Easy Property Listing Management System

But we're still missing one fundamental piece you'll need to have within your real estate investor website.

A Simple System To Manage Property Listings

You're in a house business. It goes with the territory - you'll have the inventory of homes.

You'll have to be able to showcase your homes online to any prospective buyer or tenant who might be interested in your properties. Click Here to see an example of a listing, as seen by the web site visitors.

Managing property listings online isn't an easy piece at all.

Every listing comes with its own information in multiple categories, such as schools, directions, pricing, financing, features, condition... and of course, pictures.

Once the listing information is created there will probably be a need to make changes in it, such as price, payments, status (available, sold, etc.) to name a few.

There could be changes in information related to the progress of your remodeling, or when the tenant moves out, etc.

If you don't know how to do it yourself, you'll likely have to pay somebody to make changes for you.... every time.

In fact, I have to admit, I've been managing my own listings on my real estate investor website for several years and this is the most annoying, troublesome and time-consuming part of maintaining my real estate site.

I finally broke down and wrote a big check to a programmer to develop an easy-to-use property listings management system for me.

If you can find a good off-the-shelf system or a ready property listing software solution -- buy it.

A good property listing software solution should offer at least these 4 important features:

1. Listings search and browsing should be convenient and look professional to clients

Example: Click Here to see the listings search example. You can search properties by city, zip code, property type (home or duplex).

2. Easy Adding and Editing.

Listings should be as easy as just filling out pre-set form and checking boxes with features and require very little typing or any other manual labor.

Example: Use “user name” demo and “password” demowork to access the listing editing privileges. Click Here to see how you can create a listing in seconds.

3. Printable version of the listing pages.

This has to do with your web site visitors’ ability to print the information about your home listings. You do want them to have it in their hands as a printed copy, as opposed to having to go back to your web site and look the information up every time.

If you put your listing page together yourself – chances are, it’s not going to produce a good quality printout. It’ll likely be goofy looking print with parts of information not fitting property on the page.

4. The Area Map.

You can dramatically simplify the process of giving directions to Buyers, if you can provide them with the online area map for each property they’re looking at. Yahoo provides such maps.

Try to find a way to plug the links to Yahoo’s map application into your website, so your visitors can click on the link and bring up a new window with the street map of the neighborhood where your property is located.

5. E-mailing The Listings.

Offering an ability to e-mail your home listings conveniently to other people is a handy little feature that rounds the set.

A lot of time, parents are looking for housing for their kids. They'll e-mail your property listing to the kids, if you have a way to do in on your site.

Similarly, often kids want to buy a home and intend to use parent's money for a down payment. It'll come handy if they can e-mail the home listing info they found to their folks -- right from your site.  

Example: Click Here to view a listing. Notice at the bottom how the features 3 through 5 are seen to the Buyers browsing your listings. Feel free to test them.