Technology For Agents

It’s been brought to my attention by a power user at our market center that Top Producer 8i may have done away with advanced searches.

If you had been a 7i user, you would have been privy to an extensive searching option which allowed you to build a custom search to quite a high degree of complexity.

Wanted to find all open house contacts that did not have an email on file? No problem! Or perhaps you’re looking for anyone without a phone number to apply an “email only” action plan.

Both of these types of searches are no longer available in Top Producer 8i. Joey Lam from Top Producer provided some insight:

The quick and advanced searches in Top Producer 7i are combined into one search in Top Producer 8i. Some of the search fields available in Top Producer 7i are not currently available in Top Producer 8i.

He’s going to be submitting a recommendation to development to bring back the advanced searches, which I appreciate, but why do away with it in the first place?

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A nifty tool from Top Producer was announced at the Keller Williams family reunion this year called Live Post. Essentially, it’s a way for agents to print single postcards, letters, and flyers straight from the 8i dashboard. The cards go to a printing company and are created, stamped, and mailed for you.

Not only does this save you time (and therefore money), but you’re also able to keep all of your systems integrated into Top Producer 8i and not among multiple vendors websites and databases.

• Live Post Product Information
• Live Post Pricing and Postage

Powered by PostNexus, Top Producer LivePost lets you professionally print letters, postcards and flyers, and send them by US Postal service, directly within Top Producer 8i Keller Williams® Realty Edition. With LivePost, you can customize Top Producer 8i mail templates with your own personal message, and distribute them to any of your Top Producer 8i contacts. And, no matter how many pieces you send, you’ll always receive the same per-piece rate.

This sounds like a cool deal for new agents wanting to get more into marketing, but I’d imagine you’d eventually save money with bulk mailing your own marketing pieces. I’ll be giving Live Post a shot soon and blogging my experiences.

Update: As of the date of this post, the setup fee for Live Post is $99. Printing and postage fees (see link above) are additional.

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One of my favorite contact managers just introduced a new feature that goes hand-in-hand with their market snapshot product. Market builder is an automated prospecting solution designed to streamline the direct mail process and help drive traffic to your market snapshot feature of Top Producer.

Learning About Market Builder

Choosing how your lead generation will be handled is undoubtedly a very important part of your real estate business. It’s important to keep your overhead low, conversion ratios high, and the level of complexity manageable.

We know that Market Builder aims to satisfy at least two of these requirements (conversion ratios and level of complexity), but is it still affordable?

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If you’ve been a subscriber to Top Producer, you’ve inevitably heard from their sales staff regarding the new Market Snapshot software being rolled out to many markets in the US.

This product will allow you to get great looking market updates for both buyers and sellers, which include sold history graphically mapped on a dynamic map. The map looks to be built using Microsoft Live technology, and buyers are updated by zip codes where sellers are updated based on a pre-determined radius.

The Market Snapshot provides valuable and timely data which addresses at-a-glance additional questions that consumers may have. This ability to trigger additional questions and concerns helps to shape a valuable dialogue with the sponsored agent and the inquiring consumer. This positions the agent as the interpreter rather than the simple provider of data which helps facilitate the first telephone contact. - Top Producer Market Snapshot

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In the past, Top Producer 7i hasn’t been the greatest email platform provider. Using their software, you can forward all emails to your Top Producer inbox and send emails from there, but the system really isn’t as robust as Google or Yahoo Mail, even Microsoft Outlook. Probably the best thing about using Top Producer for your emails is that when searching a contact in Top Producer, you can view their history and see a list of all emails sent to that contact in the past.

Our cries have been heard! Top Producer has now introduce Outlook Connector. This piece of software links your Top Producer account with Microsoft Outlook 2003 (2007 not yet supported) and comes with the following features:

• Email features within Top Producer 7i automatically launch Microsoft Outlook 2003 rather than Top Producer 7i’s My Email.
• When sending an email from Microsoft Outlook, the message is copied to the recipient’s contact history in Top Producer 7i.
• Search your Top Producer contact list and add contacts as message recipients, all from within Microsoft Outlook.
• Manage your Top Producer email and all additional email accounts directly from Microsoft Outlook.

This functionality comes at a hefty price, unfortunately, at $149. Though this is a one time fee, I have been using Top Producer 7i and Microsoft Outlook for quite some time now interdependent of each other, and I personally cannot see spending $149 to link the two at this time for a system that has been working fine up to this day.

As real estate agents, we must analyze all expenses and make sure that will all new added expenses, a replaceable income can be accounted for. In this case, linking Top Producer and Microsoft Outlook will not increase my sales directly, thus I cannot justify the expense to my business budget.

It’s always puzzled me why Top Producer charges for upgrades to their software such as this one. The new functionality should be used to entice new agents to become a user of their system, not as a way to continually hit the wallets of agents eager to invest in technologies that may not necessarily benefit their business. Top Producer 7i is a wonderful tool to have in your arsenal. A pricey upgrade such as Outlook Connector, though a nifty tool to have, is not really required and shouldn’t be invested in without making sure it can TRULY help your business become more efficient and prosperous.

You can learn more about Outlook Connector here.

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