Help-U-Sell Updates – Page 24 – Help-U-Sell® Connect

Help-U-Sell Success Summit

As many of you have already heard, we’re hosting the 2011 Help-U-Sell Success Summit from November 14-16, immediately following the NAR Annual Convention. The summit will be held at the Hotel Menage in Anaheim, Calif. You can find the details about the hotel and booking a room on our Set Fee Blog. The room rate is a great deal, and the summit itself is free.

As for the summit’s content, we thank all of you who contributed your ideas via our recent survey. The top two topics were:

Technology
Creative Financing

We also received a lot of write-in topics as a result of the survey. In order to accommodate as many of these as possible, we plan to hold many roundtable-type discussions simultaneously. Participants will be able to hop from one table to the next and soak up as much knowledge (and impart as much knowledge) as they can.

We hope you can join us in November!

OMS Upgrades – Forced Registration

By broker request, we have added an option to require visitors to register with your site. The default state does not require registration. If you would like your visitors to be forced to sign up with your site, follow the steps below.

Click on “website” under the Setup tab.
You will see the new dropdown menu titled “Search login requirement.”
You can choose from “none” (this is the default), “three searches” and “listing details.”

The “three searches” option will redirect a fourth search attempt to your registration page. The “listing details” option means that any visitor who clicks to see a property’s details will be sent to the registration page first.

Often, forced registration can significantly increase leads. Try out one of the options for a week or two and monitor your level of response. You can always switch to the other registration requirement or revert to allowing unlimited searches and listing detail views.

Experiment with the options and let us know what works best for your site.

OMS Upgrades – QR Codes and Leads Management Module Progress

We have some exciting developments to report. Those of you who participated in the Tech Time Tuesday meetings the past two weeks already know about these new tools. For those who have not been able to attend the meetings, here is a recap.

QR Codes

By popular demand, we’ve created a system to generate a QR code for every listing in the OMS. To access a listing’s QR code, open the listing and then click the “Reports” tab. You’ll see the listing’s QR code on the right-hand side. If you want to add the code to your printed brochure, select that option from the drop-down menu. The QR code will direct users to the mobile version of the listing.

You can save the code for use on printed materials by right-clicking on the image and choosing to save it. Some suggestions for use of the QR code are stickers and sign riders. One of our preferred vendors, Oakley Signs & Graphics, can print stickers for use on your existing signs and print the codes directly on new signs.

For more about QR codes, read our previous post on the subject.

Leads Management Module

The first phase of our Leads Management Module is complete. You can see your new web leads in OMS under the new Leads Management tab. Leads are color-coded based on their age. Red means the lead is more than two weeks old. Orange indicates between two weeks and five days, and green is younger than five days. Click on a lead to read the comment and to either delete or assign the lead to an agent. Once you “claim” the lead, it moves from the “New web leads” area to the “Leads” area.

On next week’s call, we’ll preview the next phase. It will allow you to add leads to the “Leads” area and you can sort them into types, such as “buyer,” “seller,” “walk-in” and “call.” Once the leads are converted into buyers or sellers, they will move to the “Contacts” area.

Help-U-Sell® Real Estate Announces New Franchise units in California

Sarasota, FL. – Help-U-Sell® Real Estate, the industry’s leading provider of set-fee real estate services, is proud to announce new franchises in Upland, Corona, and Redlands, California. Unlike traditional real estate companies that are struggling in today’s slower market, Help-U-Sell®’s unique business model is designed to allow their local broker/owners to thrive, regardless of the market conditions, while still providing a significant savings to consumers.

“While many of our competitors are downsizing or in a retreat mode because of the current market conditions, we’re launching an aggressive growth campaign,” said Ron McCoy, Franchise Opportunities Director, Help-U-Sell® Real Estate. “While our primary effort will still be the service and support of our local broker family, we can’t deny the response in franchise interest these past many months. This, along with the encouragement and support from our local brokers, has allowed us to again begin the pursuit of adding new members to the Help-U-Sell® Family.”
Tammy Whitehead, owner of the new Corona, CA office said, “Help-U-Sell® gives me a competitive advantage unlike anything else. The website and technology platform drives leads to my door and my set-fee offering is the best deal out there. It’s a win-win for both my clients and my business.”

Created 30 years ago, the Help-U-Sell® model was the pioneer for providing an alternative to the dated percentage based commission structure common in the residential real estate business, something that had gone uncontested for years in a market overrun by a monopoly of traditional brokerage firms. Help-U-Sell® forged a revolution in the real estate industry by proactively challenging the commission structure, and has continued to perfect its full service set-fee model to this day.

Help-U-Sell® Real Estate’s success has been founded on the ideal of providing its franchise offices the products and services needed for them to be as efficient and effective as possible, and seize a growing opportunity in their marketplace, while at the same time providing consumers with an alternative to the traditional commission structure.

In an industry that can be plagued by the false promise of the entrepreneurial myth and guessing what it takes to succeed, Help-U-Sell® has formed a unique, comprehensive and integrated set of business systems for its Network of offices. These business systems have been built by leveraging leading edge products, services, ideas and techniques. By creating this comprehensive system, Help-U-Sell® is taking the “entrepreneurial guess work” out of succeeding. And the result is one of the most dynamic, consumer-centric real estate systems in the world.

For more information on franchise opportunities with Help-U-Sell ® Real Estate, please visit www.helpusellfranchise.com or call (888) 619-7776.

Help-U-Sell® Real Estate is the world’s first set-fee real estate company, with offices in 36 states, and operations in South Africa, and the Philippines. The company has revolutionized the real estate industry by focusing on information and transparency to consumers. Help-U-Sell® differs from traditional brokers, not in the level of services provided by its licensed brokers throughout the country, but in the dollar amount that the consumer pays for those services.

January 11, 2011: OMS Upgrade – Approved Vendors Section

We have created an approved vendor section under the Marketing & Content Module. You can now view all the Help-U-Sell Approved Vendors with links to their websites. We will keep this page updated as we sign up new preferred vendors.

This update will be loaded tomorrow morning January 12, 2011.
Other updates include;

All new navigation buttons on the listing module.
We moved the Transaction History section from the Mandate tab on the listings module to the Reports tab.
Renamed the ‘Mandate’ tab to ‘Listing Status’
Fixed several 404 pages on broker websites resulted from listings that expired or was removed. The page will no longer show a 404 error page or listing not found page, instead it will redirect to your home page.
Updated the CMS: Removed the Style Builder and added several font edit tools directly to the main tool set.
Fixed property details error pages from Muscle Shoals MLS feed.
Fixed iFrame rendering issues in IE 8.
Fixed issue where incomplete listings in OMS displayed on broker website.