Try it.

The above image is incorrect in a few ways. First, some of those items are just plain wrong. The ability to change the masthead and banners is included in every website for NO extra charge. Secondly, are they really saying that the SEO enhancement that we offer for $495 is free on their system? Really? I don’t think so. Thirdly, adding pages to your website is included in your site, it just depends on which plan your on. One of our plans gives you the ability to add 20 additional pages to your website as no charge. That 20 is over and above the 10 pages that the site comes with and does NOT include listings or blog posts as pages.

I’m very confident in our system. It is head and shoulders above our competitor(s) and has excellent search engine optimization features that are second to none. We lead, our competitors follow.

Are you interested in what makes us unique and ahead of the pack?

- our system has the CSS unlocked so that any designer can manipulate the look and feel of your website
- even without our SEO enhancement our websites do extremely well within the search engines
- we do not lock clients into a contract
- we do not charge a setup fee
- we offer you the ability to try our system for free so that you know exactly what your getting
- we are on the pulse of real estate marketing across North America
- instant live help
- constant improvement to the Ubertor system
- in page SEO features that automatically update (title tags, sitemaps, etc) [w/o the enhancement enabled - it gets even better with the enhancement enabled]
- video support built into ever listing
- blog built into every website
- plus much more

There are tons of features that our system offers. The big question is, what do you need?

I will end this post with this… Ubertor’s realtor website software system follows Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to ensure your success within the search engines. Does your current supplier?

If you have any questions about your website, Ubertor’s services or anything at all, feel free to contact us. You can add your comments to this post, connect to our live help, or phone us.

I’m just going through some photos and figured I would post a couple of them here….

Here is my business partner Mike Stephenson, myself and David Heinemeier Hansson in San Francisco at Dotties True Blue Cafe having breakfast a couple of years ago.

Here is some of the Vancouver Ubertor team in December 2005

I snapped this shot at the opening of the Homer and Helmcken sales center a while back. Lots of condo buyers looking to snap up Vancouver’s precious downtown units.

Here is a random addition to the photos. This is a picture of myself and my brothers at a wedding in Montreal a few months ago.

I took this picture about 5 months ago from the offices of Zillow. What a nice view they have from their downtown Seattle offices.

Myself and Mike Stephenson in Chicago doing some sight seeing after a workshop at 37Signals in September 2004.

We have just launched a new feature to our Ubertor Software that gives the Realtor the ability to add comparable homes to their listing. This feature has been rolled out in Beta at the moment as we continue to refine its look and feel. Here is what you will see within each of your listings in the control panel:

Check out http://www.andrewhasman.com/115 to see an example of the comparables tab in action.

You will be able to add listings and solds that are comparable to the home that you are trying to sell. It is going to be a great way to gain exposure to your listing as well as you other listings/solds. The system will map the listings onto Google Maps so that users can see where they are in respect to each other as well as see the details of the homes.

Here is what it looks like from the website users point of view:

Here is what it looks like from the Ubertor control panel:

Check out http://www.andrewhasman.com/115 to see an example of the comparables tab in action.

Have you made it out to one of our Ubertor Training Sessions?

They are free and you will learn more than just how to use your website. We teach you about Blogging, the Google Toolbar, Craigslist and how to post, Voiceovers and how to make one, Google Sitemaps, Google Maps, Feedburner, PageRank, Firefox, Why to Blog (2) and much more. It is worth your time and the feedback we have had is outstanding. (sometimes we even discuss market trends and new real estate services that we come across in our travels throughout North America, lately we have been talking about Zillow.com and their free home evaluation service, John L. Scott’s new corporate website showing sold listings and Redfin.com’s online real estate model.)

We have significantly increased the frequency of our Ubertor training sessions and hope that you can all get out to one. We have new course outlines and new classes coming. Watch www.ubertor.com/events for all training sessions or the dashboard of your Ubertor website.

Upcoming Training Sessions:
Victoria - Intro to Ubertor - DFH Realty (Private Session - for DFH Agents Only)
Seattle - Intro to Ubertor - OPEN to ALL AGENTS
Vancouver - Intro to Ubertor - OPEN to ALL AGENTS

Within the last 14 days we have had sessions in Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey, Victoria, Everett, Seattle and Bellingham.

Contact me if you would like to have a Private Training Session for your office.

Here are some pictures from our last training session in Seattle:

Here is a picture from a Vancouver session we had a few weeks ago:

I just arrived into Seattle (last night) to join our team that is here. We have a few new sales people here as well as some training and presentations setup that I am going to be at. We have been operating in the Seattle market for a while now, but we have just now setup a presence here. Check out our training schedule at http://www.ubertor.com/events as we have many new sessions available. If you are in the Seattle area and would like an in office training session for your Realtors please feel free to contact me directly.

If you are outside of the Seattle area please contact me as I would be pleased to speak with you about your needs as we have many sales people and training staff that are mobile.

Back in November 2004, we decided to make a move into the land of Ruby programming. And like anything we have done before, we took it to the next level and hired the best of the best.

We hired David Heinemeier Hansson from Copenhagen, Denmark to consult our crack team of programmers to take their programming skills to the next level. We flew David in from Denmark to Vancouver and immediately took him, and our whole programming team to Whistler for a week of learning, discussion and programming.

On June 21st 2006, Busines 2.0 came out with their list of “The 50 people who matter now” and David Heinemeier Hansson was number 34. (higher than Oprah (at 38), the Skype Co-founders (at 36), Jeff Bezos (at 42), among others.)

We learned a lot from David and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to David from my business partner Mike Stephenson, our team and myself for your help and advise when building our products.

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip to Whistler from a couple of years ago:

Here is David showcasing Ruby on Rails to our team:

Here is Mike, Piotr and David:

Here is a link to David’s blog for more information about him.
Here is a post in his blog with a pics from his trip here and here talking about leaving for Vancouver.

I just finished a workshop at BCIT. They held a total of four workshops that ran concurrently with a networking opportunity afterwards. I was invited to speak about ‘Sales’. The workshop was called “How to Sell to Businesses from Cold Calling to Closing and Beyond”.

It was a very interesting morning. I started off by telling the group that I was not a professional sales trainer and that I planned on telling them how we sell and some of the good and bad techniques we use or have tried.

The topics covered were:
Reverse Sales - about my days as a debt collector
Cold Calling- how we do it, what works, and does not work (for us)
Follow up - what to do after the cold call
In the meeting - we discussed how we meet, the processes we follow
The art of NO - how to say no to a lead without loosing the deal
Asking for the sale - problems/successes we have when asking for the deal
Follow up - what comes after the sale

All in all it was a great morning. The class seemed to like the discussion. It is funny, the questions at the end of these sessions usually are the same. Everyone want to know how it is having a business partner and what kind of hours do we put in. It seems that entrepreneurs starting businesses or thinking about starting businesses always have the same questions/comments about those 2 subjects. My simple answer is, communication is the key to any relationship and the hours are long.

Our sales team is doing some traveling right now. If you are in any of the following areas and would like to setup a personal meeting or an office presentation please feel free to contact us.

Las Vegas, Nevada - February 1st - 3rd
Grand Canyon, Nevada - February 3rd - 4th
Monument Valley, Arizona - February 5th - 6th
Tombstone, Arizona - February 7th
Las Cruces, New Mexico - February 8th
(specific location not decided) Mexico - February 11th - 12th
Toronto, Ontario - February 12th - 15th
Memphis, Tennessee - February 13th - 14th
Southern Kentucky - February 15th
Washington DC - February 17th and 18th
New York, New York - February 19th - 22nd
Las Vegas, Nevada - February 23rd - 26th

We also have sales team members currently in:

Vancouver, British Columbia
Victoria, British Columbia
Whistler, British Columbia
Squamish, British Columbia
Calgary, Alberta
Bellingham, Washington

I’m off to Calgary, then Edmonton and finally Montreal. We have had a growning demand for our sales/education presentations and I have a quick stop in each of these cities for some of these presentations. If you are an agent in these cities and are looking to learn more about our Realtor website services please feel free to contact me as I would be pleased to chat with you.

I just finished my sessions at BCIT for this semister. For the last year or so I have been invited to speak at 3 BCIT classes every semister. Its quite fun as my job is to talk about Combustion and how we have grown, competition, business partnerships, sales growth, plus much more.

The classes are always interested to hear about how we started as Combustion Hosting and became Combustion Listings and now Ubertor. One day I will take the time to write about how Combustion started as a home based business and has become what it is known as today.