Ask Technical Terry is a series RMLS™ aims to offer once a month. RMLS™ subscribers will drive the content—submit any question about RMLS™ to Technical Terry in the comments or by emailing communications@rmls.com. Don’t be shy—we won’t identify you by name.
Dear TT-
I’m hoping you can clear up some questions I have about Prospecting/Auto Email. First, I have a hard time understanding the difference between the two terms. Can you help with that? It seems like they’re used interchangeably and they can’t both mean the same thing! (Can they?) Second, I suspect I’m not setting up my clients correctly because they never seem to get the first set of listings that match the criteria I’ve set up for them. What should I do?
Struggling in Stayton
Dear SS-
I’m happy to help! And I hear you about those two terms being used interchangeably. Let’s start with the term “prospecting.” Prospecting is simply a set of search criteria you’ve saved in RMLSweb in the Prospecting Profile module. In most cases you will name the saved criteria something related to a specific client.
Remember to NOT use your client’s full name here, because if you allow Reverse Prospecting (I know, another confusing term) and your client’s search criteria matches the descriptive elements of a listing being reversed prospected, the subscriber running the reverse prospecting search would be able to see your client’s entire name! Just their name, nothing else, but still probably not a good idea!
Are we good here with that the term “prospecting” means in RMLSweb? Let’s move on.
Now how do I use this set of saved search criteria going forward? In most cases you will associate this Prospecting Profile with a contact in your saved contacts on RMLSweb, and then set up Auto Email, the process whereby RMLSweb searches and automatically sends out listing matches to your client. (Note that you can associate up to five unique contacts per Prospecting Profile!) You could add the client info in Contact Manager (Toolkit->Contact Manager) before or after creating the Prospecting profile—whichever works for you.
Once you’ve chosen a saved contact or created a new contact to add to the Prospecting Profile you can then set up the Auto Email variables. You have a lot of choices here: frequency of delivery, type of client report, whether to CC yourself, customization of the subject line, and so on.
Here’s a key piece of information for you, SS: only new matches will be sent to your client(s) on the day(s) chosen in the Auto Email setup. The initial matches must be selected manually and sent in a separate email message!
Once you have this process set up and running automatically, RMLSweb will alert you of new matches by illuminating the New Prospect Matches button in the upper left corner of the RMLSweb desktop page. You may also be receiving the emails if you chose to CC yourself when setting up the Auto Email. If you did not choose to be copied on the emails you can still view the email history by navigating to Prospecting Profiles, finding the contact name, and clicking “History” in the contact record.
I sure hope this info helps. Remember that we have a variety of documents in RMLSweb covering all of this. The following are particularly excellent resources for your question:
RMLS™ has been working with Earth Advantage® to facilitate populating this important information to listings on RMLSweb. On December 6th, RMLS™ will release a “Load from Green Building Registry” button in the Green/Energy Supplement on RMLSweb. All homes with a listing address in the City of Portland will have this supplement automatically included in Listing Load. While we are introducing the ability to populate this information in a listing, the fields will remain unrequired.
When this button is selected, the listing address will be sent to the Green Building Registry database. If an address match occurs and the address has a home energy report on file, the score and report URL will autopopulate into the Green/Energy Supplement form. In addition, the home energy report and report URL will be added to the end of the Public Remarks field in data feeds, including IDX sites that get listing information from RMLS™.
RMLS™ is aware that some properties may have Portland addresses that do not fall within the jurisdiction of the City of Portland. The Administrative Rules of the Residential Energy Performance Rating and Disclosures, Part 3.3.1, provide guidelines to determine if a property must have a Home Energy Score. If a property has received a Home Energy Score but the “Load from Green Building Registry” button did not find a match, contact RMLS™ so we can make improvements to this process. This situation could occur if the address entered in Listing Load does not match the address recorded in the Green Building Registry. REALTORS® are encouraged to use PortlandMaps as a reference to find the correct listing address.
The Home Energy Score button is now live on RMLSweb. Earth Advantage has produced a short demonstration of how the feature works, below. RMLS™ will produce a similar tutorial in the coming weeks.
For the week of October 16-22, 2017, these charts show the number of times RMLS™ subscribers opened SentriLock lockboxes in Oregon and Washington. Activity increased in both Oregon and Washington this week.
SentriLock made some internal changes on October 20th that impacted the information provided to RMLS™. This post has been updated to reflect the corrected data.
For the week of October 9-15, 2017, these charts show the number of times RMLS™ subscribers opened SentriLock lockboxes in Oregon and Washington. Activity decreased in both Oregon and Washington this week.
Ask Technical Terry is a series RMLS™ aims to offer once a month. RMLS™ subscribers will drive the content—submit any question about RMLS™ to Technical Terry in the comments or by emailing communications@rmls.com. Don’t be shy—we won’t identify you by name.
Dear Technical Terry,
My clients just asked me for some market statistics. The statistics module on RMLSweb and Market Action are crazy good, but I just need some simple, easy to understand stats. Any ideas?
Simple Statistics in Stayton
Dear SS,
Of course I have some ideas! There are two really easy places to see and/or print some stats that your clients may find compelling.
One: when you run a search and scroll down to the “Detail View” tab in your search results. At the bottom of each section is a nice synopsis of the properties contained within the section, with the sections separated by listing status. Here’s what that section looks like:
Quick and easy—but not easy to print.
If you want to print a simple, yet statistically effective report for your clients choose the “Summary Only” report from your list of report options. Here’s what that simple yet effective report looks like:
The report gives you and your clients great info on some of the basic stats we talk about all the time. Solds, if they are part of your search, even have sale price to list price ratio.
If neither of these options are good for your needs, have a look at the Statistics menu on the main navigation bar. It gives you many options to compile statistics you and your client may find useful, including the statistical summaries documents which compile years worth of Market Action data for each published area within the RMLS™ region.
Technical Terry
Technical Terry!
Do you keep up on the news? It seems REALTORS® are being accosted when performing showings! There seems to be more and more of it happening. I heard that SentriSmart™, the SentriLock app, has a feature for agent safety. What the heck is that, and how does it work?
To access and set up the agent safety feature in SentriSmart™, follow these steps:
Log in to SentriSmart™ on either your iPhone or Android.
Go to the Settings option in the app.
Tap on Agent Safety and enter your PIN.
From the Agent Safety page, add your emergency contacts by clicking on the blue + sign. The app will access the contacts stored on your phone and allow you to pick one or more contacts to be included in the list of people the app will contact.
Enable “Automated Safety Check.” Once enabled, SentriSmart™ will send you an alert approximately 90 seconds after you have opened the lockbox key container. If you do not acknowledge the first alert, a second alert will be sent after approximately 60 seconds. If you do not acknowledge the second alert, an email and text message will be sent to the contact(s) you’ve added to your contacts list in the app. If you have several contacts in that list, the app will alert all of them simultaneously about the potential safety concern.
Tap on Accept to agree to the Release Agreement, then enter your PIN for verification.
Here are samples of the texts you and your list of contacts will receive if you don’t respond to the two notifications.
Hope that this SentriSmart™ feature can help you feel less terrified, Terrified in Troutdale! It’s great that you’re thinking ahead to prepare for safety issues before they occur.
