MyRealPage Overhauls Listing Web Forms, Adds Lead Capture

Continuing with the focus on our Listings System, we have just published updates to our most commonly used Listings Web Forms, including the "Listing Inquiry" form, "Send this Listing" form and the "Mortgage Calculator" form. The new forms are now much more interactive, visual and fun to use. Along with their rich animation and display, they are also very SEO-friendly and can even be operated by browsers with no javascript enabled. The forms not only present much more relevant information, including listing photos, website owner photos, and cross-links to the inquiry form (all to facilitate the form submission, and generation of a lead); but also, hopefully, web visitors will find them much more fun to use. 

Along with the new forms, we have also deployed a new Lead Capture system which makes it very easy for our customers to review and create leads. The lead creation is inevitably a trade-off between a fully automated system which may create too much data and may be in need of constant "pruning" and "cleaning" and a fully manual system which requires too many repetitive tasks. We think we found the golden medium with the simple email friendly links which can either be ignored if the lead is recognized or used to quickly reivew and create a lead in the Private Office. Combined with the Outlook synchronization, import and export functions in the Private Office, MyRealPage leads can become very "portable".

The new web forms, although seemingly unassuming, carry a fair amount of complexity; as they function in an expected way for our broker clients as well. If the account has an Agent Diretory subscription, then agents' photos will be used in the inquiry forms, as well as their direct email addresses. And those agents that have Tier 3 access to the Private Office will also benefit from the One Click Lead Capture. Equally, the new forms will support the "Featured Agent" function which allows all listings inquiries to be directed to one "Agent of the Day". 

There are more exciting updates to come. Stay tuned!

MyRealPage listings get their own Media Center

We have been quiet for the past month, following a flurry of activity in January. There was a good reason for it: everyone was working hard on bringing together a major product update in the MyRealPage Listings System: the new Media Center. Read the Listing Media Center product release on our official blog.

Our Listings System has entered and will remain in the focus of our product development for still some time now. There is a very good motivation behind this: listings are increasingly becoming the pivot for other services and information. Consider that a listing can be viewed from a multitude of perspectives:

• Plain data sheet on the property
  
• A showcase of photos, virtual tours, etc.
  
• A place in a community
  
• A financial commitment
  
• Investment opportunity
  
• The list goes on...

Each one of these aspects can warrant a separate data component to do research, provide enriched web experience, etc. We thought it would be great to have a platform into which we can "plug" these additional components; some of which may even originate from 3rd party services...

Our new Media Center and Listing Mapping options are the first implementations of this strategy. We have spent some effort up-front to work out the new architecture for the listings wich would allow us to achieve the wanted "pluggability". The proof is in the pudding: we offer 6 galleries to choose from, 18 video-oriented slots, in browser Google Earth and a WalkScore (which measures how "walkable" your property is). 

Take one of these enhancements: the six galleries to choose from... It's certainly more than the original business requirement dictated; but after we got started on the new path, it was so easy to add galleries that we decided not to skip. For example: we added 2 galleries in the 2 days prior to the product launch just to beef up this product. We also provide a "graceful degrading" for our galleries. It's a popular term with the webmaster crowd and simply means that some new flashy feature should be accessible to web visitors who may not have the necessary browser components enabled; such as javascript or Flash. Graceful degrading also plays well with search indexing as search bots usually cannot read "rich" content (javascript, Flash). Taking that into account, our listing photos are accessible for javascript disabled browsers, and, in addition, to flash-disabled browsers as well. If flash is disabled, the galleries are shown in plain javascript one, and if javascript is disabled, then the photos are available as plain image links.

You may also want to check out the Custom Listing Banners. You can now provide your own short text so it appears in a cute ribbon-like banner across the listing photo. 

We hope you will enjoy this new product update. There are more to come and we plan to time them closer together from now on.