Some of Arizona’s most Successful Agents call John Hall & Associates home.
Tag Archive: Real Estate Technology
How to separate a multi-page PDF file
I had some good techno-talk at the Scottsdale office party yesterday. One of the topics was how to pull an individual page out of a multi-page pdf file.
The user has Office 2003. This matters, because if you’re using Office 2007 your computer has a similar tool by default. I’m pretty sure Mac’s come with a pdf writer as well.
So for those that need a pdf tool, I recommend Cute PDF writer. It’s free, it’s simple and it works. You can find it here… cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp
There is a download button on the left side of the screen.
This installs a new “Printer” on your computer – only the output is not a piece of paper, it’s a pdf file.
So now when you’re looking at the multi-page pdf, click print and tell it which pages you would like to “print”. Choose PDF Writer as the printer and then print. Automagically a new pdf file will be created with the selected pages.
Happy PDF’ing!
Technology Upgrade at all our Real Estate Offices
Image of John Hall agents jumping with glee - AGAIN
I really like bringing good news to the successful real estate agents with John Hall & Associates – especially when that good news is going to make REALTOR® life just a little bit easier here at John Hall. Just last month, I got to break the news that office bills are now emailable. Today more good news, all John Hall & Associates offices will be getting new toys! Wait, wait, that was a techno-typo, I meant new TOOLS! Our offices are getting new tools. I get the two of them confused sometimes. These new tools are not toys, they are printing, scanning, faxing, copying, emailing, powerhouses that will replace the current copy machines.
I don’t feel I need to explain the features that our current machines are capable of. Wireless printing, high-speed copying, et cetera are things we’ve had for years. I also don’t think I need to explain how a fax machine works. What I do want to mention about faxing though is that the current options are not going away. If you are a fan of our full service offices, our friendly live office staff will still be glad to send faxes for you. And just like it has been, there will be a per page charge to have them assist you. However, with these new self-serving machines, if you’d like to fax your document yourself, there is no per page charge for assistance. What this also means is that the staff does not have to be present for you to send a fax. You can now send as many free faxes as you’d like at any hour of the day.
We’ve been asked several times about when we were going to install scanners in our offices. Consider it done. You don’t even need a computer for this. You can walk up to these powerhouse machines, scan the documents and have the file sent to an email address – directly from the machine. The best way I know how to explain this – it’s like sending a fax (but with better quality) to an email address.
Let me share with you the schedule of installation and 2 reasons why you may be affected by this upgrade.
- Paradise Valley Office and Executive Suites – Monday from 12-5
- Scottsdale Office – Tuesday from 12-5
- Tempe Office – Wednesday from 12-5
- Arrowhead Office – Thursday from 12-5
This is may affect you for two reasons. One, the computer rooms will be closed during installation and two, if you print wirelessly from your laptop, you will need to install a new printer driver for it to work. Please plan accordingly.
Toni Row and Bill Evans are to be thanked for their hard work in negotiating the replacement of our machines. They have met with the vendor several times figuring out the best way to bring these features to the offices. Hopefully the new benefits of being able to fax at all hours of the night and scan documents will help make your REALTOR® world a little bit easier.
Technology User Panel – AAR Winter Conference
I recently attended one day of the three day session of the Arizona Association of REALTORS® 2009 Winter Conference in Prescott. It turned out to be a good day to attend; I not only saw many familiar faces but also caught the Social Media Networking panel discussion. Whenever I hear “social networking” I think of people after work imbibing adult beverages. There were NO adult beverages but I stayed anyway. Great panel, moderated by Amy Chorew and hosting Jay Thompson, Rob Gibbs, Phil Sexton and Dru Bloomfield. I was pretty proud that we had two representatives from John Hall & Associates on the panel.
Phil Sexton, the officially appointed “I.M.D.” (Internet Marketing Dude) of John Hall & Associates, talked about the online tools especially effective for managers and designated brokers. It is more effective, more efficient and cheaper than other types of broker- to- agent communication; it is also easier to store, reference and file that any other type of communication. We found out that some of the tools used by John Hall & Associates are “bad to the bone”!
Dru Bloomfield was an exceptionally informative panelist. Her success on Twitter was phenomenal; she has over 2,200 people following her! She must be truly doing it right if 2,200 followers have identified value in her information. The “how to” of it seems almost embarrassingly simple, as did her advice – “Be Yourself”. She “tweets” about those things important to her like special need children and real estate in general, but Scottsdale in particular. She only started doing this a year ago and considers it social capital just like community activities and volunteer work.
Great panel, great information and great learning opportunities. Congratulations Arizona Association of REALTORS® on an all around great day.
DF
ARMLS Technopalooza – April 22, 2009
(Link to: Information about ARMLS Technopalooza 2010)
The next ARMLS tech fair has been scheduled for April 22, 2009 at the Mesa Convention Center (Bldgs B & C). ARMLS is stepping it up a notch for this Technopalooza. Along with 30 exhibitors and ARMLS specialty classes, they are bringing in national social media speaker/consultant Dustin Luther and Master Trainer Jason Edwards.
In order to keep greater Phoenix real estate agents up to date on the new technologies that interact with ARMLS data, ARMLS plans on hosting 2 tech fairs per year. The last fair, held at Westworld in August mixed Flexmls training with exhibitor booths creating an energetic learning and networking environment for all who attended. (You can watch some video of it here.)
Pay attention to emails from ARMLS and the flexmls dashboard for more information.
Arizona REALTORS® Need to Hold On!!
Holy moly AAR has been moving fast! They’re going about 110 mph down the information highway, the communication highway and the technology highway all at the same time. Soon after they expanded their online presence to facebook they got their twitter handle up and running. As soon as they organized all the existing information available to REALTORS® with the Road to Professionalism site, they start sharing new information on AARnews. The good news is they plan on getting you up to speed with this technology and more at The Road to Success Winter Conference.
Are you a fan of the Arizona Association of REALTORS® page on facebook? As of this morning there were 322 fans! It’s been up and running for a few months now, and it looks like a great place for AZ agents to communicate. If you are trying to integrate your real estate business into your social media efforts, know that as soon as you become a fan of any page, all your contacts receive updates. What better way to stay on top of their mind for real estate than becoming more and more involved with REALTOR® organizations and companies on facebook.
Are you on twitter? AAR is…well, kind of. Don’t take any twitter lessons from AAR on how to interact with others. They are solely using it as a content promoter. Take lessons from them on that, how to share your content with others. Twitter is a good way to notify a lot of people there is something new on your website. If you would like to know when they add new material to their blog or announce updated information – start following them.
Let’s talk about the Road to Professionalism site. Have you seen it yet? What an incredibly overwhelming resource of information. I had no idea there was this much content available to our industry. I take that back, I had no idea AAR could do such a good job organizing this amount of content. First they break down AAR and NAR resources into categories like Risk Management, Communication, Real Property Fundamentals, etc. Then once you dig deeper into those categories you’ll find the content tagged with icons informing you whether the content is for Rookies, Experienced Agents, Brokers, or Managers. Anyone looking to improve their real estate professionalism will consider this site gold!
Blog – is it still an unknown? When I hear the term blog – I think “website that has fresh content and encourages interaction”. That is exactly what AARnews.com is. It will always have fresh content and it allows readers to comment on articles. Now you can share your thoughts on the articles that are published in the AZR every month. What a great way to learn, network and communicate. Check it out – you may want to subscribe to receive their articles in your feed reader.
Are you overwhelmed by the things AAR is doing online these days? If so, you are not alone. Many agents have been asking questions about all this new technology. Because of this, AAR is designating a big part of The Road to Success Winter Conference to answering technology questions and teaching how to connect the dots between using technology and generating more business. The Road to Success will merge technology with the basics of building a real estate business. This is an excellent chance for you to get up to speed if any of the things in this article are a mystery!
BlackBerry® eKeys are Coming!
Straight from the flyer (h/t @drubloomfield)…
By the end of 2008, Supra eKey software will be available for the BlackBerry Pearl, BlackBerry Curve, and BlackBerry 8800 series smartphones. BlackBerry devotees will soon join thousands of real estate professionals already enjoying the timesaving benefits of eKey service on their Palm and Windows Mobile smartphones.
We double checked with the local Supra office and they confirmed BlackBerry’s should double as lockbox keys by the end of the year.
What is IMAP?
I thought that I would write a quick blog on what in the world is IMAP. I get clients complaining that they can’t remember which PC, or phone, they sent and email from if they forget to CC themselves. There is a simple solution and it’s free.
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol, which probably doesn’t help explain what it is one bit, but what IMAP does is save a bunch of time searching around trying to find an important email. If you are like me and use Outlook on multiple machines and also a phone to send and receive emails, the standard POP that we use to receive emails is pretty much useless. Google offers both the IMAP and POP feature for free through it’s gmail client, most free email clients charge to let you use POP and I don’t know of any other free email client that offers IMAP.
When you use IMAP in Outlook with gmail it copies and sync’s all of the folders in your gmail and your Outlook so that you have all of the same folders (gmail calls them ‘labels’) in all of your email clients. This means that if you send an email with Outlook it shows up in the sent folders of both Outlook and gmail, the same goes for sending an email with the web based gmail client. You can do this with as many PC’s as you have Outlook running on, so now it doesn’t matter which machine you send the email, it shows up on all of your email clients. I use Outlook as an email client because I like the features, but there are other email clients that support IMAP as well.
Now, the really neat part is that some phones allow you to IMAP, I have the iPhone so now I can send and receive email from my phone and the email shows up in gmail and Outlook. The iPhone set-up is so easy a caveman can do it; go to Settings, add account, press gmail, type in your username and password and the phone will do the rest.
If you are interested in trying this you can go to www.gmail.com and set up a free account with them. Once you set-up an account go to Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP, enable IMAP. There are very good instructions on how to setup your email clients in that area when you click on ‘Configuration Instructions’. Another nice feature is that you can have gmail retrieve your email from most email hosting companies so that you have one central email rather than have multiple email addresses to setup in Outlook. I have 6 email addresses that gmail goes out and retrieves, it makes life a lot easier and you have over 6gb of storage so space won’t be an issue. Doing this will slow Outlook down a bit because of the sync process, but otherwise it runs well.
I know this doesn’t sound like it should be on a real estate blog, but I feel being able to send and receive email while previewing homes (or at happy hour) is as important as having a cell phone.
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