Sounds like a great idea Gail.  (good to see you over here on Reliberation).  I'll be within the next six months, Point 2 will have something started on this very subject.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you too.  We are getting ready for the inevitable St. Paddy's day winter storm.  It seems to be a regular thing here on PEI.  Winter storm warning for tonight.  

Carol

I would like to P2 create the ability to section handshake agreements in regions and states, so that they are seperate and encourage the type of referrals you are suggesting.

I know they have it sectioned out on NLS, but when prospects come to our website, there ought to be some easy way to merge the two, so that the prospect can search a wide area, or a state, or even out of state if they are local and want to move.

I obviously haven't given this a lot of thought, but I dimly sense what i want.

Gail, I have thought about it quite a lot ... I added an area in Florida and tested it on Becky ... to see if the handshake would go through. I'd love to do this kind of out of state handshake with agents in certain areas throughout the US but first would like to know if this wouldn't be against any laws and regulations? Would a disclaimer, perhaps specifying that these ARE NOT our listings and that we ARE NOT licensed to sell in these states but cooperate in our referral network, etc. work to avoid confusion? I've asked this previously on the message board, but haven't gotten any responses. .... does anyone have the answer?

It could be a referral site, maybe, where handshake listings are sectioned by state. If it is identified as a referral site, that would avoid the impression of trying to sell in those areas.

Gail,

I would love this!  Being on Cape Cod, I have a large population of retirees (and future retirees) looking in FL, NV, AZ, NM and other warmer climates.  I would be doing my "folks" a great service by offering links to listings in these areas.  Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas are becoming very popular, as well.

Carol & Steve, I'm feeling your pain....snow when I woke up this morning, sleet and freezing rain at 3:00, back to snow.  And it's headed your way.  I can't complain, we've had a typically mild Cape Cod winter.

Cathy

Gail,

The Pendings are not being sorted out yet. It is an automated program and they have it running to do one section of the handshakes at a time. Apparently it would overload the system that the program is running on. The pendings should start in the next few days according to support.

Gail and everyone I like that idea, we can section it off. Our people are either going -9 out of 10 to Florida. When they fill that up they go to the Carolina's, south mostly. I also heard from an agent in Atlantic City they are going to Delaware almost no tax at all, why shouldn't we get referrals directly. I came from big corp. relocation and when it got to 40% I went on my own to RE/MAX. I just think when we work we work hard trying to please out buyers' and sellers' and we could offer that service to potential sellers' ahead of time and get first crack. I always ask the seller if I can get them an agent where they are going. That would only ad to our power. This is getting to be a habit for me, we are in the middle of a ice snow storm. I may need a referral agent myself.

Gail and everyone I like that idea, we can section it off. Our people are either going -9 out of 10 to Florida. When they fill that up they go to the Carolina's, south mostly. I also heard from an agent in Atlantic City they are going to Delaware almost no tax at all, why shouldn't we get referrals directly. I came from big corp. relocation and when it got to 40% I went on my own to RE/MAX. I just think when we work we work hard trying to please out buyers' and sellers' and we could offer that service to potential sellers' ahead of time and get first crack. I always ask the seller if I can get them an agent where they are going. That would only ad to our power. This is getting to be a habit for me, we are in the middle of a ice snow storm. I may need a referral agent myself.

Gail,

I have thought about this as well and think it is a great idea. We get a lot of retirees and snowbirds that buy second homes in Southern California or looking for 55+ communities.

It was 90+ here today! Snow? What is snow?

I love the idea.  We get many people moving into Florida but there are many leaving, too.  Just in the past couple of months I've had sales where the owners moved to Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. Many of our snowbirds will be moving into smaller homes in the north.  I say give people a reason to want to stay on our sites longer.

Gail,

I was trying to do the same thing as you explain, however professional members are only allowed to select a total of 30 selling areas and premium members are allowed 75 areas.

This is including the areas you already have selected as your current selling areas that you really do sell in.

I gave up and just stuck with Florida and selected some other areas up and down the west coast and added them to another page titled "Other Florida Listings."

I would of loved to do this.  I wanted listings for every state on my site and some from other countries in case people were looking for second homes.  

I think it would be cool if we could display every single handshake listing in the system on our websites if we wanted to, but have it somewhat oraganized where they could search from one page all the states and countries for listings, and anytime they click on a listing if they are on our website, it still brings up our contact info, just like it does now.  Then we could refer the lead out to someone that works in that area.

The possibilites of referrals could be endless!

Gail, sorry for taking so long to respond to your question ... have been sick the last few days ... I was successful approving the handshake with Becky ... but haven't done anything with it yet as I still don't know whether it's a good idea legally ... I did notice one thing though ... after adding two Florida counties to my "selling areas" ... I now have a lot of new neighborhoods to choose from in my handshake listings selection, so I'm sure it would work but it will be a major headache trying to search through the towns that way. Because the towns are not identified by state or at least the county they are in, if you were to add couple more out of state selling areas, you would simply get lost among all the new towns you could choose to display. So unless they get somehow organized, it would be a total nightmare trying to manage it. ... not sure if I'm making any sense here ... it's hard to explain it.

Maybe you simply need to use the KISS formula.

For example, if I added a link on my site to view listings in Florida and requiring a registration form, why couldn't I send the viewer to Gails' site and follow up with an email to her with the viewers registration information? We could both follow up with the potential buyer to see if they saw anything of interest and whether they had a home in Illinois to sell. By mutually agreeing on the linking, referral agreements would have already been in place.

The only problem I can see with this is the inter-linking of P2 to P2 sites which is very questionable. A page full of links to other P2 state sites would look like nothing more than a link farm to search engines.