We have just published a bunch of updates in our systems to give you more choices and better streamlined features when it comes to giving your listings the best online treatment possible. Please note, that these changes are available only in our Web Private Office; please fire up your Chrome, Safari, or Firefox and check it out if you haven’t yet: http://private-office.myrealpage.com

NEW DEDICATED SUPPORT FOR FLOOR PLANS

We now have a separate tab in the Listing Editor specifically for Floor Plans. Previously, you had to manage your Floor Plans through the Listing Documents which didn’t get proper visibility in the listing details views and one couldn’t look at the floor plans without downloading them. With the new Floor Plans tab, you can easily upload all your Floor Plans in one convenient location; and you can also customize the label for the dedicated tab and even enter an optional introduction text. In addition, if you upload PDF documents of your floor plans, they will be shown inside the page without the visitor needing to download them: less time spent fumbling with the documents and more on your listing page.

New dedicated Floor Plans tab in Listing Details.

New “Floor Plans” support in the Web Private Office: everything you need in one convenient location

BETTER SUPPORT FOR RICH MEDIA (VIDEOS, VIRTUAL TOURS)

We have also streamlined how you add and manage your listings’ videos and virtual tours. Both are now combined into one list; and we have also added the ability for you to change their default tab label, as well as add an optional introduction text. You can also use this facility to change your “Videos | V.Tours” tab into something completely different, like a tab dedicated to the listing’s neighborhood, with its own text, pictures, and videos.

New Rich Media support in the Web Private Office: more flexibility and convenience

FINE-TUNING DIALOG FOR GOOGLE STREET VIEW

It is obvious that you would like your listing to have best possible presentation online. You can now use our integrated, convenient dialog to fine-tune how the Google Street View of your listing looks online. You can simply launch this dialog and use the standard Street View controls to zoom in, pan and rotate the view to get the best possible look of your listing. Our system will remember exactly what you have done and will apply it to the listing.

New integrated Google Street View dialog for fine-tuning

STANDALONE VIRTUAL TOUR (MEDIA) PAGE FOR YOUR LISTING

We have long offered a standalone media presentation for your listing which you can add to your listing’s information in the MLS® system. Many MLS® systems allow you to submit such external links to feature virtual tours, images, etc. We have modified this listing presentation to include Floor Plans support, better image gallery and more.

How to access the Standalone Virtual Tour / Media page in the Web Private Office

New streamlined look for the Virtual Tour / Media page for your listing.

We hope you will enjoy using these new features as much as we enjoyed building them. Let us know what you think: feedback@myrealpage.com

We are very excited to publish a great new feature in our Listings Module: a set of tools to quickly and easily create and publish all manner of listings on your Facebook Fan Page. If you don’t know what Facebook Fan Pages are, we encourage you to check them out. In a nutshell, Facebook Fan Pages allow you to create a special landing page for your real estate business where you can engage your existing and potential client base. And now, you can compliment such a Fan Page with your listings, including listing search and predefined searches (in regions where available).

We have gone to great lengths to make the typically convoluted process of publishing on a Facebook Page, a breeze. Everything is handled from a single easy-to-use wizard dialog which takes you through all the steps and gives you a great deal of flexibility and customization.

At a glance, this new feature will let you:

• Quickly publish your listings, including a custom arrangement of your listings, such as “Only active listings”, “This listing at the top, followed by the rest of my listings”, etc…
• Publish any of your Predefined Searches (in regions where available), also including various arrangements.
• Publish your individual listings’ details
• Publish a special, facebook-friendly search form (in regions where available) to let your visitors search for listings right on your Facebook Page 
• Create special fans-only (fan gate) pages which show their true contents only to people who have liked the page, and otherwise invite them to like the page first (a way to build a fan base for your page)
• Completely integrated way to manage all your listing Facebook Tabs from the web-based Private Office, including the ability to publish and unpublish individual tabs.
• Manage one or many Facebook Pages and tabs all in one place.

A QUICK VIDEO TOUR

Take this new shiny tool for a spin: it’s slick and super easy to use! It will even let you create the Facebook Page right from the wizard.

Let us know what you think: feedback@myrealpage.com

We would like to introduce a set of new features that have just been published to myRealPage Private Office. We have given our Statistics package an overhaul to make it more usable and friendly. We have also created a tight integration for Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. It is now super easy to connect your website with myRealPage to a Google Analytics account, get quick Analytics stats, and with only one click, you can now connect your website to Google Webmaster Tools!

[ Find all the statistics in one convenient place ]

Here is a the brief summary of our updates:

• Created a new section in the Private Office for Statistics
• Created Google Analytics integration:
  • Instantly connect a Tracking code to your website's domain
  • Run quick reports, including comparative reports for a time period of your choice
  • Get started with Google Analytics in a few clicks even you didn’t have a Google Analytics account before
  • See a quick video tour of Google Analytics in myRealPage Private Office here
• Created Google Webmaster Tools integration:
  • Verify and link your website’s domain to your Google Webmaster Tools with one click
  • View and manage your Google Webmaster messages
  • Access your Google Webmaster Tools directly from the Private Office
  • See a quick video tour of Google Webmaster Tools in myRealPage Private Office here
• Listing Statistics received a complete facelift to make them easier to use and understand
• Virtual Office Website (VOW) Statistics also received a facelift and now sport easier-to-use controls

[ The above is a quick report view in the Google Analytics section in the Private Office ]

[ Quickly access Google Webmaster Tools and verify and link your website’s domains ]

[ Virtual Office Website statistics are easier than ever to use ]

We hope you enjoy these new updates and, as always, we would love to hear what you have to say. Send us your thoughts to feedback@myrealpage.com

We are very pleased to release a complete re-work on our Listing Feature Sheets. The new feature sheets have been completely redesigned and rethought and brought in line with the rest of the new Private Office. Our main design goal was to have the feature sheets produce great-looking results out-of-the-box but also give you fine control over customizations and adjustments which are inevitable when dealing with printed material. As a result, the new feature sheets pack a powerful interactive editor and easy-to-use tools.

We have created a quick video with the main highlights of the feature sheets.

At a glimpse, here is what the new feature sheets will let you do:

• Produce a great looking marketing leaflet for your listing out-of-the-box, with no or minimal adjustments necessary
• Edit any text on the feature sheet by simply clicking on it and editing
• Change, remove, or edit table-based features of the listing
• Change, zoom and pan photos; as well as change photos and images at will
• Resize nearly any element on the feature sheet
• Show or hide nearly any element on the feature sheet
• Customize branding banner
• Save feature sheets for later use to avoid losing changes
• Save feature sheets as templates to use your customizations on other listings
• Google map and QR code are automatically placed on the feature but can be further removed or customized

We hope you enjoy your new feature sheets. Let us know what you think: feedback@myrealpage.com

Over the past few months we have been hard at work re-evaluating and re-thinking how you, our clients, use our products. We know that you love the features, the power, the flexibility, the price, the all-inclusiveness. But we also heard you when you told us that you wanted our tools to be simpler and easier to use, you wanted to get off the ground quicker and spend less time finding out how to do things and more time doing them. We decided that we needed a new Private Office, one that would be web-based, and truly deliver on the promise of “making simple things easy and difficult things possible”.

We are very pleased today to launch the first beta version of our new Private Office. The Private Office is now completely web based; it was designed from the ground up to use the exciting new web developments, such as HTML5; and we are looking forward to growing with the web and making new web technologies part of our tools. There are too many improvements, redesigns and features to enumerate in one list: we want you to dive in and re-discover the familiar ones and find the new ones. We will be covering them on our blog over the next while, so stay tuned!

All you have to do to get started is fire up Chrome or Firefox browser and login into your account at:

http://private-office.myrealpage.com

Here is a brief tour in screenshots of the Private Office. Check it out:

Below is the view of the Private Office Dashboard: a starting point that takes you where you want to go.

Here is a new web-based listings module: everything you need to get your listings and IDX looking and behaving their best.

The new Listing Editor is completely re-designed with simplicity in mind. Explore it to find new things too!

Never get lost: powerful and intuitive navigation to let you get to where you need to be faster and easier.

We are very excited about the new Private Office release and we are looking forward to learning from your feedback and continuing to build on it. Please help us make it better: let us know what you think by dropping us a line to support@myrealpage.com

We are very excited to release the first beta version of our newly updated Website Builder or technically: Content Management System (CMS).  myRealPage has been offering a very powerful set of real estate website tools and features for a while now, but the purpose of this update was to make our tools easy to use for beginners and casual editing, and also retain and promote the proper use of our more advanced functionality.

We started with a complete re-think of the way our client sees the Content Management System, and tried to weave the user experience flow along the most natural lines we could see. This update makes our website tools completely web-based. It is introduced alongside the existing tools until we are confident that it is superior in user-friendliness and function.

The new tools can be accessed by simply navigating to http://[your-domain.com]/login-beta or you can launch it from your Private Office.

The update features improvements on the existing functionality and introduces new things, in particular:

• NEW: Fresh new user interface that puts all the prominent and frequently used functions at your fingertips
• NEW: Ability to make practically all changes to your website in “Live” mode without needing to go through the Edit-Publish cycle: this should be especially useful for ongoing maintenance of a website and casual editing and writing
• NEW: A new Quick Editor for pages: specially designed for simple and quick editing of content; it was built to make finding and editing page parts easy and fun
• NEW: Completely rewritten blogging tools: we aimed to create an intuitive writing-centric experience for bloggers
• NEW: Much improved Edit-Publish cycle that allows the use of a Staging area for your websites: the area where you can make changes without the public seeing them. We have created a dedicated place from where you can publish, browse, or discard all your changes and a special notification chevron to tell you what’s pending
• NEW: Much improved history of changes: we made it possible to find all the changes per page or a particular website setting, as well as for all changes together. You can easily preview the historic changes and recover them to Staging or Live websites
• NEW: A lot of contextual help and tips in the screens and next to form fields to give you answers to questions you may have as you explore the new interface
• … and much, much more ….

Please give our new Website Tools a try: we would love to hear what you think. We are still working to simplify and streamline more advanced features in our CMS, but it is currently fully functional and we hope you will like to use it as much we liked building it.

New Expanded Page List view:

New Quick Page Editor:

Quick Editor for a Mobile Website:

New Blog Post screen:

We would love to hear your feedback: leave your comments here, or send them to feedback@myrealpage.com

graphic art by icontexto

We are very pleased to publish a very large update to the myRealPage Listings product. The update covers a pretty wide area and introduces new functionality, boosts existing features, and improves user experience. myRealPage has been long offering a very powerful set of listing tools and features; and today’s updates are designed to let you take advantage of these easier and faster.

When you login into your Private Office, you will notice the new changes in the “Listings” section:

Here is a quick look at these 5 main sections:

Embeddable Listings and IDX wizard:

Embeddable Listings and IDX is an advanced toolkit from myRealPage which allows you to embed a powerful Listing Search engine (IDX) and a fully featured Virtual Office Website (VOW) in a 3rd party website, such as WordPress, Joomla, or even if a website is with another real estate website provider that lacks these features. It has proven to be a flexible option for many who want to take advantage of myRealPage listing functionality but continue running their existing websites.

The new Embeddable Listings wizard is a veritable powerhouse of options now. If before, you had a limited set of embeddable listing scriptlets, now you can configure very exactly what sort of listing content you would like to embed, including:

• Your listings, including custom categories, etc.
• Predefined searches
• Hand-picked listings combined with your listings or searches
• An individual listing
• A search form

You can also fine-tune how your listing content will appear by setting a theme, template, custom width and many other options.

We have also made sure that this wizard allows you to create and edit your Predefined Searches and Search Forms right in place, without needing to go to the Private Office to do so.

In addition, we have “webified”, this wizard so that you don’t need to login into the Private Office to access it. If you prefer to use this wizard outside the Private Office, simply follow this link to login into your wizard in your web browser.

Mobile Links and QR codes:

myRealPage has always taken mobile very seriously and has been offering free mobile listing tools for all its customers, those that do and don’t have myRealPage websites. myRealPage also released powerful, simple to use, fully editable Mobile Websites which can be tightly integrated with your regular website.

We have also created easy tools for our customers to access and use QR codes for listings and contact information. QR codes are a great way to publish mobile friendly content to smartphone users.

We have now combined all the mobile links and QR codes into one coherent interface where you can get mobile links to:

• Your listings
• Office listings
• Mobile listing search
• Individual listings
• and a QR code for your contact information

Predefined Searches:

Predefined Listing Searches have been very popular with myRealPage customers: they allow you to create “canned” search pages with listing results matching a particular set of criteria. You can create searches, like “Luxury Downtown Condos”, or “Core Area Lofts”, etc. The new interface allows you easily browse, create, edit and preview your predefined searches.

Note the new “Preview results” button in the Predefined Search wizard: it should allow you to easily verify that the search is producing desired results.

Search Forms:

Search Forms are a great way to create a specially pre-configured listing search formes for your website that accurately reflect your niche market and audience. For example, if you specialize in a particular neighborhood or types of properties, you can easily configure your search form to have those types of properties and neighborhood areas pre-selected, so your visitors start interacting with your listing searches right away.

The new screens allow you to quickly and easily manage your Search Forms:

Listing Showcases:

Listing Showcases are a great way to publish and advertise various groups of listings or individual listings via a variety of formats, such as:

• Listing slideshow with and without Flash
• Listings on a Google Map
• Listing grids
• Horizontally sliding listing bands
• Simple featured listings

These showcases can be created based on your listings, a predefined search, or a combination of hand-picked listings. They can be embedded in your website or any other website.

The new interface allows you to quickly and easily manage these showcases:

We hope you will find these updates useful and easy to use. We would love to hear your feedback: simply leave a comment here to drop us a line at feedback@myrealpage.com

-- Brought to you by myRealPage.com

We have just published a new feature in the Private Office that will allow you to import a listing from our database even if that listing is not listed by you. There may be many circumstances in which this is desirable: you may have participated in the sale of the listing or you may be cooperating with the listing agent to market the listing. We have also added an ability for you to duplicate a listing which may be useful if you are entering a bunch of listings from, say, the same condo complex, and most information is the same. In addition, we have added special markers to differentiate automatically imported listings and manual listings in your Private Office. We thought this may be helpful.

Do you have ideas or suggestions for our products or would like to give us your feedback? We are all ears! Leave your comments here or send them to us to feedback@myrealpage.com