EasyBroker Blog

A vacation rental with the tag "exclusive"

Tags are a very useful feature to categorize your data within EasyBroker. A tag is a keyword or term you associate with properties, opportunities, bookings, or contacts. Once you associate the tag with an object you can then easily filter or search for any objects matching those tags. For example you may want to tag vacation rental properties that you exclusively manage as “exclusive” and those that you don’t exclusively manage as “non-exclusive”. After you’ve tagged your properties you can then simply click on the tag in the “Filter by tag” sidebar to see properties with those tags.

I often use the tags “lead”, “vendor”, “client”, and “job candidate” to categorize my contacts. For bookings you could use the tag “airport pickup” so that you can easily see how many and which of your bookings included airport pickup. You could use “hot” for opportunities that you are very likely to close successfully, or “stuck” for those that just don’t seem to move forward.

Filter by tag sidebar

The “Tags” page is another useful tool you can use to manage your tags and see where and how your tags are being used. You can access the “Tags” page by clicking “edit tags” on the “Filter by tag” sidebar. The “Tags” page shows you all of the tags that your team is using. Each tag is shown with a total by type of object such as Property or Contact which gives you an overall break down of how your data is categorized. For example you can easily see how many exclusive vacation rentals you have versus non-exclusive ones or how many bookings have airport pickup.

The beauty of tags is that you can invent your own and use them in very creative and original ways to help you more effectively track and manage your business.

New EasyBroker Dashboard

Now you can get a quick overview of your business and import your contacts. After you log into EasyBroker you are now presented with a Dashboard showing a chart that displays the number of new opportunities from the previous two weeks. By monitoring your opportunities you can get a good idea of how well you are managing new leads or how effective a new marketing campaign is. Note that the chart only displays if you have created at least one new opportunity in the last two weeks.

We’ve also added the following general metrics which are pretty self-explanatory:

• Open opportunities
• Active properties
• Unassigned opportunities
• Upcoming check-ins this week
• My expected commission this month
• Upcoming check-outs this week

One metric which probably needs further clarification is “My expected commission this month.” The commission is the sum of the commissions from all opportunities assigned to you with a close date for the current month. Any opportunities with the stage “Closed Lost” are not included in this amount.

We also added support for importing contacts from Outlook CSV files. Most email applications such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, and Yahoo support exporting to Outlook CSV format. Once you have exported your contacts to a file you simply go to the Contacts page and click on the “Import Contacts” button and select your Outlook CSV file. Now you can easily import leads or other contacts into EasyBroker.

Featured Properties on MoveGlobally.com

We just added a featured properties section to the MoveGlobally.com home page. The section randomly displays properties listed with EasyBroker that have three or more photos and most of their fields completed such as bathrooms and bedrooms. Make sure to complete your listings so that they will appear in the featured property section and so that they are more likely to show up in search results.

Today we added several new features to EasyBroker. You can now attach files to notes, manage deposits and payments on bookings, translate property descriptions with the click of a button, and hide the availability of a property.

Attach Files to Notes

Attach images, contracts, reports, or whatever you like to any of your notes. You simply create a note and then select the “attach files” link to add as many files as you want to a note. You can easily share files with your whole team so you no longer have to worry about where a specific document is.

Easily translate your property descriptions into English or Spanish so that you can reach more potential buyers. You simply go to the Description tab while editing a property and click “Translate English to Spanish” or “Translate Spanish to English.” After saving the property, the translated descriptions are shown based on the language of the visitors to your site or to MoveGlobally.com.

Hide Availability Calendar

Help your customers search for properties that are available by hiding the availability for properties where the availability is unknown or not up-to-date. By hiding the availability you allow your customers to easily find properties that are actually available without frustrating them by showing properties that appear available but are not. When you create or edit a temporary rental there is a check box on the General tab to hide the availability of the property. When a renter searches by check-in and check-out date only those properties with the availability shown will display in the search results.

We also added new fields to the bookings so you can keep track of deposits, commissions, and payments for bookings as well as the dates when those payments were made. You can even search for all paid bookings between specific dates.

Let us know what you think of the new features and if you have suggestions or ideas for how we can improve EasyBroker!

Here is an interesting post in the NY Times to give you some insight into what vacation renters go through when renting short-term rentals. I’ve rented tens if not hundreds of places around the world and it always surprises me how simple things such as providing clean sheets get overlooked.

Skirting the Pitfalls of Private Rentals

Uploading photos of your listings is one of the most essential elements to effectively market them online. Potential buyers and renters almost always view listings based on photos more than any other factor. Unfortunately many agents tend to forget to upload photos or upload low quality photos. In this post I provide a few recommendations for uploading photos as well as tips on how you can easily and quickly upload your photos with EasyBroker.

First you should upload at least five photos for each property listing, although ten to twenty photos is probably a better range for most properties. However, I do not recommend that you upload photos just because you have them. It is better to upload a few good photos than many low quality images. You also want to be careful not to bore your visitors by showing every nook and cranny of a property. Choosing five photos of one room is probably way too much, unless the property is a huge open loft. Choose interesting and accurate photos that highlight the important elements of a property. Don’t forget that photos of the neighborhood or a great view from a window might convince a lead to contact you.

EasyBroker Image Uploader

When you upload photos to EasyBroker you should ideally choose photos that are larger than 800×800 pixels. EasyBroker will automatically resize your photo to fit a 800×800 pixel box and will also create thumbnails of the image for you. Another cool trick is that you can easily upload many photos from the same folder by using the CTRL button to select multiple files, or if you are using Windows you can press CTRL plus the letter A to automatically select every photo in a folder.

Once you’ve uploaded your photos in EasyBroker you can drag and drop them using your mouse in order to rearrange the order of appearance of the images on MoveGlobally.com and on your website. Make sure to drag the best or most eye-catching photo into the position of the first image because only the first photo appears in listing results.

Most importantly view the listing after uploading photos. Many times the photos appear differently when shown in a slide-show or give a different impression when shown with the background color of your website or on MoveGlobally.com.
In summary

• Upload at least five photos but ideally ten to twenty
• Upload photos with dimensions of at least 800×800 pixels
• Upload multiple photos with EasyBroker by using the CTRL key or select all with CTRL+A
• Rearrange your photos afterwards by dragging and dropping them
• Put the most important or eye-catching photo first
• Review the property listing after you’ve uploaded the photos

Remember that uploading good quality photos is probably the most effective way of marketing your listings online. Spend time to take good photos and you will generate more leads and also appear more professional to owners looking to potentially sell or rent their property.

The name of a property is the first thing a potential client sees when searching on most property listing websites. When you assign a name to a property in EasyBroker it’s very important to think about how your potential clients will see the name when compared to other listed properties and how the name might impact search engine optimization.

When you give a property a boring name such as “Apartment #1″ or “Apartment #2″ it won’t stand out in a long list of properties. Give each of your listings a name that helps distinguish it from other listings and encourages your visitors to want to know more about it. Include the most important feature of the property, where it’s located, or the propertytype. Here are some examples:

• Beautiful open loft in Palermo with excellent terrace view
• Three bedroom row house in the heart of Canton w/ parking
• Luxury penthouse apartment with private pool in Recoleta

Keep in mind that the words in a property name significantly influence search engine results. For example if someone were to search for “palermo loft terrace”, the first property above is likely to appear in the search engine results. It’s not a perfect science, but the names of your listings are generally considered important by search engines due to how they are used in each web page. However, don’t expect properties you just listed to show up in search engine results immediately. It can sometimes take a week or two before they are picked up by search engines.

One other naming convention that you might want to consider when naming properties in a major city is to include the cross streets or block that the property is on. For example

• Cordoba and Thames: Beautiful open loft in Palermo with excellent terrace view
• Cordoba 5100: Beautiful open loft in Palermo with excellent terrace view

This convention helps visitors clearly and quickly know where a property is located without knowing the exact address. If you have multiple listings on the same cross streets you may want to add a number to distinguish them and also provide an easy way for your clients to refer to apartments without having to know the property code.

• Cordoba and Thames #1: Beautiful open loft in Palermo with excellent terrace view
• Cordoba and Thames #2: Quiet inside French style apartment with patio

If you name your properties using relevant and descriptive words you will not only set your properties apart from others listings but also help drive more visitors to your listings from search engines.

Recently I received an email from a friend/broker with an email signature that annoyed me. If you aren’t using signatures you definitely should be because they allow your recipients to easily keep track of your contact info and allow you to advertise your website and company name.

So what annoyed me about my friend’s email signature was that it was an image. I wanted to copy and paste his website and various phone numbers into my EasyBroker contact manager but because it was an image I had to manually copy it. Not only was it a pain but I also didn’t realize it was even in prior emails because I have to click on “display images” in my email client in order to see images.

The lesson here is you do not want to make your friends, family and of course customers take extra steps to save your contact information or to see what your company name is. I find images in signatures generally annoying and would avoid them altogether but if you must include an image you should limit them to just your logo.

One last quick peeve about signatures is that you should limit your signature to five or six lines. I include my name, my company name, a cool slogan, my phone numbers, and the URL to my company. If you provide more than six lines, the recipient is more likely to ignore it. Make sure your recipients see your company name and website by keeping your signatures brief.

Here are some more resources on email signatures:

• Email Signature Netiquette
• How to unleash the power of e-mail signatures

We finally got around to creating a blog for EasyBroker. In case you don’t know already, EasyBroker is a web based Customer Relationship Manager and Content Manager tailored to the real estate industry. We plan to use this blog to keep you up-to-date on the latest news, tips, and best practices for using EasyBroker and running an effective real estate agency. EasyBroker was created by MoveGlobally.com.

Feel free to leave us comments or suggestions to let us know how we can improve this blog or if you have your own EasyBroker tips that you would like share.