TuwawiAgent.com

Have you seen our advanced new mapping features? See Real-estate website maps. Every property you upload can be seen on a map (whichever country it’s in). After uploading a property, select the ‘map’ tab and find the location on the map by scrolling and zooming. click on where the property is located, and click ’save’.

Easy eh? No need to carry a GPS device around with you. Your clients will love this new feature, and we’ve got a few more planned which will make your TuwawiAgent website stand out from the crowd!

The website creator has now been upgraded. As before, you can instantly create a website by choosing a theme and the website will be automatically be generated for you.

Now, you can add your own pages to your website, in any language without needing any technical knowledge at all. You simply click on the ‘Add new page’ button, and type in the text for your page and click save. Simple as that! The new page will automatically appear on your website - and you didn’t even have to call a web designer!

You can add pictures to each page if you want, by clicking on the ‘image’ button and selecting an image from your hard drive. You can copy and paste existing information from a Word document or even another webpage.

All new pages appear on the main menu for your website. You can change the order they appear by typeing in a number in the order boxes. a low number such as 1, 23, or 4 will make the page appear near the top of the list, while a high number such as 70, 76, 85 will make it appear near the botom.

TuwawiAgent websites are now the easiest to use with many more features than you’d expect in a typical real estate website system. Upgrade your website now and maximise your advantage!

Due to (popular) demand, we’ve just added 8 more themes to the available free real-estate websites. With the two types of website (standard and basic), that gives you a total of 26 different websites to choose from.

If you’re an existing member you can change your website to any of the new ones.

These websites are all instant. You can have one of them within a couple of minutes - for free - with no obligation!!

1. It’s really quick to upload a listing onto your website. Less than a minute including photos. Longer if you want to compose a nice description!

2. You can have an instant website for free - to get you started.

3. Websites powered by TuwawiAgent can look and be structured totally differently. Although our free websites are template based, your website can be totally unique due to our advanced web services interface which allows you full control over your own website whilst leveraging the power of the TuwawiAgent system.

4. You will know exactly how many visitors to your website have clicked on each property listing. Does your current website tell you that? Or are you left in the dark when it comes to identifying which listings attract the most attention.

5. Nobody else on the planet (at the moment) is offering you such a flexible system.

6. You can pad your website out with listings from other agents (if you want to). You still get the leads directly and can pass them onto collaborating agents.

7. You can advertise your properties on other collaborating agents’ website for free and with no extra work. Just click a button next to the agent’s name and your listings appear on their website. (They have to accept - obviously!)

8. You can edit the front page of your website and other pages at any time from the control panel. No need to learn HTML or pay a web designer.

9. Your listings get FREE exposure on property portals such as www.ahome.in and other country specific portals - and we’re adding more soon.

Ok, we’ve realised that there is some confusion as to whether we are an MLS or not. For those of you not sure what an MLS is, it stands for Multiple Listing Service, and is the primary way that realtors in the US collaborate. Basically, each realtor uploads their listings onto a central database. Every realtor in the MLS has access to this central database and can offer any property from the database to their clients. Most realtors will also have a screen on their website that shows all the properties from this central database.

This is all very well and good, but the standard MLS system is flawed. Most realtors will admit that they want more control over which listings they offer their clients. With an MLS, all the other agents’ listings get shown on your website whether you like it or not. You can’t exclude an agent who perhaps you don’t get on with or distrust. You’re either in the MLS - or not.

TuwawiAgent uses a more flexible approach. Realtors upload their listings to the system. They then decide who they want to collaborate with via the system. It’s as simple as ticking a box next to the realtor’s name. Then, only collaborating realtors’ listings will be shown on your website. Both parties have to agree, and either one can stop collaborating at any time.

So TuwawiAgent is a type of MLS, albeit a more advanced one.

The days of the standard MLS are numbered!

Make way for TuwawiAgent!

I know it’s been a while since my last post, but finally I can announce that the vendor and client modules are up and running.

The vendor module is pretty simple at the moment and allows you to keep all your property owner details saved for quick retrieval. Much more is planned, and soon every event that takes place to do with a vendor, e.g. if you send them an email or phone them, will be recorded so you can run a report and see exactly what you’ve done over time with each vendor.

The client module is a bit more advanced. Enter a client’s details and then enter the type of property they are looking for, along with the location and other details. We’ve tried to keep this as simple to use as possible while giving it a lot of flexibility. Then you click on a button, and the system tells you how many properties match your client’s criteria. Tick the MLS box and it will include other agent’s properties you are sharing with as well as your own listings. Click on the View button, and the system will bring up a list of all matched properties. Tick the ones you think are suitable, then click on the email button. Type your email message and click send. Then the system generates window cards (PDF’s) for each of the ticked properties and emails them to your client. Pretty cool eh?

Not only that, but the system remembers which listings you’ve emailed to each client. So if you later do another match for the same client, and you’ve already sent him 3 properties that show on the matched property list, then these 3 properties will have a tick box saying ’sent’.

Ah well, it’s definately back to work time here now.

Welcome to the first post on my ramblings about the

TuwawiAgent Online Real-Estate Listings Management System and MLS.

Phew, bit of a long title; maybe I’ll abreviate it to

TAORLMSM.

Or then again, maybe not

So what is TuwawiAgent all about and why shoud you join?

Basically, if you are a real-estate agent, it’s an online system for managing your property listings details. Yes, I know there’s already a few out there, but ours is different, and dare I say it,

better?

First, the sytem integrates with your own website, so any properties you upload onto the TuwawiAgent system show on your website. These same listings can then also show on some of our other property portals, such as the ’soon to be revamped’ www.property-abroad-for-sale.co.uk.

Your listings can also go onto other agents’ websites if you and they agree. Correspondingly, their listings can show on your website.

Why is this a good thing? Showing your listings on 10 websites is pretty likely to increase the leads you get.

Showing them on 100 websites should dramatically improve it. Having other agents’ listings on your website is more likely to get you business, as you can get referral fees by passing on interested clients to the agent who owns the listings.

As the entire system is online, you can manage your listings from anywhere; any office, any internet cafe, even from home. No need to install software on your PC’s.

We’re constantly upgrading and improving the system. Again, no need to keep installing upgrades on your own PC’s - unlike other systems.

The TuwawiAgent system is designed to be multi-currency. You can set your listings to be in Euros, but visitors can see them in dollars, or whatever, as the system converts the prices.

We’re working on a multi-lingual facility, so that visitors can see the websites in their own language. But as you can imagine, it’s a big job!

We’ve opened up the system to allow new members to join for FREE, which I’m pretty sure differentiates us from most of the other MLS’s who generally want a big fat fee upfront. Hopefully, you’ll like the system, and you’ll want to be more involved. We don’t try to lock people in, so no contracts. My view is, that if you like the system you’ll stay. If you don’t like it, we shouldn’t penalise you for that.

We really intend TuwawiAgent to be the best system around. The best MLS, the best real-estate websites, and the best listings management tool. We are always open to your suggestions as to how we can improve. Indeed, I’ve already spent many an hour discussing with agents what they need from a system, and it’s from these discussions that TuwawiAgent has evolved.

And why did I bother?

There are a hell of a lot of bad real-estate websites out there, and some good ones. There seems to be a split into two camps, those that go all out and spend thousands on a real-estate website, and those that seem to think a free script and a bit of tinkering in Frontpage will magically give them a super-duper real-estate website and produce loads of fresh leads. TuwawiAgent is designed to provide all the features of the expensive websites (and some news ones we keep thinking up), for the price of an average website.

In our view (IMHO), there’s no point keeping re-inventing the wheel for every different real-estate agent. The basics are the same. Upload a property with pictures and details, show it on your website. Keep track of vendors and clients. Where the system has flexibility, is in the presentation of the website. Indeed, every agent can use the same administration system, but have their website look totally unique.

My own pet-hate is when in order to see a full size photo of a property, a website makes you click on every photo thumbnail to see a bigger picture open in a new window. When you are seriously searching for a new home online - that extra clicking is not fun!! If each property has ten photos, that’s an extra ten clicks per property - you get the picture? Our websites allow you to hover the cursor over a thumbnail, and a bigger image appears - as if by magic!

This is probably enough for a first post, so I’ll stop now.

(sighs of relief)

Thanks for reading and come back soon, or register if you haven’t already done so.

Yours

El Gringo

The end of year, in which so much has happened. I would have time to reflect but it’s New Year’s Eve, and my wife keeps popping her head round the door and insisting that I get ready. No big celebrations tonight - just meeting a few friends - some of whom I haven’t met!

Hopefully this blog will give you an insight as to what we do at TuwawiAgent, and what it’s all about. Or, it just might give you an excuse to avoid put off what you are supposed to be doing!

Quote of the day - “Remember, don’t try to teach pigs to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pigs!”

Hey, I didn’t make it up - but I like it!

Thanks for dropping by!

El Gringo