Inmoba » Technology & Real Estate

Shift happens, Did you know?

Sergio G. — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 08:46:13 +0000

This is not only related with our daily work with “supposed latest technologies” designing websites and online systems, but also with the very near future of us and our kids.

This is the latest version (3.0) of “Shift Happens / Did you know” video. It shows how fast the actual world goes and makes many people think “Am I ready? Am I preparing my kids for their life?”…

Me too.

Thanks Kirai

Las cosas cambian, ¿lo sabias?

Proptrack.com closes – now what?

Sergio G. — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 02:33:57 +0000

HiFX, the company behind Proptrack.com, has announced that as from March 31st they will cease operating the Proptrack service. Many of the Proptrack members, free and paid ones, must be thinking “… and now what?”. These estate agents are left without the property management tool, good or bad, where they have been investing work and resources during the last year and a half.

As soon as the news was made public, some companies inmediately started the hunt for those potential customers spreading a message of panic “you need to do something quick or you are going to lose all your data”.

If you are a Proptrack.com user … BE CALM!

You need to make an informed and correct decision this time. Proptrack allows you to download a copy of all your data. You are not going to lose it.

You should contact several IT companies (also with Inmoba, of course ;-), meet with them. See their offices and meet their teams. Ask them about their property and contact management systems, etc … but also, and this is crucial, about:

Which estate agents are working with their system?
What these clients say about them? Ask for references and phone these clients.
How are they going to integrate their property database with your actual website? Can they help? Can they take care of everything? Ask for some examples.
Are they going to take care on how the change is going to affect you current rankings on Google? How?

Once you have all the information, and only then, decide which IT company is going to work with you and remember this is a long term relationship you are considering! Of one thing I can assure you , we at Inmoba have all the answers to these questions. Again remember, this is a long term relationship you are entering into!.

On the Costa del Sol, we are one of a handful of established IT companies with a history of working with estate agents. Inmoba have been around for 10+ years and have one of the best reputations for SEO on the Coast.

Please call us for a no obligation meeting to discuss how we can work together.

Inmoba meets Properazzi

Sergio G. — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:10:27 +0000

Since the beginning, Inmoba software and our online CRMs for real estate have been focused on easy and massive distribution of our clients’ property portfolios to as many property portals as possible, Spanish and international ones. We have reached a point that we almost can export properties to any system that wants to accept them. Sadly, I have not had enough free time to post news about most of improvements on our systems as we desire … but I promise we will try get you all posted from now on (expect me to be a little bit more “pesado” ;-)

As the excuse for this post, I am happy to announce that we have reached compatibility with properazzi.com, a global property portal with listings on 50+ countries.

When it was born, properazzi.com meant fresh air on the property portals world, it showed and impressive integration with Google Maps technology (I miss that functionality!) that was useful and fun. Now it is one of the big ones, with millions of pages indexed by Google, more than 1.8 million visitors every month and an extremely simple way of finding properties all over the world.

In a property world in crisis, and real estate agents looking for new property markets overseas, properazzi.com could be one of the good options, many countries many languages. If you become interested just take note that, by just using your Inmoba software, is almost no work for you to publish your portfolio there and remember to ask Antonio Luna or Rosie Cade for the “2 special features” for Inmoba clients! (sorry I cannot publish it here, get in contact with us if you just want to know before talking to them).

Email Marketing, the easy way

Sergio G. — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:34:14 +0000

We are happy to announce a new service, Inmobative, the Inmoba Email Marketing Service.

Getting in touch periodically with your present and past clients, your colleagues, your competitors,… is a tremendous business tool, perhaps one of the most productive on the internet. It does help to create your brand, your reputation online, everyone you are interested knows about you and your business, etc…. But it also creates the possibility of new and fast sales opportunities.

On the other point, managing your subscribers lists, sending hundreds of emails without affecting your office server performance, preventing being declared as spam, etc … can be a very time consuming task and sometimes it can be even dangerous for your company.

Inmobative, as most of our other products & services, is just our answer to help requests from our existing clients. They need to be able to communicate with their customers, their colleagues, send newsletters, etc … in an easy and efficient way, without headaches and without compromising their daily work.

Give a look to Inmobative, we are sure you will like its easy use and power.

Avoid problems when working with property pictures

Sergio G. — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 07:29:15 +0000

People working on Real Estate manage pictures of properties every day. They take, organize, send, etc … pictures for clients, collaborators, etc… And with the boom of digital photography almost every Real Estate agency has an superb camera able to take pictures at 5, 7, 10 o more megapixels.

Many megapixels means bigger photos, bigger files but absolutely not better photos.

Did you know that:

A super big picture is NOT going to print better than an right-sized one on your printer (at least that you want to print a huge panel for placing on the road)
A super big picture is NOT going to be seen better than an right-sized one on a computer screen (you have to resize it to see the whole picture, true?)
If you want to amaze a potential purchaser by sending incredible high resolution pictures of a property, what you probably are doing is blocking your email sends for some time and clogging their email because of the big attachments. And sometimes, the email will not even reach them because they use an email account on Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail.
Your “Sent” folder is going to be huge. So huge that your email client is going to get slower and slower and finally crash (specially Outlook) letting you on the phone with your IT people.
Your going to need more hard disk space, more backup space, more IT people work hours, etc …

Definitively, you need high-quality pictures but right sized for your needs. Have a chat with your IT people and ask them what is the right size.

If you use a real estate software for managing your properties portfolio it probably has a built in functionality to resize and store the properties images for you. Ask your software vendor about where they are stored and how to access them in case that you need them. For example, our Real Estate Software – Inmoba Property Manager, resizes automatically the property pictures, archive the original ones (if you want), makes web thumbnails, etc … and everything is stored in a shared folder and organized by property references so it is easy to access and use them.

If you are alone or the pictures are not related with any property, there is a little (and free) tool for Windows XP, named Image Resizer (from Microsoft PowerToys) that everybody working with images on real estate should have installed on their computer. It provides the ability to resize one or multiple pictures to an specified size with just two clicks. Here you have a guide on how to use it. Simple, free and will save you many hours of image resizing in Photoshop or any other.

Hope it helps.