Entegral Blog

The top Benoni & Boksburg franchises of RE/MAX Randgro was recently honored by RE/MAX South Africa with the prestigious Broker/Manager of the year award , handed to Marika Grové. A long-standing client of Entegral, their website was recently upgraded to the latest Flex responsive real estate technology using a new 'Canvas' theme.  The responsive technology allows their website to work on any screen size device, eliminating the need for an additional mobile website and providing a consistent, professional look and feel and user experience in the process. Visit their website at: www.remax-randgro.co.za The new website offers a range of features including integrated property alerts , news subscription , Google maps, streetview and driving directions, on show and interactive suburb map search. The office relies on the Entegral OMS (Office Management System) , to manage property listings, contacts, documents and other functions. Each agent can manage their own lis...

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...

Running MyProperty South Africa and Namibia, we get regular feedback from visitors on site experience which includes problems like: not being able to reach an agent or being told that the property they are interested in, is no longer available. Based on this feedback and years of experience working in the real estate industry with some of SA’s and Namibia’s top agencies, we’ve narrowed down 3 factors that influences an estate agent’s online reputation: 1) YOUR RESPONSE TIME Research have shown that companies that contacted potential customers within an hour of receiving an enquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as compared to those that contacted the prospect even an hour later - and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer (Harvard Business Review). Not being able to respond ASAP on a potential enquiry can therefore cost you a valuable lead and hurt your reputation as an agent that can respond quickly. 2) OLD LISTINGS Another ...

We are revolutionizing online document management for estate agents, one step at a time, through our industry leading cloud infrastructure. Here is a look at our latest upgrades and other features that enables offices to work towards a paperless environment. CAPTURE EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT FOR A PROPERTY We are proud to announce an important upgrade in the property document management section of industry leading OMS for Estate Agents . Estate Agents can now save bigger and more files on every single property listing they capture in the OMS.  Read more about the upgrade here . Estate agencies can now enjoy getting up to 10GB of storage for files saved on property listings included as part of their subscription packages and if they ever run out of space, can purchase additional 1GB bundles to provide limitless space. Estate agents can essentially save everything related to a property, and since you can archive property listings, it is always available 5 or 10 years down the l...

On the 19th October we’ve launched our (industry first!) Free Office SEO profile websites , and on the 15th November we followed up with our Free Agent SEO profile websites . We had a tremendous response from clients, and in just 30 days, we’ve setup 100 of these new profile sites on our platform. Agencies and agents have taken the opportunity to register and secure top SEO domains such as: http://witbank-property-for-sale.co.za/, http://bushproperty.com/ , http://securitycomplexes.co.za/ , http://pretoriasmallholdings.co.za/ , http://property-centurion-for-sale.co.za/ , http://bestprop.co.za/, http://meproperties.co.za/ , http://smallholdingspretoria.co.za/ , http://rendapropertiesrentals.co.za/ , http://property-randburg-for-sale.co.za/ , http://property-bromhof.co.za/ , http://stellenbosch-property-for-sale.co.za/ , http://midrand.property.co.za/ etc! Search Engines like Google take the domain name into account when ranking sites, so if you have highly searches keywords in yo...

NEW UNLIMITTED ADSL PACKAGES In the last 2 weeks South African’s joined the ‘rest of the world’ with unlimited ADSL bandwidth packages offered by MWeb and other ADSL service providers. The unlimited ADSL packages allow your estate agency to use as much data (bandwidth) as you want all at a fixed monthly price. MWeb offers a very attractive package for 4MB lines starting at R899/month for line rental and the data package (or R539/month for MWEB and R413 telkom line rental).  Have a look at the offering here: http://www.mweb.co.za/adsl/ (Entegral recently switched to MWEB, signup and activation took only 10 minutes). Various other service providers have since come unboard like www.afrihost.com TAKING YOUR ESTATE AGENCY ONLINE The new buzzword in the real estate industry is ONLINE SOFTWARE , and specifically taking your real estate agency online.  Entegral is the leader in SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions for the Southern Africa real estate industry being the first...

In real estate, word of mouth is still your best form of advertising. Take advantage of it – here is a great article from Entrepreneur.com discussing the following 7 points: 1. Quality 2. Service 3. Instructions 4. Communications 5. Value 6. High integrity 7. Be a good citizen

The Jacaranda FM team 'busted' Entegral's offices in Centurion today with some free Mimmo's pizza and Coke... ...and in the process we also scored a minute of free radio time!

What a year it’s been, after a well deserved break the Entegral team is back in action for a very busy 2009.   In the first quarter of 2009 we will develop no fewer than 5 national websites for existing and new clients. This is in addition to the agent and office website development that takes places on an ongoing basis for new real estate clients. It is great to see that these national groups have so much confidence in the internet despite the state the South African property market is finding itself in.   There is lots of new stuff going into the OMS (Office Management System) and our Grid Interface now allows national real estate groups to advertise on Entegral’s high traffic real estate portals.   We also have an international deal looming for a large real estate group in the USA . We’ve done a proof of concept last year which took more than a month of hard work by the design and development team (including some late nights and lot...