Entegral Blog

According to a recent survey by U.S based brokerage Redfin ,  one in three home buyers are making offers sight-unseen. What does this mean for real estate agents and the future of home buying? With the advancement of technology and the competitive nature of the real estate industry (and market), it is becoming clear that home buyers are starting to make use of alternatives to not only find their ideal home but also buy their new home, and the real estate agents that adapt are the ones that will thrive. While the survey is based on the U.S marketplace, this is much more than just a market shift - this is a generational shift.  The thirty-three percent of people that bought a property sight-unseen in 2016 is a massive 19 percent higher than 2015 and 21 percent from two years ago. “Millennials were more than three times as likely as their parents to make offers sight-unseen, with 41 percent having said they had done so, compared to 30 percent of Gen Xers and only 12 p...

We recently launched the new Flex responsive site for long time clients Bauer Estates, who specialise in the selling and renting of elite real estate in Namibia. The agency, which boasts a large number of international clients, needed a website that would work on any internet enabled device, from anywhere in the world to ensure their stock would be showcased in the best way possible. Visit www.bauerestates.com This was made possible with the help of our Elegant themed Flex website template and cutting edge real estate website technology that would allow for quick, adaptive and reliable search functionality and a user-friendly experience. Not only are you getting a website that adapts to different screen sizes, you are also able to benefit from features such as integrated map searches, automated property alerts, automated newsletters, unlimited photos and cloud technology to just name a few. With the launch of this new site for Bauer Estates, we are once again afforded the o...

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Flex real estate websites in the UK  with the launch of our first client, London letting specialists , Boyd Property Group. Check out the new website at www.boydgroup.london . Built on the Flex real estate platform, the product was enhanced to cater for the unique requirements of the UK real estate market. The website is packed with features like: Responsive design: It scales to any size device without compromising any functionality and enhancing the search engine ranking. Automated property alerts : Lets visitors sign up and receive instant alerts the minute a new matching property is listed by the agent. Automated newsletters:  Lets visitors sign up for a weekly newsletter that showcases the latest property news and property listings. Unlimited photos: Agents can upload as many photos as they want on properties. Unlimited files: Agents can upload PDF documents, floorplans, EPC documents, virtual tours and other files...

Recent research from NAR reveals what marketing platforms are used by USA estate agents to market property listings. In short more than 50% of agents use the following 5 mediums to promote property listings: 1) MLS 2) Yard sign 3) Agent website 4) Open houses 5) Portals like Realtor.com There are some interesting stats here: 89% of listings end up on the MLS. Multiple Listing Service is huge in the US with hundreds of local MLS regions and is the default way to list property. As a result, most property transactions have a listing and a sales side with 2 different agents. The MLS concept operates in pockets in South Africa (In the larger metro areas like Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and Bloemfontein mostly) but not on the scale of the USA. 51% on the real estate agent websites. Note not company websites, this is further down at 43%. Personal agent websites are not huge in South Africa and Namibia but worthwhile to look at for extra exposure. Entegral offers Flex estate ...

Just over 3 years ago, Entegral was the 1st real estate technology service provider in Africa to move all of its products over to the cloud. It all began 4 years ago, when we researched and tested various cloud platforms available. We made a decision on Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) and switched over all our products in the course of 6-12 months to take full benefit of the unique cloud features offered. Our property portal, MyProperty , was our first product to switch over in January 2011. Stressful it was, at that stage cloud platforms were still in its infancy and we took a calculated risk with our business. Either that, or being boxed in by local service providers who couldn’t offer the amazing cloud features we wanted. Our monthly bandwidth costs also increased at alarming rates due to huge traffic. In the end, partnering with Amazon paid off, as can be seen in this 2013 magic quadrant from Gartner comparing the top cloud IaaS providers: It didn’t go all smoothly, we had...

Gone are the days of worrying about the capacity of your servers and doing lengthy planning & budgeting for server resources & associated operating software and licenses. Entegral’s expert real world experience with Amazon AWS cloud services including EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, Route 53, SES, SNS, DynamoDB, Firewalls and various new services, ensures that your company’s IT infrastructure & systems are in safe hands. Whether you use one of our leading cloud based products like the OMS, Virtual Tours, Websites or have dedicated cloud servers we manage - all are centrally managed by an expert team that will ensure better uptime & scalability and lower cost compared to traditional dedicated server environments. This includes full disaster recovery and failover services. RealTime monitoring & management With our Cloud infrastructure we are for example immediately notified if any custom thresholds on servers or cloud services were exceeded, as indicated in the above scre...

Our self service virtual tour solution has always been available free of charge to OMS clients. Now we have created an industry first cloud-based self-service virtual tour system for real estate groups that operates as a standalone web system. It is technically easy to integrate into existing property management systems and because it is running on our cloud platform, provides 100% uptime. It also provides consistent performance whether one or 100 offices are loading virtual tours. It comfortably supports high traffic websites and the plus side for real estate groups, is that there is no additional bandwidth costs . An unlimited number of tours can be uploaded per property and depending on the contract, unlimited tours for the office or whole group. This results in enormous cost savings, since typical virtual tours will easily cost at least R1000 per property. Our self service virtual tour solution requires a standard digital camera, tripod and the software we provide. High q...

The latest Google Analytics stats shows how IE lost grown to Firefox, Chrome and Safari on Entegral’s real estate portals like MyProperty . It is interesting to see the historical trend of browser usage since 2005. Bottom line : make sure your real estate website is optimized for all the major browsers: IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. November 2005 browser stats IE had a massive 93% market share. At that time it was perfectly fine to optimize your real estate website for IE and forget the other browsers. It was also still acceptable to display a message on your site, saying that it is optimised for IE. This made the work of web developers easy. November 2010 browser stats 2010 is a different story, and real estate web developers had to ensure they optimise sites for IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari with The 2d,3rd and 4th browsers taking up about 25% of the browser stats for visitors. Fail to optimise your websites for these browsers and you loose out on about 25% of your lea...

Here are the top 20 USA real estate websites for October 2011 accordin to Hitwise . No single property portal has more than 8% market share with only the first 15 having more than 1% market share.

Property portals assist real estate organisations in marketing their property listings on more websites and therefore get more exposure and leads. This is an interesting story from Edina Realty , a USA based agency who is going the solo route and pulling their property listings from 3rd party portals like Trulia.  According to Edina Realty: “…Third party aggregators are not brokers. They get listings for free from brokers around the country and then display them online, collecting and distributing leads for profit.  We believe it makes the best business sense for our agents and Edina Realty to control our own listings in order to ensure that: • Our agents don’t lose future business opportunities because a non-listing competitor pays to present themselves as the contact for your listing. • Our agents don’t have to pay – directly or indirectly – for leads on their own listings. • Our sellers can be assured that leads on their listing are being handled by an expert ...

We are proud to announce that we have moved all real estate products and websites (including the OMS) to our new Cloud Hosting infrastructure at Amazon AWS.   Entegral takes the lead by being the first real estate service provider in Southern Africa to make this bold move. Our new cloud infrastructure will allow us to scale our products and services to new levels and provide an unparalleled service uptime . Although we have an excellent track record with service uptime, the outages caused by last week’s hardware failures on our dedicated servers, prompted us to make the move earlier than the planned switchover in June.  With over 100 new SEO profile websites launched in November 2010 we were also quickly outgrowing our dedicated server environment. What is ‘the cloud’? Cloud computing provides Entegral with the power of a shared pool of configurable computing resources (i.e. servers, networks, storage, etc) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal manage...

We’ve done it! Entegral Technologies LLC was successfully registered (and operating) in the USA. For those of you who follow us on Facebook or Twitter , this would off course be 'old' news :) Here is a short rundown on the incredible journey so far ….     Two years ago we've started off with some some prototyping and eventually hard core development work for the USA's leading premier provider of professional licensed real estate services, Help-U-Sell , leading to the launch of a comprehensive array of national systems including: - cutting-edge franchise websites with integrated CMS (Content Management System), - customized Office Management System specially catering for their unique business needs, - an impressive franchise opportunity center website and blog . Today, we import close to 1 million USA MLS (multi-listing-system) records on a daily basis into Help-U-Sell's state of the art cloud hosting infrastructure from more than 50 MLS organ...

We live in incredible times. Today a single person or small focused teams have the ability to upset larger players in their market or start a global phenomenon with little or no funding. Think 26 year old Facebook billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. He still prefers to rent property rather than buy and have recently moved into a new rental closer to work! I respect people like Mark Zuckerberg, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who put their business passion above personal financial gain or status. Mark Zuckerberg even committed to donate most of his wealth to charity (signing on to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s initiative called the “Giving Pledge,”). To succeed in business, you need to be a “game changer” , you need to be unconventional to be strategic .  This also applies to real estate, if you are passionate, innovative and hard working, you will make a success. 2010 was a difficult year with the worldwide recession and most agency sales targets were not met. For...

More and more people are using the internet on daily basis. In effect, more people will also visit your site if your SEO and other online marketing initiatives are any good. For national real estate franchise groups this present a unique challenge. Not only do they need to centralise listings into a single database and make these properties searchable for the general public, but the website needs 99.9% uptime and the speed of searches need to be lightning fast. In general these franchise sites also attracts more visitors than your single agency websites and therefore needs regular tweaking to enhance the response times to visitors. This leaves the master franchise with a difficult question: which database platform is right for my franchise operation? Luckily the answer is a simple one…. Microsoft SQL Server. Entegral has, since 2009, started international rollouts of its OMS system , including custom configurations for large USA based franchise clients.  This presented the Entegr...

Teams from long-term Entegral clients RE/MAX Masters and RE/MAX Living have ‘cleaned up’ at the recent RE/MAX international awards walking away with 3 of the top 5 international awards. Read the full article here . www.remax-masters.co.za – Johannesburg Northern Suburbs including Sandton and Randburg RE/MAX Masters Lance Heroldt of RE/MAX Masters clinched first place and Glenn Joselowitz third place overall. www.remaxliving.co.za – Cape Town and surrounds RE/MAX Living Gerlinde Moser of RE / MAXLiving was ranked third.

Entegral was proud to co-sponsor South Africa’s first real estate online marketing conference in Cape Town on 9 and 10 March 2010. The event was a success and all participants walked away with a clearer understanding of how to maximise your efforts for online real estate marketing. It presented some interesting views and statistics on social media integration for real estate. Adriaan Grove, Entegral MD , presented an interesting view of Google’s impact on the real estate industry and how the role of the traditional estate agent is changing to a new breed of estate agent, the ‘virtual agent’. What was also clear, is that mobile marketing is a relatively untapped channel for estate agents to explore and that it presents lots of opportunities for early adopters of the technology. We were presented with some fascinating mobile stats by mobile industry expert Rick Joubert . RE/MAX Southern Africa CEO, Adrian Goslet, also presented at the conference and shared some interesting facts ...

Google has made it a lot more easier to find real estate listings on its map service by added the one-click 'real estate' option to its Google Maps in the USA. (it was also available previously but only through the search dropdown option). Read the official Google blog release here . This will put a lot of competitive pressure on USA property portals like www.zillow.com and www.trulia.com. You simply cannot discount the impact that Google will have on real estate search judging by the impact it had on navigation companies like Tom Tom and Garmin with their shares falling by more than 15% after the day of announcement of google navigation . Overseas I think it is starting to be a threat for MLS organisations, also read Matt Cohen's blog on this . We think it will be a matter of time before Google launches real estate search for South Africa on its http://maps.google.co.za site. Estate agents in South Africa should prepare themselves to disclose the physical location of their...

Over 31 Billion searches on Google every month - where is your real estate website ranked?

We are getting ready to launch the new MyProperty South Africa website. We have compiled a list of some of the new features to expect, click here to view the PDF . New features PDF

We have just launched the new PMI (Project Management Institute of Southern Africa) website. You can visit the website at www.pmi.org.za The delivery included survey and email campaign functions and is the first of several phases to be launched.