EasyBroker Blog

Have you used saved searches yet? Saved searches allow you to store exactly what a client is looking for in EasyBroker and you can choose to receive alerts so that EasyBroker notifies you each morning by email if any properties were published on the previous day matching what your clients are looking for.

Saved searches are very useful but many times you also want to know which of your contacts might be interested in a specific property. We recently added a new tab called Potential Leads to the property overview page so that you can see all contacts that might be interested in the property you’re reviewing. In order that contacts appear in the tab you must have contacts with saved searches that match the current property.

For example if I create a saved search for Josh Almonte who is looking to rent an apartment in Condesa for $15,000 pesos or less, when I view the Potential Clients tab on a rental  in Condesa that costs less than $15,000 pesos, Josh will show up. You can then call or email him to see if he would be interested in the property. This new feature should help you or your sales team provide more proactive service and close more deals.

Below is a detailed and a bit summary of the reasons for and our response to the outage on March 18th and 19th and the actions we plan to take to ensure that such an outage doesn’t occur again. In total there was about 8 hours of downtime for our clients websites and 2 hours of downtime for the CRM portion of EasyBroker. Our last unplanned outage was on February 14, 2012 over a year ago. We’ve maintained over a 99% uptime for the year however we understand that EasyBroker is fundamental to your business and plan to take steps to ensure that we can more quickly respond should a similar problem arise.

The problem and the various attempts to solve it

On March 18th our main production server started behaving strangely and rebooting and making a few changes which took about an hour we were able to get the server back online but without discovering the root cause. During the day we investigated with our host Rackspace but we were still unable to find the root of the problem.

On the morning of the 19th the problem returned however we weren’t able to get the server to come back online. We tried to swap in a newly built virtual server but unfortunately as we were migrating the server Rackspace had an outage with their Cloud Files server which caused our migration to freeze. While trying to resolve the migration issue with Rackspace we launched a new server on a different ip and were able to quickly get the CRM portion of EasyBroker back online. Unfortunately all of the domain names of our clients’ websites were pointing to the old server ip so it would probably take from four to eight hours to migrate to the new ip. Rackspace told us that it would take about 30 minutes to get the Cloud Files service back online so we assumed it would be best to wait.

Unfortunately after the Cloud Files service came back online they couldn’t unfreeze the box. After about 5 hours of working with Rackspace they realized there was a hardware issue, most likely the hard drive, which was also the root cause of the problems on the server up until now. Rackspace changed the hardware and then we were able to get the server fully migrated.

Plans to alleviate future outages

The biggest problem we had with this outage is that we couldn’t move to a new server because the ip was locked to the current one. This would not have been a factor if we had used CNames instead of A records for each of our clients’ domains. We could have easily transitioned everything to a new server with a simple DNS change. We’ve already updated all the domain names of all our clients’ domains that we manage to use CNames so that we’re prepared for this in the future.

Another way we could have resolved the problem is by using a load balancer so that we can easily swap in new servers without having to take down EasyBroker. A load balancer enables us to use a single ip for multiple servers. We are currently in the process of adding a load balancer so that in the future we can resolve this problem with no or at least a very limited amount of downtime.

Conclusion

We are very sorry for the downtime and realize that it affects each of our clients’ businesses. We have over a 99% uptime for the past few years however we will still take additional measures to reduce the possibility of such outages in the future.

We are happy to present EasyAviso as the newest member of the EasyBroker network. 

A new real estate portal and exclusively focused on Mexico, EasyAviso is caracterized by its intuitive and user-friendly interface.  It’s a full-featured site with everything you’d expect from a real estate portal. It  is completely free, and best of all, there are no pesky ads to distract or annoy you.  This makes it an excellent place to visit if you’re looking for a new home, and also the ideal site to publish your listings.

So there you go, now every time you publish a property on EasyBroker, it will appear on EasyAviso too!

Take EasyBroker out of the office and onto the road! Have all your properties, contacts and tasks at the tip of your fingers. Surf to easybroker.com/m and off you go!

As a broker or real estate agent, you spend a lot of time on the road. You need to be flexible and you don’t always have the time to report back to the office to check whether new appointments have come up. Being mobile is of the essence.

Now, with our latest feature, checking your upcoming tasks while on the road has never been easier. Need to make a quick call to a potential client? Want to show similar properties to a prospect? No problem, nothing the mobile version of EasyBroker can’t handle! And there’s much more. Add new, or edit existing contacts, view your properties directly on the map, add new tasks… It’s all there; now you take your CRM wherever you go.

To make things even easier, add a shortcut to your device’s homescreen (“Add to homescreen” for iOS, and “Add shortcut to home” for Android users) so you’ll always have EasyBroker right at hand. Literally. Easy access, wherever you are!

A handy new feature now makes it possible for an administrator to hide other user’s activities -notes, calls, chats, completed tasks- so this information won’t show up on the Dashboard of individual agents. You can turn this feature on or off for each individual user by clicking on Settings/Users in the top right corner inside your EasyBroker account.

As administrator, you continue to have a complete overview of your team’s activities from the Dashboard. Restricted users on the other hand will now only be able to see their own activities, unless of course, they were granted permission by the administrator to view this information.