SOFTWARE
switched to the cloud product with old Windows XP machines, and 22 users. They effectively saved £3,740 on licences while getting an upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft software. Of course this relies on Estates IT’s strong integration with
Office, which Nick Hubbard says is different from other cloud providers. “Everyone who takes our cloud version gets Microsoft Office with it,” he says, so that PC Homes Plus is “a complete business in a box.” Best of all, most staff already know how to use Office, so there’s no need to retrain them.
BELLS AND WHISTLES While the cloud is changing the way IT infrastructure works, we’re also seeing huge changes in the way people communicate with each other. Stewart Anderson says that it’s important to distinguish bells and whistles, individual technology applications, from the real revolution in conceptual thinking. “There’s a big transformation going on in terms of how information is being delivered,” he says, “and the way agents are going to communicate to their customers is going to change radically.” He also believes that technology will enable agents to transform
the future of social media that it has now set up a second company to provide outsourced marketing services using social media. Evolvin has historically provided web sites as well as software for estate agents, and Chris Haines says “over the last eighteen months those sites have become more integrated with Twitter, Facebook and so on. We saw there was an opportunity to help our clients get more out of social media without a huge investment of their time.” Evolvin Agency Software
Agents should be tying all their online presence together. If it’s on the website, it needs to be on Facebook and Twitter.” CHRIS HAINES EVOLVIN
system allows agents to automate feeds to social media, as well as allowing all the agency business processes such as viewings, marketing, and matching applicants to properties. For instance, as Chris Haines notes, one thing every agent has (by definition!) is stock, new stock coming on the market, price reductions, ‘property of the week’, that can all be fed into social media as news items. Average prices in each area, average time on the market, price rises for year to date, and other statistics can
all be derived from the inventory data and publicised as news items or in articles. “They definitely want to be tying all of their online presence
their businesses. Software is no longer about automating basic processes; it can enable them to change the business completely. “We have provided the mechanism for agents to break down their service in any way they wish,” he says, so that an agent could offer separately costed services ranging from flat-fee tenant finding to a complete property sales service. Yet despite his visions of a
technology future, he’s less than enamoured of the second big trend of the day, saying that as far as he’s concerned, “the jury is still out on social media.” Not everyone agrees with him. Chris Haines, at Evolvin,
believes that social media is one of the two big trends driving technology at the moment, as well as the cloud. Other software firms appear to agree, DezRez, for instance, launched apps in February including a Twitter feed widget, while Reapit not only believes in social media, but has Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn buttons on its website. Evolvin is so convinced of
together,” he says. “If something goes on the website it needs to go to Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest is a new big one; and it needs to feed smartphone apps, too.” Evolvin also generates an automatic YouTube video for any property that has more than five photographs.
Obviously, automating or How many platforms for your products are there? 1000000’s.
outsourcing is vital; few agents will have enough time to feed all these various media with content. But the bonus of online media is that agents can get a detailed analysis of the data and see exactly what return they are getting on that investment. For instance, Chris Haines mentions one client that only saw a 10 per cent rise in web traffic, but Evolvin was able to show that almost all of it was new traffic. “Because this stuff is online,” he says, “we can get very hard statistics, 100 people followed this QR code to your web site, the average time they spent was five minutes, this percentage of them were returning visitors, this percentage were new.”
PROPERTYdrum MAY 2012 27
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