Blog
We continuously refine and add new features to our websites. See our blog posts below.
Financial Assistance Information
We have updated our mini site Estate Agent’s practical tips to navigate Covid-19 with notes on the financial assistance available during Lockdown and beyond.
In this financially (and emotionally) stressful time, the information out there is vague, and the landscape is changing quickly. We have tried to help you navigate this by structuring the information out there.
We are also looking to provide details of some professionals who can help you and will let you know if and when we do.
We hope this will be of help. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Be kind.
Email Security: check links before opening
Unfortunately, email hackers are taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic and using it as an opportunity to scam people. They are doing this by sending an official looking email purporting to be from the Government/Bank or other official source, that asks you to click on a link. This link will either be used to steal information like bank details and passwords, or it could be used to install malicious malware, viruses or ransomware.
To protect yourself, you should always check links in emails before clicking on them. Below is how you can check the link on computer and mobile.
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| On a computer, hover your mouse over the link to see the actual url/link in a pop up or in the bottom bar. |
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| On your phone, hold your finger on the link for a few seconds until this appears. |
A related email security pointer is to never enter a banking or email password on a website that you have clicked to from an email.
Group Your Subscribers
You can now group your subscribers and send a different newsletter to each group. Some people want to receive your newsletter, but not property alerts (or vice versa) or you might have an investor newsletter and a homeowner newsletter which you would want to send to different people.
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| Subscriber Groups feature in your admin console. |
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| Add or remove subscribers from a Subscriber Group. |
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| Subscribers can add and remove themselves from groups. |
Feature Reminder: Document Management System
We recently introduced a new document management feature for our standard and responsive websites. These documents can be either for your own internal use.
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| Documents in your admin console. |
Or you can make them available for visitors to the website to download.
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| Documents on your website. |
New Default Property Sort Order
We have changed the default order of “for sale” and “for rent” properties on your website to highest price first. We’ve seen this makes your website (and therefore you) look better since it generally presents your better quality stock first. These properties also tend to have better pictures and descriptions.
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| New default sort order for ‘for sale’ and ‘for rent’ properties. |
New Feature: Send Property Alerts At Any Time
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| After ticking the property alert box when editing or uploading a property, select this option in your admin console.
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| The list of property alerts to be sent is shown in your admin console. |
Feature Reminder: Owner Emails
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| Owner email example. |
The owner email is a great way to let sellers know how hard you are working to sell their property. This email shows the seller what their property looks like on the various portals and can be customised with your own personal message to them.
Sending an owner email is easily done from your admin console and is sure to impress the seller.
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| How to send an owner email from your admin console. |
Change To Facebook Sharing in Admin Console
Facebook recently changed their security settings so you will no longer be able to share properties to your personal Facebook page from the admin console. However, you can still share them from the property page on the front end of your website:
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| Click Facebook button to share the property to your personal Facebook page. |
Sharing to your business Facebook page from the admin console is not affected by the new settings.
Don’t forget, we can help you set up your Facebook business page for R1670 + VAT (once-off cost ), or if you already have an existing page we can ensure it is optimally set-up for R940 + VAT (once-off cost)
Read more about our online marketing services.
Please contact us if you have any questions, we would love to assist you!
Reminder: Quick Notes Feature
Here is a reminder about a feature that can make life easier. Quick Notes is a quick and easy way to make notes on each property. It is useful for noting viewings, commission splits, owner interactions and anything else that you would like recorded for a property.
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| Quick notes for a property |
New Document Management System
Exciting news! You can now upload documents to your admin console to share with your team - no more storing documents in places nobody can find. This will save you hours of hunting around for the documents you regularly use in your business.
This feature also allows you to make documents public on the frontend of your website so your clients can download documents like rental agreements and tenant application forms. It's quick and easy to manage.
To access this feature, login to your admin console and select “Documents”:
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| Manage documents from admin console. |
When uploading a document, you can choose to make it public on your website as a download, or keep it private for internal use only.
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| To make documents visible or not on your website. |
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| Documents on your website. |
To enable the “public” document function please contact us.
We would love your feedback about this new feature. (Please note this is only available for Standard and Responsive websites).
Features - New and Existing
New - Webmail Link
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| Link to webmail in admin console |
Reminder - Property Capture Sheet
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| Click on "downloads" in the admin console help section |
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| Click on "Property Capture Sheet" to download it |
Match Your Banner To Your Corporate Colours
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| Updated banner on property listing page |
Property24 Video Uploads
In our constant quest to make your website work as hard for you as possible, we’ve worked with Property24 to allow any videos you load to a property in your web-box admin console to now automatically pull through to your listing on Property24. No more extra work of sending your videos separately to them for you!
Just follow these quick steps to ensure your videos go through to Property24:
Upload your property as normal. Once uploaded, go back to the property and under “action” click “edit”. Then scroll down to the bottom and click on “add a video”
Enter the video link and click “update”
You’ll be taken back to the upload screen, where you must remember to then click “update” at the bottom too!
Ta da! Your video will now be on your Property24 listing.
Remember, you will need an account with Property24 if you want your properties to feed through to them. Please feel free to contact us on support@webbox.co.za for any assistance.
Please note this is only available for our Standard and Premium Sites.
How to set up Out of Office messages
It’s the festive season and we’re sure that you will all be taking a little time off for some much needed R&R. While you’re out of the office it’s good to let potential clients and others know you’re not in and when you’ll be back. To put an “Out of Office” on for your emails just follow these easy steps:
1. Login to your webmail account - webmail.yourdomain.co.za
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| Click the roundcube option |
3.
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| Choose Autoresponders from the dropdown menu |
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| Click ‘Add Autoresponder’ |
5.
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| Fill out as above |
6. It’s always good to send a test email on the day the autoresponder is due to start just to double check that you get a response.
New feature - Quick Notes
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| Quick Notes for a property |
It’s great for writing down viewings, interactions with the owner, negotiations, updates in the transfer process, mandate info, commission split info, owner info, interested buyer details and much more.
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| Link to view Quick Notes on admin Properties page |
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| How to view Quick Notes for all properties in the admin console |
It’s also easy to print a report for the owner showing all the Quick Notes for their property. You can even select which notes are to appear in the report.
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| Link to print Quick Notes for a property (from Quick Notes in the admin console) |
Estate agents, your clients are on Facebook. You should be too.
For almost fifteen years, web-box has been a market leader in providing websites to estate agents, exclusively. Over this time, we have gained a lot of experience about the most effective ways of marketing your business and, in particular, how to attract sellers and buyers online.
As you know, in the estate agent industry, having a strong online presence is absolutely critical. Most sellers, buyers, landlords and tenants use the internet as their first port of call - and while having your own website is an essential starting point, social media is a powerful and cost-effective way of getting your business and your well-maintained website in front of the right people.
Facebook, in particular, is the social media network of choice for estate agents – and with internet users spending more time on Facebook than any other site, it has gone from a ‘nice to have’ to an essential part of marketing your properties.
Facebook gives you an opportunity to build your credibility and create brand awareness by providing your followers with interesting and relevant information about your industry, business and local area. It ensures that you are ‘top of mind’ for both sellers (which will increase your mandates) and buyers (which will increase your sales), as well as for landlords and tenants.
As with our websites, our exclusive focus on estate agencies means we are able to deliver exceptional value, at the lowest possible prices. Our dedicated social media team’s in-depth understanding of the industry allows them to produce the best possible content to generate client interest and engagement.
We are very excited to show you our social media offering and think that you will love the added attention it can bring to your business.The same rules that apply to building a real-life relationship apply to Facebook. The more good interactions you have with your Facebook followers, the stronger that relationship becomes. That said, we know that you, our clients, have a range of budgets, social media skills and marketing needs, so we have developed 3 options to accommodate this, all offering unbeatable value. Click through to our website for the pricing schedule and more info.
Please beware: Email scams target the real estate industry
There has been a worrying increase in fraudsters posing as known clients or regular service providers in various property transactions and, as you can imagine, the losses can be substantial.
This email fraud takes many forms but one of the the most common and easily overlooked is when you (or a client) receive an email that looks exactly like it comes from a known party in one of your deals, whether buyer, seller or conveyancing attorneys, requesting payment to a specific account or “confirming” bank details for the payment. This is called spoofing, and unfortunately, it is actually pretty easy to do: displaying a name in the sender line that is different to the actual address is not hard if you know a little about it. Following the instructions in this email will result in you paying the fraudsters directly into their bank account. Bye-bye funds!
A while back fraudsters did this with an email account belonging to one of SA’s leading estate agents. Despite appearing to have been sent from the agent’s official Seeff address, it was fake and contained bank details of the fraudster, not the appointed conveyancer. This resulted in the buyer being defrauded by close to R1m.
So, what’s the bottom line? Do not let your guard down. Rather start from the assumption that any email in your inbox regarding payments could be a targeted attack from a criminal.
These situations can be well managed simply by having protocols in place in your office (and for your clients) for whenever bank details are involved or money is transferred to a new beneficiary. We strongly recommend putting these protocol into place immediately!
- Make it part of every sale/rental routine to contact all parties involved to inform them of the possibility of this fraud. Attorneys, conveyancers, buyers, sellers, real estate agents, etc have all been targeted in these scams
- If possible, do not send sensitive information via email
- Immediately prior to paying any money, ensure that the payer calls the recipient to verify the details.
- Call the recipient on a well known telephone number (legitimate number)
- Ask them to verify the amount AND the bank details
- Only load the recipient onto your banking system and make payment if all is well
- Trust your instincts. Tell everyone involved that if an e-mail or a telephone call ever seems suspicious or not quite right, that they should stop until the communication has been independently verified.
- Clean out your e-mail account on a regular basis. Your e-mails may establish patterns in your business practice over time that fraudsters can use against you.
- Change your email usernames and passwords on a regular basis.
- Never use usernames or passwords that are easy to guess, like the password “password.”
Please be aware that these emails can be extremely convincing. Many intelligent, well informed people have been duped. No one should assume that they are “too savvy” and no one should assume that they are “too small a target” to be defrauded.
Why not talk it through as key role players in your agency and ask yourselves what you can do to foolproof your system?
This information is very important. For some it will be a useful reminder and for some it will be the first time you have thought to double check. Either way, we hope that you will make sure the people responsible for making payments in your transactions are 100% sure the instruction is legitimate each time.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if we can help you with any of this.