carpenterrealestatenews

Carpenter Real Estate News

Great Tools for your next open house

January 25th, 2011

At a Sales Meeting last week I was talking about our new GPS HomeSearch™ program and an Associate mentioned it would make a great conversation starter with visitors to an Open House.  What a great idea!  We built on that idea and suggested an agent might want to get a plexi-glass “take-one” stand at Office Mart to put copies of our new GPS HomeSearch flyer out on the kitchen counter as a reminder to the agent to talk about it…demonstrate it…and have the visitor leave with a copy of the personalized flyer to remind them how to access the GPS HomeSearch tool.  We all agreed today’s Open House visitors would love to learn about a high-tech tool like that.

If you’re not familiar with our GPS HomeSearch program, simply go to Carpenter’s website at callcarpenter.com using your smartphone and click on the “Find Nearby Properties” button at the top of the page.  By magic, your smartphone will show you all the homes for sale sorted by the nearest homes to you within a one mile radius.  Carpenter is the only local real estate firm to offer this tool.

In addition, another great idea is to have personalized copies of our “6 Reasons Today May Be the Best Time in 40 Years to Buy a Home” report on display in your next Open House.  This report outlines the 6 reasons your Open House visitor needs to become a homeowner TODAY!  The report is available to Carpenter agents through our Intranet and contact management system, i-Contact, and can be fully customized to the agent’s identity.  And like the GPS HomeSearch flyers, it can be displayed in one of those clear plexi-glass holders on the kitchen counter.  Another great “value-added” conversation starter.

Posted by:  David Caveness


tagged with , , , , , | 0 comments »

Share With a Friend
 

 

Location, location, location…

January 25th, 2011

Carpenter Realtors is the first to bring location-aware home searches to smartphones.  It’s pretty slick – If you’re standing in front of a house for sale and, for example, you want to see what else is for sale in the area, Carpenter Realtor’s callcarpenter.com mobile-aware website will allow you to see other homes for sale starting with the closest on down in a one mile radius.  Nice.

The search depends on the GPS chip sitting in your smartphone – your iPhone, Android device, Blackberry, Windows phone, etc.  The only caveat is that you have to have your GPS turned on and you have to allow our app to access your location.

If you’re like me, running a high-powered, large-screened, battery sucking hog of a smartphone, you leave non-essential services turned off to conserve battery.  When I’m not at the office or at home I leave my wifi off for example and almost all of the time I leave my GPS off.  So before performing a location-based search such as ours you must turn your GPS back on.  OK, that’s pretty obvious.  The next step isn’t so obvious and it does trip some folks up.

As a security measure you have to give applications permission to access your location.  The reasons for this may or may not be obvious to you but think of an app that can follow you wherever you go and know exactly where you are at any given time without you knowing it is doing that.  Not cool.  So as a security measure, you have to give those apps requesting to know your location permission to do so.  So if Google Maps or Foursquare want to access your GPS coordinates, you know they need those to work and probably aren’t doing so for any insidious purposes.

There are so many variations of smartphones these days and variations within them that I would have to write a Tolstoy-esque novel to cover them all.  (Here is what Apple has to say about location services for the iPhone.)  Basically you will either get a prompt telling you the app wants access to your location – tell it yes.  On some phones, however, you may have to go into the phone’s settings and tell it to allow applications to access your location first.  And, of course, have the GPS turned on when you do the search.  I don’t mean to make this all sound complicated.  Most people, including myself, haven’t had trouble and the search just worked.  If you’re one of the unfortunate few, however, I didn’t want you left out of this cool and very useful new feature.

And then use the new search function at callcarpenter.com.  It will tell where all the homes for sale are in the area you’re looking.  No map drawing, no townships to look up, no coordinates to enter.  Just, “Hey, what’s for sale around here?”.  Slick.

Posted by:  George Christodoulou


tagged with , , , , , | 0 comments »

Share With a Friend
 

 

 

©2010 Carpenter Realtors®. All rights reserved.
No reproduction, distribution, or transmission of the copyrighted materials at this site is permitted without written permission of Carpenter Realtors® unless otherwise specified.

Subscribe to this CarpenterRealEstateNews Blog RSS Subscribe
Follow us on Facebook

Sections

Contributors

Archives

Subscribe

Enter your email address:

Web Links

Keyword Tags

Map


View Larger Map

8722 N. Meridian Street,
Indianapolis, IN
46260-2331

Visitors

Locations of visitors to this page

Blog Links

Real Estate Blogs - BlogCatalog Blog Directory Top Real Estate blogs Blog Directory Blog Blog Flux Local - New York

Validation

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid CSS!