http://www.ubertor.com/

Keep your credit card in your wallet on this one!

Michaela:

Thank you so much for that post.  It makes me feel a great deal better. I am giving you stars for this one.  Thanks for sharing your trail runs as well.

Thanks Michaela.  I try to be as objective as I can be about what other technology companies are delivering, and what their strengths and weaknesses are - which is part of the reason I'm in Pewaukee, WI right now.

So on that note, this is a little bit of a hijack - out of curiosity, if you had to pick one thing that we could improve on/develop/release, what would it be?

I'll chime in on this one but I have more than one...

1)  CUSTOMIZABLE forms!!!!

2)  Drop down menus

3)  Much better email system:  too much spam and the spam controls don't work (they even send messages from Point2 to spam) etc.

Those are the top three improvements I would want.

Square Space !

http://www.squarespace.com/pricing/

I have a cheap version for my storage business just to try it out

http://www.AbbeySelfStorage.com

I would like to see point 2 offer personal web/business sites also, more revenue for point 2 plus a big help for us members that would like to setup a personal home pages, small business etc.

I already have my property management site with Point 2 now  although it is a freebie  http://www.WaldenGlen.net

For 17 bucks a month at Square Space its a steal for my storage property is a deal.

After all Point 2 has everything in place now to offer this type of program, all you need it a name for it,, Point 3 ?

VanceSpace

I'd like for my customers to be able to search more effeciently by ammenities or location such as waterfront, pool, etc.   :)

There are others but I guess we should start a wish list on the board...

oh, wait...we have one there already, lol.    

Carey:

One thing?  P2's weakest link?  Auto load listings from MLS!

A Better Menu system with drop downs as an option would be nice too.  I know we can use CSS but I prefer KISS - keep it simple s----.

And I know Carey said "one"  but, a way to tweak ALL the meta tags on the site such as "robots" etc.

I do agree top of the list is customizable forms.

Free custom forms that you can use on your Point2 web site: http://formsite.com/

This probably should be on the message board after the hi-jack.  I don't think any one is a bigger P2 fan, than I.  I think this is similar to Lonn's post, my 'fantasy" would be to somehow integrate the MLS data with the P2 handshake data, so a SINGLE SEARCH PAGE would display both, the P2 stuff would replace the corresponding MLS listing in the search. The search results page would "highlight" the P2 listings as a "showcase" or "spotlight".

That is my FANTASY, but day to day the biggest help for me would be to be able to add attachments to "Prospect" and "Drip" emails.

I vote for the customizable forms, menu drop downs and Troy's request for prospect email attachments.  Yes, both forms and menus can be done with with other tools, but it would be so much nicer if they were integrated.

Michaela

Vance, where do you always find these funky sites and names? It does look like a great option for a secondary site. Any major drawbacks you've found with that one so far?

---------     ----------------------        --------------------------

Check this one out

http://www.myers.com/realestate/

Square Space works good and you can become a reseller if you want to.

Vanceweb

Yes, customizable forms would be a fabulous tool!

I would also like to see easier ways to create a banner or more banner options.

Thanks for the link Steve - and Vanceweb-- "surf on!"

Michaela:

Just to clarify, my FANTASY would not eliminate entering the listings on the website, we would still do that.  I am suggesting integrating an MLS IDX feed with the P2 handshake data, including our own listings. Combining them into one search page (see previous post).

I know it would be a huge undertaking, and very unlikely to happen, that is why I labeled it as “fantasy”.  However, P2 took on a task, with the “Neighborhood Directory” that I think far less useful, and nearly as ominous.  (I hardly dare say this, but my fantasy would be worth a little more to me in terms of cost.)

For now email attachments... please.

Vance:

I was checking Square Space out last week more for a "blog" than their website capability. They certainly do get some rave reviews from some big names...so how do you like them? I was comparing them to WordPress and Typepad, as I keep dragging my feet on moving everything over from my P2 blog to one of these, but I have vowed I will have this completed by the end of December.

Before going with Point2, I checked out about 6 companies out there for "real estate websites" including Myers, Superlative, and Ubertor. All were good and Superlative, Ubertor and Square Space offer some very "professional" looking sites. So certainly if I was just interested in a "web page" more for informational purposes (even a neighborhood website) and if I were looking to hit the "luxury" market...they would be a good choice. And Square Space sounded very easy to use as a blog format.

But like Michaela...I found none that do what Point2 does. When I first signed up, I was so surprised at all the reports I kept getting and I also enjoy the coaching calls (they're have been some good tidbits in those).

Anyway...I'm with Point2 unless they do something really drastic, but it is good to stay on top of what is out there.

Hi Connie

If I had to choose out of all that are mention here except Point 2

I would go with Square Space for sure, they are on edge and will a force to be reckon with in the biz  and the price breaks are great, it is also user friendly.

VanceSquare

I agree that the MLS interface would be nice. I'm sick and tired of entering my listings twice.  I would even go for something where I could upload a csv file to save some data entry on my part.  Then I could tweak each listing for the special points and pics instead of having to enter the same standard data for each one.

Micheala, I too, periodically look at other stuff out there.  Eventually I figure someone will come up with something to wow me or have better pricing.

Hi Michaela

Na I won't deal with Myers because of the so called setup fee that sets up nothing but their lining in there pockets.

Setup fees should tell ya something about a company, think about it ?

its just some add on junk fee, kinda like brokers charging a transaction fee for record retention fees on both sides no less!!!

How can they say they have the customer best interest in mine when they stab them in the back with a junk fee/setup

Junkyard fee

Myers wants only $199 setup fee

How about I bill them for putting this on the net,Via this blog, I will call a Net fee and charge a bigger fish net fee.

Sharkie

Personally, I don't think Vance is a real person.  He has too much time to research.  How could he work?  

I agree with all above:

Easy forms that can be customized.

MLS integration for handshakes with the option to enter manually or direct integration from MLS.

Drop down menu's.

I would also like to see a lot more features that include audio and video. I believe this will be the future of real estate. Good productions will capture attention and generate stickyness to the site. The options on the P2 tour are a good start. Perhaps you should have an option for video tours by neigborhood for those that prefer to preview homes that way.

Anyway, that's my two cents worth.

REW (real estate webmasters) would be my hands down choice if P2 didn't exist.

And what would I like P2 to add, * toughness * to make handshake work properly and not let agents slip their contact info in the description and pictures and of course, remove and archive their sold or expired listings.

ha ha  Gloria

I am sitting as I write this post and so far my 2:pm closing on a new home  in Wallnut Hills is now a 4:40 pm closing today in calhoun

I just sold that Dalton building that was closed 2 weeks ago for a second time and will close on Jan 4th 2008 Yehaw that is the  big metal building that you can see next to my storage property at

www.abbeyselfstorage.com

I really don't work Gloria sort of, I let others join in and reap and share the rewards with me, all I do is stick to my new stuff and commercial and few resales.

Our Florida office will be expanding into Georgia in the new year an that is music    http://youtube.com/watch?v=tdqNkWg0Dr8     to my ears  this should be fun :)

VanceMusic

Hi Gloria and Michaela: you're right ... I think he's a robot ... or maybe a spider? ... that's how he knows all these websites ... he's seen it all before

----------- ------------------       --------------------------------

Well I have seen a good bit since.

I have been on the net since 1994  I am sure others have seen the changes over those years also, those web sites we are talking about I did investigate them and so far not to impressed with them except Square Space just my opinion.

Real Estate on the net ?? what?

That will never happen, well it did in a big way and will even get bigger then it is today.

The tools we have available today to market ourselves in never ending and lets us reach out around the world as I said a while back we are Real Estate Ambassadors now, in Orlando and Miami especially as in other markets that have a large international presents.

The competition in real estate on the net is fierce and you gotta be in to win it everyday , "What Ever It Takes"

Michaela that will work.

I have not seen to many Point 2 sites rank well have you?

Vance

? Which one are you using Michaela , I will give it a shot

I have no desire to auto load listings from the MLS. Our MLS stinks -- 6 photo max and 3 lines of descriptive text. I'll take the P2 listings over our MLS any day. It doesn't take that long to enter a listing.

Drop down menus and forms can be done on a P2 site. It's not real user freindly, but it can be done. If P2 ever implements both those things, I hope they really beef up the support staff, because the phone is going to go crazy!

The Handshake feature could be an amazingly powerful tool. But it is abused far too much -- contact info displayed, sold/expired listings and the search is tedious.  I know it is supposed to be "self policed" but there are over 1,000 Point2 Agent users in my market so there isn't enough time in the day to look at every site and listing.

A truly integrated contact management system would be a real plus. I'd like to be able to customize email drips *completely* -- format, attachments, more than one email address per prospect, add different triggers like birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

Editable CSS stylesheets would be wicked cool.

I would love to be able to use Firefox to edit my site.

Oh, and lose Community Server as the blog platform.

That's all one thing, right? :)

OK, if I could only have one thing -- I'd love to be notified when someone is approaching the end of a drip campaign, with an option to start the drip over or put them on another one. With 2400 prospects in my P2 database, it's impossible to monitor them closely. Who knows how many I've lost because I had no idea they'd dropped off drips.

No one said anything about taking away the ability to hand enter your listings.  If that floats your boat then great, but I'd like to be able to auto-enter by entering the MLS number or upload a csv file or something and stop all this data entry. We aren't a large agency (4 of us) so we only have to enter about 120 or so properties a year but that is still a lot of data entry.

Course, for us that part of the usefulness of the P2 site will be lessened when we get our new MLS system.  Most of my 'Net contact with prospects will probably changeover to the MLS contact management system.

Jay:

As usual, you are the man! Hey didn't I hear about an opening at P2 recently...? I don't think they could do better!

I agree with everything in your post, but just to clarify, again, I never suggested auto loading listings into the website from the MLS. My suggestion would be to, huh... mingle (?) an MLS feed with our listings and the P2 handshakes (that would all be hand entered with lots of photos and description, etc. as they are now), but the P2 listings in the search results would, huh... stand out, because they display so much better.

2400 prospects??? Man, I think I'm gonna give up!!!

I've been a member since 2003 and I have 1247 prospects in my P2 mgmt module but before I went to the professional level about 2 years ago (+/-), I didn't keep people in P2.  If someone started out in P2, I would move them to another database (ACT), then delete them in P2. I need to clean out the junk right now. I'm a little behind in my weeding so I'm just guessing that 40 or 50 of those are junk.

There are workarounds to both customized forms and drop down menus, albeit at a cost in most cases.

I think the Handshake system needs an overhaul in order to ensure both rock solid integrity.  Automatic expiry of listings for Standard users (with an option for auto-email renewal) would likely eliminate many stale listings among members who've moved on or simply have stopped using P2 as their provider of choice.  I can't help but assume that the majority of stale listings reside with standard (FREE) users.  Unfortunately, it's only human nature not to be as mindful of things you don't pay for.

I like Jay's comment about customized trigger points for drips etc based on a beefed up contact management system.

Steven - thanks for the formsite.com recommendation.  Tried it out and it works great.  Quickly put together a good looking MLS search form for my site.

Further to my 2 cents, here's one more penny...

I should have qualified my comment above.  Yes, there are workarounds to customized forms.  I use one that is rather straightforward, simple to use and economical.

However, aside from the fact that the forms are not integrated in Point2 for ease of set up and maintenance...the HUGE downside is the lack of automatic integration in the Point2 contact management (ie Prospect) system.

With a built in custom form system, there would be an obvious benefit in customizing the information for each of our own individual local communities, lines of business and markets.  However, there would also be major ancillary benefits of being able to integrate forms fields with our current prospect management and drip systems.

I'm sure it's no techical walk-in-the-park to do, but it would really set Point2 apart from the pack..."Dream Team" or not.

So for example, the ideal would be to set up a form with common and  such as "first name" "surname" "address" etc that mirror the fields in our contact management system.  When a user fills out the form, we would not only do we get a copy of the completed form but also an automatic addition the individual to our prospect list.  Add to that the ability to trigger a particular drip system based on the particular contact form completed and you now have a very robust system.

When you cut to the chase, our websites are nothing more than pretty lead generators.  Core functions revolve around lead generation.  All others are simply cute bells and whistles.

An integrated customized form system like the one above would be a crowning achievement to a fine Point2 system, IMHO.

Man, just look how easy it would be to add attachments to prospect and drip email (comparatively speaking).

(Or you could just hire Jay to to the integrated contact mngmt)

I would love to be able to do a search by listing notifiers periodically after the listing notifier has been completed - & possibly within a specific date range. I don't know if there is a way to do it currently, but I have to look prospect by prospect.  I don't know if I am making any sense but sort of like how I can check to see how many e-mails are opened etc.  I would like to have that at a glance for listing notifiers as well. And if there are no listings that match I can set aside time to do MLS searches or FSBO searches that may match the prospects criteria.

An update to the contact management system and just a few more form options.  

Wow, this is like asking Santa and actually having a chance to get it!

Ditto everything Jay said! Especially concerning the Phoenix MLS.

I am often contacted by Point2 competitors asking me to design for their clients, so I ask them to set up a trial site for me to play around in. So far, I've not seen anything that compares favorably or even comes close. I love being provided with a blank slate that allows me to exercise my technical and artistic capabilities almost without limitation.

Having been involved on the development end during the setup phase of yet another competing system, I fully appreciate the complexity of what Point2 is doing and applaud their efforts.

While integrated IDX might be nice, I equally enjoy having Point2 members all over the world. I doubt that would be possible if Point2 tried to integrate IDX everywhere. Other parts of the world don't enjoy the ubiquitous availability of IDX data that U.S. agents expect. I'm working on a site for Canadian brokerage right now that doesn't have access to IDX data at all.

When I heard P2A was fixing the CMA I was talking myself into becoming a paying member. I mean there are quite a few free web site hosts, free blog sites, and other tools I can get on the internet without paying. I can even use an IDX link from other sites to the free ones with a quick copy and paste. Most vendors think of agents as their cash cow waiting to be milked. So, the CMA thing had me going. Moo! But, that ain't no toolkitcma.com presentation P2A made. Let me know when you make a real CMA and maybe I'll become a paying member.

My 1 wish is go with Jay's post especially...

Drop down menus and forms (aren't the drop down menus in the "office"?  -It's time to share.

Biggy...A truly integrated contact management system would be a real plus. I'd like to be able to customize email drips *completely* -- format, attachments, more than one email address per prospect, add different triggers like birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

Firefox to edit my site

Editable CSS stylesheets (not exactly sure what this is, but I bet it would br good.

OK, that's my 1 wish.  

My wish is to have a calendar and auto notify for appts. like Top Producer.  I would love to be able to set up my appointments in a calendar.  I called and asked about this about 2 years ago...no thought as of then.  

I hope you don't mind me jumping in here.  I just found the blogs section on P2.  I read and blog with Active Rain but have really enjoyed these posts.

When displaying listings on our web site Would really really like to have more fields to filter such as active adult or golf course

Guess you all can tell we're in Florida, but would be great! That's my wish!

When you put your head on the pillow tonight just be glad that you DON'T have an Advanced Access website. They are completely down and have been down for quite some time. Whatever shortcomings P2 may have, the one thing they are consistent on is staying online! If you are interested in reading what recent past employees have posted you can go to my AA blog and you will know why I stopped referring agents to AA when they contact me for my opinion.

http://aapoweroutage.wordpress.com

I currently have 3 Websites with the Point to agent system,  Im working on my forth site which will be a standard free bee.   I think the Point to agent platform is pretty good but pages seem to load to slowly.  They have alot of features like when signing up from the upgraded memberships you can add as many pages as you want,  but the trick to this is knowing how to work the keywords and descriptions to help you rank good on google,

If anyone is Looking to Add a True MLS Search from your local MLS System feel free to contact me and I can set it up, No Monthly Fees, just a 1 time fee of $ 75.00.  Sorry no free bees here,  Its time consuming and overall way cheaper than those IDX Packages that you see.  Click the link below to see Mine

http://www.davidjrogers.com/MLS-SEARCH/page_2006521.html

I can also help you fix your keywords and descriptions to help with ranking better as well.  

David J Rogers II

Cell #  321-574-1167

www.DavidJRogers.com

I do not know if anyone else is having this problem, but searching, reviewing and sending the searched out listings is probolematic on POINT2.  The two (2) most important items that need attention with Point 2, is:

1.  MLS download via the mls# (this saves a huge amount of time); and

2.  Searchable Point 2, via a list of criteria, which is deliverable to customers.  I find it impossible to deal with listings notifiers when searching for properties for my customers.

Let me know what you think on this subject.

Thanks for bringing this issue up, and by the way, what are the "changes" to Point 2 and when is that happening?  Surely, that will be a price increase wthout doubt.

More detail, or search criteria in the listing notifiers would indeed be nice. I get complaints from people that sign up for listing notifiers that the homes they are sent are "all over the place", rather than the area they are interested in. When I get this sort of feedback I try to go into their listing notifier and make it more in line with what they are looking for but have not been able to satisfy most of them. I end up doing MLS searches myself and sending those to them but it is much more time consuming and hard to remember to keep personally doing these searches as often as a listing notifier would.

Having said all this, overall I am a "happy camper", here at P2. I think we have a very good website service, but there is always room for improvement.