The scope of the project was admittedly broad, here was our prompt:

• You or your team have 48 hours to create an interesting real estate application (during the first two days of Real Estate Connect)
• You demo your application in front of 1,000 of the most important people in real estate during our Friday general session
• You wow our judges, win our grand prize, and become an instant real estate rock star

We were instructed that we could not write a single line of code, or design any assets, before the start of the 48 hours. However, we were given a few weeks to mull over ideas and sketch basic wire frames. With our thoughts and plans in hand we headed for SFO via SNA at 3:25pm Tuesday August 4th, T-8:35 from competition start.

After having a relaxing meal my two compatriots and I headed to our hotel suite for a quick power-nap before we started our marathon coding session. Before I continue, let me introduce you to the three of us:

• Andrew Mattie – Programmer extraordinaire, wrangled our data, slaving over the facts and figures for a majority of our time.
• Jennifer Orser – Our Designer (of awesomeness!), spent her hours designing the site (in a single proof!) and assets.
• Jonathan Mabe – (me!) I built the UI (html/javascript) and brought what Jennifer and Andrew produced together.

Just after midnight, with our power-nap begrudgingly complete, our illustrious leader Justin kicked down our door to snap us in gear. I have to admit, for the first few hours I didn’t think we’d be able to complete the project enough for the reveal. Staring at mostly stark-white screens without a lick of code or line of pixels is very daunting. Somehow the three of us progressed through the first night, then the next morning, continuing into that afternoon (with a short break to be introduced at Inman), and still into most of Wednesday evening. Until we each, in turn, took roughly three hours of sleep.

With the first 1/2 (24hrs) of the competition under our belt, and a renewed fervor from being introduced on stage, we took some time to discuss the upcoming final 24hr leg. With a little fear, at bit of trepidation, and a lot of resolve, we continued on into the night.

As we had from the beginning of the competition, breaks would commence every 6 to 8 hours, we’d take walks down to Bread and Cocoa, or just around the block. In between our Caffè Americanos (extra shot!) we would fill in the energy gap with a Rockstar or Monster energy drink (sugar free! we can’t forget the Biggest Loser competition back at the office!). This kind of insanely unhealthful activity produced surprisingly stellar results. The three of us would find ourselves in a “zen” like state, for hours on end, with only the music as our muse. Speaking of music, here are a few choice artists that spurred our creativity (streamed mostly via Pandora, our favorite internet radio):

• Led Zeppelin
• Imogen Heap / Frou Frou
• Muse
• The Jackson 5 (used mostly as a deterrent – I’m looking at you Justin!)

As the hours wound down, the determination grew stronger. We would plan on sleeping “for an hour or so” in “a few hours”, but needing to get done more and more to complete the project, sleep was definitely a crutch we weren’t prepared to lean on. I would like to say we finished early, but we did not. I would like to say we did everything we set out to do, we did not. We did work down to the wire fitting in every bug-smash, or feature-implementation we could manage. And we ended up with, in our humble opinion, an awesome prize-winning application, Agent Scouting Report.. the future?

The full reveal of our “Experiment in Transparency” will come soon, here on the Diverse Solutions Blog. Stay tuned!

So without further ado, please visit our launch site to learn more and try it out yourself: http://dslistingexpress.diversesolutions.com

We know you’ll like it.

Mike shares with us an overview of their product and examples of clients who are putting it to use in their markets. He also discusses why they are such huge supporters of the RE Barcamp movement. 

Listen To the .mp3 File Here
Click Here To Subscribe to the DS Radio Podcast, It’s Free (iTunes)
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RETech South – Atlanta – March 20
RE Barcamp LosAngeles – April 2
RE Barcamp Phoenix – April 23 

We will have representatives at each event. Contact  us on Twitter or through our site if you’re interested in meeting with us during any of these events. Be sure to subscribe to our blog to see where we will be next!

One of our newer partners is a company based in Raleigh NC named Dakno Marketing. I spoke to the company’s VP of sales, Bobby Carroll recently about their products and services and how they work with our IDX solutions. Dakno focuses on their core strengths of great design and marketing platforms and introduces Diverse Solutions DS Search Agent IDX product to round out a dynamic broker and/or agent system. They are familiar with our platforms and experienced in getting the most out of the tools and integrating them in the most efficient and effective ways possible.

Tune in and find out more about how we have teamed up to deliver next generation real estate marketing platforms that truly are best-of-breed.  

Click to Listen: Mike Price Interviews Bobby Carroll of Dakno Marketing (.mp3)

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What Is a Social Media Manager?
The role of SM managers, or community managers isn’t something is quite yet cast in stone, primarily because the efforts either overlap or dovetail with so many different areas within a company. I think many that are doing great jobs of it, like Trulia, Active Rain and Zillow, would probably still characterize the roles as fluid. My counterparts in many companies have graciously offered to share their experience with me and I look forward to hearing how they have navigated themselves in what is rapidly becoming an integral part of companies of any stripe. DS has a tremendous reputation for top-shelf customer service and is recognized as premier offering in it’s category. My role is to be an evangelist, a problem solver and overall ambassador. I’ll also be pitching in from time to time to help with marketing, advertising and branding strategies for the company.

What You Can Expect

The expected and whole lot more. Sure I’ll be out there on Twitter and Facebook and all the traditional channels, but it won’t be in overtly promotional fashion. As I’ve said so many times before, the professional of the future will be putting themselves into the fray of  conversations as an advocate, mentor, coach and many other hats and I think it’s important to “walk the talk”. If I have an idea that fits the niche of a follower and might help them, I’ll be proactive at pushing those ideas forward in the spirit of social interaction. Opinions? Sure, I’ve got em, and most of the time I’m right – not always though, so call me on it. That’s what this is all about. I enjoy a spirited debate as much as the next gal or guy. One of the things I’m most looking forward to is building the official Diverse Solutions audio/video podcast. Our first episode will be launching some time next week. If you have an idea for future episodes, please leave a comment and let me know!
I’m currenty in NYC attending REBarcamp and Inman Connect. Yesterday’s barcamp was well attended and offered an interesting glimpse into the future of the industry. Brokers and agents are now armed with a much better understanding of listing distribution and web lead generation than ever before. I had the opportunity to talk to several current DS clients about their experience with our products. One thing that stood out as a testament to the flexibility of the DS tool set was the different ways that each of the folks I spoke with are implementing them in their individual business models. I’ll be reporting back more as the event continues over the coming 2 – 3 days.

Where To Find Me
I’ve established a presence in the primary social media destinations and will be adding more upon my return. You can always email me directly at mprice @ diveresesolutions I promise a quick and enthusiastic response.

I am genuinely excited about the new role that DS has entrusted me with and remain committed to continuing the long tradition of keeping the promises that keep you successful.

Best,
Mike Price
Social Media Manager – Diverse Solutions

Mike is a veteran real estate technology and marketing expert with over 12 years of experience serving the industry. In his most recent role as the president of MLBroadcast Mike has established a a firm foothold as a well respected member of the re.net and social media space.

His blog, Mike’s Corner has become a “go-to” guide for real estate marketing advice and opinion. Price is a frequent speaker and of the organizers of the REBarcamp concept, an industry event platform that has spread to cities across the country.

Diverse Solutions provides a wide range of Real Estate development services to produced inspired, attention-grabbing, easy to use products. Our decision to create Mike’s role was to extend our customer service experience while engaging clients and prospects of DS within the social media channels, extend the Diverse Solutions brand and offer general assistance with development and IDX questions.

You can follow Diverse Solutions and Mike on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/diversesolution. You can also join us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Diverse-Solutions/43077687863 and Active Rain at http://www.activerain.com/diversesolutions.

Join us in welcoming Mike to the Diverse Solutions team!

We’ve been working behind the scenes nearly nonstop for the past few months, and today is the day that we finally get to pull back the curtain and reveal what we’ve done. We made an infinity-plus-one number of changes to our dsSearchAgent Pro IDX solution, and we think you’re going to love what we have to show you right now (unless you’re one of ours competitors!).

We’ve actually have so much to share with you that we’re going to break all of this up into a number of blog posts over the next couple of days. In this post, I’m going to cover the changes to our search panel and some other minor changes.

If you want to follow along with me as I discuss the first group of changes, here is our standard demo link so you can see all of the pretty new features. Also, if you’re a client of ours and you want to participate in a webinar to discuss the new changes, we’ve set up a special one tomorrow at 10 AM PST – you can register for it in your control panel. If you’re not a client of ours, what the heck are you waiting for?? Hop into our sales webinar tomorrow at 2 PM PST and, after you’ve stopped drooling over everything we have to offer, buy! Ok, here we go….

We’ve 100% re-engineered our search panel!

Our old search panel was great, but our new one completely trounces the old one.

Our first order of business was to move each search criteria item into its own expandable search box. We felt that the old search panel layout didn’t properly accommodate all of the unique needs of our customers and the different areas they serviced. We also felt that it would be better to show ALL of the available search options at first, even if you can’t adjust them until you click on them, rather than hide a bunch of them until the user expanded an “advanced search” area.

With this release, our clients can remove, add, and rearrange the search boxes however they see fit and expand any or all of them by default when the page first loads. The boxes can be removed and rearranged for each account by default, and they can also be removed and rearranged for each link that the our clients in our control panel area.

We have also changed the way the sliders and text boxes work. After going back and forth on this for weeks and trying out a number of different ideas on our focus groups (drop downs, drop down / text box hybrids, hidden text boxes, etc), we ultimately decided to go with simple text boxes that are tied to the sliders, and vice versa. We found that this allows for the best balance between people who like to quickly explore using the sliders and people who like to be precise with the textboxes.

We’ve added new search options!

The new search panel gave us the breathing room to implement a few more of our most highly requested search features.

The first option we added is something I’m especially proud of. You can now search for pre-foreclosures and bank owned listings in EVERY SINGLE MARKET WE SERVICE! We can do this by looking at two sets of data, both of which are provided by the MLS. First, we look at all of the features that are provided by the MLS for each property. If there’s a feature that denotes that the property is a short sale, is in pre-foreclosure, has had a notice of default filed against the owner, etc, then we mark it as a pre-foreclosure. If there’s a feature that says that the property has been foreclosed upon, is a lender / bank owned listing, is an REO, etc, then we mark it as bank owned.

If the MLS doesn’t provide features that say whether or not a property is distress, or if the agent just forgot to say that it’s in distress, we do something super special. We spent a very long time developing a proprietary algorithm to analyze the descriptions of each property, and for each of the literally millions of active listings in our database, we’ve run the descriptions through our algorithm to find out if it’s a pre-foreclosure or bank owned listing. We’ve run extensive tests, and our positive rate for matching these descriptions is near 99.5%! We toss out properties where the listing agent says things like “this house is not a preforeclosure” or “this house is better than a bank-owned listing.” The result is something we’re really proud of, and it’s something that we can confidently say that no one else has.

We know that there are still going to be small issues with this though, so we set up an email address that you can send property descriptions to so that our system will get better. That’s right – it’s ALIIIIVE! We will be continually training and refining our algorithm, so the more listings you send in that it either should have matched but didn’t or shouldn’t have matched but did, the better our system will get! We will manually review and classify each submission that comes through to ensure that our pre-foreclosure / foreclosure description analyzer is the very best there is! Anyway, if you do find a property description that should be classified as a (pre-)foreclosure or one that shouldn’t have been classified as a (pre-)foreclosure that was, send the description and perhaps a link to the property to foreclosure-descriptions@diversesolutions.com.

We’ve also added the ability to search by price drops. This isn’t just any ol’ price drop search though – you can customize EXACTLY what you’re looking for. It’s pretty self explanatory we think, so go ahead and try it out. We’ve found some listings in our area (SoCal) that have legitimately had price drops of > 60%…. Incidentally, you can now also sort by the price drop percentage (largest drops first) once you get to the search results tab.

You can now search by school districts too! We’ve had a lot of requests for that one. Note that some MLS’s let agents type in the school in free-form, so if a visitor in one of those areas is looking for listings in an individual school area or overall school district, they may have to type in a couple of different schools and / or districts to get what they’re looking for. Don’t worry though – all of our text boxes magically try to complete the visitors thoughts so they will always know exactly what’s available.

Additionally, you can now search for FSBO listings and Make Me Move properties that are on Zillow.com. We know this may be controversial to some, but at the same time we’ve had a lot of requests for it, so we made the decision to implement it for those that want to use it. The value offered here is that visitors may be able to find FSBO listings and properties that may be for sale (Zillow’s Make Me Move listings) that they might not otherwise be able to find in the MLS search. Please note that this option is disabled by default – it can be easily enabled in our clients’ control panel area.

Finally, we’ve added the option for agents to remove property types from the search that they don’t deal with. This was another popular request, and the super-slick interface for it is now available in the control panel.

We’ve focused even more on speed!

We made significant enhancements to our infrastructure and used advanced loading techniques in our front-end code to really get things moving! Both subjectively and objectively, this latest release loads wayyyyy quicker than our old version and is much more responsive to all interactions. Try it out and see!

… and so much more!

There is so much more to share, but again, we’re instead going to break out our changes into smaller blog posts over the next couple of days. Stay tuned!

P.S. Incidentally, and quite humorously, our friends in Seattle, Redfin, had their own big news to share with the world today. Although they took a slightly different approach than us, a nice handful of their new features ended up being the same as ours. We swear we didn’t plan that out! Anyway, kudos to Redfin!!

For those that didn’t have a chance to make it out to the tech fair VisitMyLuxuryHome.com put together a series of video interviews with each of the ARMLS approved vendors in attendance. Of course I was chosen to speak on the behalf of DS. How did I do?

Candace Robinson who hosts the AZ Real Estate Blogging Network also did a follow up post about her experience at the ARMLS Tech Fair. She was also gracious enough to capture a few shots through the day and add the to her Flikr account. You can view those photos HERE!

The seminar itself, hosted by Dustin Luther (Rain City Guide and Move.com) and Jim Marks (Virtual Results), is currently touring the west coast with the goal of helping the agents who attend better utilize their Internet marketing dollars and efforts. The class I attended lasted until 4pm, and not a single minute felt wasted! The course covers a great deal of material including everything from social networking to ROI. Throughout the seminar, agents are educated on the importance of understanding what consumers expect, and as Jim, states “different is better.”

Additionally, the two pointed out the importance of “original content” to establish better web presence during their seminar. I completely agree with them and can assure you that having original content on your site is an incredibly important subject. As many of you know, we have a very aggressive SEO (search engine optimization) program here at Diverse Solutions, and one of the key elements in our marketing packages is custom content. Basically, the more original and unique content you have on both your website and blog, the better chance you’ll have to be recognized by search engines and subsequently rank above your competitors.

As I thought about it a bit more, I decided to create a way for agents to better take advantage of this knowledge. For the remainder of the month, we will be offering 10 pages of custom content that can be added to your web site or blog for just $500; normally, we charge $1200 for this package! All you have to do to take advantage of this offer is just let us know what topics you would like us to cover (real estate related, of course). Our professional writers will do the rest. The offer is a great opportunity for individuals who recognize the importance of Jim and Dustin’s advice as well as those who may be considering implementing a marketing strategy in the near future.

Thanks again to both Dustin and Jim. You guys gave a great presentation, and I look forward to seeing you soon in Orange County!

(Note: If you’d like to attend the Orange County educational seminar, it’s only $49 for “the most informative 4-5 hours that you will likely ever spend on real estate education.” You can register here.)