Real Estate and Technology

Here are some details on using My Showing Log, including some screen shots. I know I’ve done this before, but each time it gets a little better.

We will start at the beginning — What is My Showing Log?

An internet “tool” that automatically requests and collects feedback from other agents who show your listings.

Here is how it works:

1. Real Estate Agent calls to request a showing on one of your listings.

Below is a screen shot of the home page which is your starting point. Whenever you see a screen shot in this post just click on it to see a large, readable version. Use your back button to continue with the article. There are screen shots that show what each step of setting up a showing in My Showing Log looks like further down in this post.

2. Who ever is setting up the showing collects the agent’s contact information and enters it in My Showing Log.
3. The property, date and time of the showing is selected in My Showing Log and marked as approved.

Any of the following can happen automatically if selected:
Showing agent gets email confirmation of showing
Listing agent is copied confirmation via email
Owner is copied confirmation via email

After the showing:

• Showing agent is emailed a simple form requesting feedback on the showing.(which can be forwarded to the owner)
• Listing agent receives feedback via email and it is stored for later reference in My Showing Log.
• My Showing Log functions much like the “Floor Book” maintained by many offices to keep track of showings.
• Records can be shared and updated by groups with adjustable levels of access.
• Any group member can see the status of properties and showings in real time any place there is an internet connection.
• My Showing Log is great for handling after hours showing requests.

Features that make My Showing Log easy to use:

• Once showing agent contact information is entered My Showing Log remembers it for future use.
• The last twenty showing agents are kept in a handy list and can be utilized with one click.
• Each showing request is timestamped and the person entering the request recorded.
• each user can set preferences on how they want confirmation and feedback emails handled.
• Users can enter default confirmation messages as well as editing the message ath the time the showing is set up.
• The user can ad a personal note to the feedback request.
• Feedback gathered by phone or in person can be entered manually to the records.
• The feedback form includes a photo of the house and agent contact information.

For MLS associations, My Showing Log is designed automatically maintain agent contact information through a RETS conection with a local MLS.

If you would like to try My Showing Log, go to www.MyShowingLog.com and click “Get An Account”

It takes about fifteen seconds to enter a showing into My Showing Log. When you are done, depending on your choices, you may have sent a showing confirmation via email to the showing agent and copied it to the seller and the listing agent via email. You have scheduled an email feedback request to the showing agent the results of which will automatically be filed in My Showing Log and emailed to the listing agent.

My Showing Log has recorded who is showing the property, who set up and confirmed the showing and when it was done. This is information you can access from any internet connection.

When you first open My Showing Log it may not look like much. Even after you have entered or imported your listings the home page is pretty simple looking. To set up a showing, locate the property to be shown on the list and click the “set up a showing” link. The quickest method of selecting the showing agent is to enter their MLS code. There are other shortcuts for selecting the showing agent as well.

Click the screen shots below to enlarge them, then use the “back” button on your browser to continue.

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Once you select the showing agent, select the date and the time of the showing and and click “submit”.

Make sure you complete the status column and submit. If you don’t check everything in the status column the showing remains “pending” and no confirmation or feedback request will be sent out. If you have been unable to reach the seller to confirm a showing, you can leave it pending to be confirmed later by you or someone else in your group.

Clicking submit brings you back to the home page which displays your upcoming showings. You can click the “details” link at any time to review or edit the details of the showing.

My Showing Log ?is web based, there is no computer setup. Everything just works,  ?as long as you have internet access. All you need to do is go to myshowingLog.com and click “get an account”. This article is focusing on members of ? North Star MLS, but anyone can get an account. Members of the North Star MLS will click on the first choice. In order to get your account you will need to know the email address you have registered with the MLS and you will have to be able to open an email sent to that location.

After providing your name , office etc. you will be sent an email with a link to your new account and instructions on how to get started.

Getting your listing information into my showing Log.

The information required by my showing Log is minimal. ? You need to enter an address and you should enter a price. Uploading a property photo increases your feedback responses. If you enter an expiration date my showing log will warn you when the property expiration is approaching.

Why is My showing log ?Free?

There might not be a completely reasonable answer to that. I know that Google started by offering its services for free and still offers many things for free. ?The approach ?seems to have worked pretty well for them. Eventually we will charge $10 per month. We have to do this because MLS charges us for the agent Roster, there are development costs, hosting costs and simple maintenance. The advantage to you is that signing up is simple. Try it, see what you think, give us suggestions. We will try to make “free” last as long as possible.

Since the stated purpose of this blog is to advertise My Showing Log, I better do at least a little of that.

Here is how My Showing Log ?came about. Several years back I went to a seminar to pick up a few educational credits.

The speaker was a real estate attorney. He was banging away at the idea that we Realtors had a lot of work to do to justify our comissions. He was talking about how the internet was going to kill our business if we couldn’t justify ourselves. He said that new for sale by owner internet companies were going to give everyone a run for ?our money.

The speaker got me thinking. ? I thought if all of these people were going to sell their own homes maybe I ?should be part of that. I started a web site called doFSBO.com. ?This led ?me to ?a flat fee broker model which which I figured out pretty quickly ?was not for me. I’m not a list ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy and a person has to get paid more than a flat fee ?to survive.

I downgraded dofsbo.com to an informational site.

But I had learned something. ?In breaking down the process of selling real estate for someone who knew nothing about it, I discovered there were things I could do to make life ?better for myself.

Being a broker ?owning a ?small company I get calls at home on weekends and at night from other agents wanting showings. Ocassionally I’d forget notes at home or the office ?and ?miss recording a showing. Sometimes ?I wouldn’t have a lockbox code handy. There were times I actually drove to my office to get information about a listing.

I ?realized ? the FSBO Site had a showing log and I started using it myself. Suddenly I had information for all of my office listings available to me wherever I had an internet connection. I hired a programmer to professionally reprogram what had already been done. We added user accounts for my agents and front desk help.

Since the beginning of time I had had trouble keeping up with feedback. I knew agents who just told customers they didn’t do feedback. I would like to say I was really smart and it just occured to me I could request feedback by email, but what really happened was I got a feedback form from another agent using some other service. I thought it was a great idea and I checked it out.

The problem was that I didn’t like the way the service worked. The listing agent had to type in a lot of information for every showing and the system for requesting feedback had a very “spammy” feel to me. Every agent was on their own and there was no way to tie an office together.

I spoke with another broker who voiced the same frustrations.

It seemed like we should be able to tie the feedback thing into the tool I already had. I went to work with my programmer again.

The result is My Showing Log. You can access all of your listing information all of the time. You can allow other agents in your office, like the floor person or your assistant to set up showings. My showing log is smart enough to find showing agent information from an MLS ID or a partial name. It does this using a direct ?RETS connection to MLS. ?You can make notes about the showing agent or the individual showing. My showing log remembers the last twenty agents who requested showings so you can just click on the name to enter a new showing.

When a showing is set up My Showing log timestamps the request and automatically keeps track of who entered it.

Just click a box and My Showing Log ?will send an email confirmation to the showing agent. If you like it will copy that confirmation to the seller and/or the listing agent. After the showing has occured My Showing log will send a simple form to the showing agent requesting feedback. The results of the feedback response are stored in my showing Log. You can also have the feedback results emailed directly to your seller and to your own email account. The response rate is greater than 80%.

If you happen to speak with an agent and get feedback on a showing its easy to ad this to the data collected on line. If you are in an area with non-MLS agents or if you want to record a visit by an appraiser just ad the name and it will be remembered.

My Showing Log does not require much information to set up a ?listing and its best if you enter ?each of those few ?fields even if they are not required. Specifcally, remember to upload a property photo. This increases your feedback response rate. Also be sure to enter the expiration date of your listing. Having an expiration date allows My Showing Log to warn you when a property is about to expire. We have had several comments ?saying what a nice feature this is.

The current My Showing Log is excellent, but there is a lot more to come. We have plans, but we would like your ideas as well.

Through the years I have come to prefer computer tools that don’t involve buying a program and installing on a computer. Computers get old, they break or catch a virus. You might even use several different computers in a day - who can afford the time and expense of maintaining multiple computer programs?

The words ?to describe ?a computer tool that is not a program installed on your computer are “web based”. Our “Feedback Tool” is called “My Showing Log” and it is web based. It works from anywhere you can connect to the internet. With all of their web based products, google is a master of this approach. I consciously tried to copy a tiny part of their successful approach.

The buzz word on the internet today is “communities”. The big internet companies are racing to develop “communities” for everything, sharing video, personal profiles, music. Just like a village can help to raise a child, a community on the internet can give an idea life. My Showing Log allows you to work as an individual or form a community such as a sales team or office.

What I mean by community here is that with My Showing Log you can form a group of individual users. You have your own account and data, but you can allow other’s to access it. The old fashioned equivalent would be giving contact information to the floor person so they can set up showings or letting an assistant call for and record feedback. My showing log allows different levels of sharing that can be simply assigned or taken away.

The computer has a huge advantage over these old examples because you can access your information anywhere, any time. If you or anyone in your community makes a change everyone in the community sees it in real time. Click here for some examples.

In its simplest form, My showing log is a website that stores information about your listings and provides you with ?information ?to contact ?other Realtors. Its a lot like an electronic form of the little book you keep for the floor person or front desk person to refer to when setting up showings.

You can access My Showing Log from anywhere and you can keep it private, share it or un-share. When the floor person sets up a showing they can find all the information about the listing very quickly in My Showing log. They can quickly verify the showing agents office, phone number and email with the click of a mouse. My showing Log can send the showing agent a confirmation for the showing via email. It can send a copy to the listing agent and the seller if you wish. After the showing occurs my showing log can send an email to the showing agent with a simple feedback form for the agent to fill out.

When the showing agent submits the feedback form, feedback is stored for later use. My showing Log can also email the feedback results to the listing agent and the seller if you wish.

Since my showing log is web based, you can access it and set up a showing at any time and the information is available to your community in Real Time. If you don’t want to be in a group, you can be out of it with the click of a mouse. You can rejoin just as quickly.

If you’ve ever had a listing, you’ve had a customer that wants to know whats going on with it. Feedback is something you can’t avoid. To most of us feedback means chatting with the showing agent after a showing takes place and getting a general feeling for how things went. It seems a simple matter to call the showing agent right after the showing to find out how it went.

The problem is that you might not remember to do it right away or the agent might be hard to reach. Maybe the agent doesn’t remember the house or the conversation gets sidetracked and you don’t ask all of the questions you should. Have you ever collected feedback and not communicated the information to the seller? In this new information age some sellers expect ?feedback after every showing.

A different, but related problem is when you get a lot of negative feedback. Good Realtors have lost good listings because they keep calling and saying the property is over priced. The seller gets sick of hearing it and they associate ?the negative feedback ?with you, the listing agent. They shoot the messenger.

More information on My Showing Log Feedback Management

I have developed a tool that automatically requests and tracks showing feedback. Â ?It is simple, reasonably priced and it works. There is very little time to spend learning how it works. You can still call agents for feedback if you want and use the showing log to record your notes. You will find, however, that the automatic feedback form gets more information more consistently.

You will also discover that customers are more accepting of the data on the feedback form than what you tell them directly. Sometimes a seller will say “Whats wrong with that agent” and you will know they would have been quietly thinking ?bad things ?about you if they hadn’t read it for themselves.

I didn’t set out to build a real estate program to sell Realtors. I started by organizing myself, then my office. Next thing you know I hired programmers to make my simple little thing better. I still sell real estate, I am a broker ?and have ?agents working with me. I use my own program every day and am constantly making it better.

Practical means using technology not just for the sake of technology but because the value delivered is greater than the cost. ?Cost includes the time spent by the real estate agent figuring out how to use the technology.

Realtors come from different backgrounds, different generations ? and varing levels of skill with regard to technology. Technology solutions that work the best are different depending on the Realtor. Each Realtor is succesful because of their unique, individual traits. ?

I started in the Real Estate business directly out of college. Sometimes I feel like if ?I were a fly, technology would be fly paper. Through the years I have spent a lot of time in the pursuit of technology, not always to my benifit.

It is interesting to me that my most productive and profitable times in Real Estate are when I concentrate on basic sales rather than working with new gadgets. When I adopt something new there is a learning period that slows me down.

It would be wrong to say that Real Estate Agents shouldn’t worry about new technology. When I started in Real Estate the most important technology was the real estate calculator. Still to come was the common use of computers, electronic forms such as zip forms, cell phones and the internet.

If I had not concentrated on technology, I would not be as comfortable with my world as I am now. You could say I payed for that comfort in advance by putting the time into technology as I went.

Many companies selling technology capitalize on fear of being left behind. There is some truth in that approach and a lot of hype. Some technology is sold more to show off than to be used. ?Many of us don’t mind flashing around the fancy new phone or bragging about our web site. The best technology though, ?is the stuff you use without even thinking about it.

Just when you think you are up on everything, something new comes around the corner. I wonder how much of it all we really need. ? Sales is still a person to person business.

To survive in Real Estate you have to be able to filter out the noise and the fads. Everyone has an angle that works for them. Marketing folks are constantly looking for common hot points that make sense to everyone in the industry. “Isn’t my product worth it if you can sell just one more house with it?” ? The answer is, “maybe”.

“I’m the guy who sells all of those pens to Realtors.” “you need your name on the bulletin board in the grocery store” ? or how about the front cover of the magazines at the clinic. You need a blackberry, you need a my space account, you need your own web page, each one of your listings needs its own web page. There are a million ways to spend your advertising dollar.

Yes you’ve got to advertise and keep up with the times, but none of it is worth a nickle if you don’t take care of what you already have. Most agents lose customers and leads because of weak follow up. Top producers know that organization and communication ?are as important as advertising. If you are organized you are in a position to capitalize on the more of the leads that already come across your desk.

The main idea here is discussing ? an automatic feedback tracking system called ? My Showing Log.

I’ve put it in blog format in case there are comments or questions. I like the sound of my own keyboard so its likely subjects I cover will expand to include discussing the practicle use of technology in Real Estate in general.

MyShowingLog.com

If you are looking for quick answers about my Showing Log try this link, because I’m not focusing on “quick” right here at the moment.