Blog
We continuously refine and add new features to our websites. See our blog posts below.
Feed All Your Properties to Gumtree for Free
All new properties you now upload will be ticked by default to feed to Gumtree - you do not have to do anything. To also feed older properties, select and edit them in your admin console and tick the Gumtree feed box.
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| Feed your older properties by ticking their Gumtree feed box. |
Filter Property Alerts by City and Suburb
Your property alerts are even better. Subscribers to your property alerts can now filter them by city and suburb. This is in addition to the current property type and price range filters.
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| Filter Property Alerts by city or suburb. |
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| New Property Locations Screen. |
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| Link to change property alert filters. |
Property Alerts Not Just For New Properties
With the Covid-19 lockdown in full effect, the chances are you have not been able to get new stock. However, nothing is stopping you from sending out property alerts for your current properties to your subscribers. The only way you can reach potential buyers right now is online, and email is the best way to reach as many people as possible.
Here are instructions on how to send out an alert immediately on an older property.
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| Get your current properties out to all your subscribers. |
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. |
Track What’s Happening On Your Website
Activities happening on your website can be tracked in the admin console by going to the monitoring menu dropdown. From there the principal can easily see what is happening on the website, what their agents are up to as well as website communications to and from their agents.
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| Admin console monitoring menu dropdown. |
- Owner Emails - List of all Owner Emails sent from website - showing owners their property on the different portals.
- Emailed Properties - All property detail emails sent manually from the admin console. (Not to be confused with Property Alerts.)
- SMS Agent - Logs of any SMSes sent to your agents. (If you would like to buy more credit at 65c per credit, please email us.)
- Enquiry Forms - All Enquiry Forms completed on your website.
- Property Enquiries - A list of all Property Enquiries received by your agents.
- Owner Email feedback - Logs any feedback received from owners to the Owner Email that was sent.
Bulk Upload of Email Addresses
Did you know you can send us a list of subscriber email addresses to do a bulk import into your admin console for you? How easy is that!
We do this because we want to help you get your property alerts to as many people as possible.
The property alerts are an incredibly powerful tool for a number of reasons:
- Enables buyers to be immediately notified whenever you have new properties for sale.
- Enables you to present properties to hundreds or thousands of interested buyers.
- They happen automatically - no extra work (phone calls or emails) or costs (phone calls) are required to get your new properties in front of all of your interested buyers.
- They happen fast - go out automatically at 7am the day after the property is uploaded or you can send them immediately (see how here). Sending them out immediately is especially important if its an open mandate as it could mean you are presenting it to the buyer before another agent … and therefore making the sale!
- They ensure that all of your interested buyers are notified - there is no human error where you or one of your agents could forget to present the property to a buyer.
- Builds brand recognition - people know you are professional and active.
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| A property alerts email. |
- showhouses
- when talking to potential buyers over the phone
- from your incoming emails
New Feature: Email Properties From The Admin Console
You can now send an email with property information from the admin console instead of having to compose them yourself.
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| Example of an email sent from the Admin console. |
All you have to do is select which properties to include and then personalise the intro paragraph and click send.
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| Select properties to include in the email. |
No more spending of time and effort finding and putting together this information. Instead you can send a personalised email that, while it looks professional, also has the look and feel of one composed by yourself.
Save Your Properties As Drafts
Have you ever wanted to start uploading a property but didn’t want to publish it on your website yet, or wanted to remove a property off your website temporarily? Maybe you didn’t have all the information, time or the property wasn’t yet on the market.
We are pleased to tell you that you can now do so with our new ‘draft’ feature. A property can now be saved to a draft before being pushed live on your website, or a live property can be moved to drafts thereby removing it from your website.
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| Save to draft from upload property screen. |
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| Access draft properties from admin console. |
So no more uploading a property when it is not 100% ready and no more losing work that you started but unexpectedly could not finish. We are sure you will find this new feature very helpful.
Call Directly From Quick Notes
Our Quick Notes are a great “on-the-run” tool for agents to make notes on each property. You can record things like viewings, owner interaction and commission splits.
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| Quick Notes for a property with clickable phone numbers. |
Improved Search Function In Admin Console
We have refined the search in the admin console properties page by removing the general search box and replacing it with a search field for each column.
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| New search in the admin console properties page. |
This was done because the previous search sometimes gave unexpected results. The new search addresses this and gives you more precise search results as it is limited to one column.
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| Multiple column search. |
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| Download or print search results. |
New Portal: PropBay
We are excited to let you know that RentBay, one of the current free portals we automatically feed your rental properties to now has a for sale section for residential and commercial property - propbay.co.za
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| New portal. |
We have enabled the feed so your for sale properties will automatically be copied to this portal. Like the other free portals, you don’t have to do anything - it happens automatically. The link to the property on the portal will appear alongside the other portal links in your admin console.
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| Link to Propbay in your admin console. |
We hope you get great exposure from this new portal and would love to know what you think so please contact us.
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. |
Feature Reminder: Additional Users / Multiple Login Function
Did you know you can add additional users with their own logins to your website’s’ admin console? This means agents can upload and edit their own properties, but not those of other agents. You set their permissions so you decide who can manage and view properties, agents, subscribers, the portal feeds, your website stats, enquiries and others tabs in the admin console. This will free up your time, as well as give you a good overview of your agents productivity in terms of how many properties they are uploading.
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| Manage users in your admin console. |
The first 10 additional users each cost R21 + VAT per month, thereafter R16 + VAT per month. If you would like us to enable this feature for you please contact us
Please note this is only available for standard and responsive websites.
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 |
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.
New Look Search Function
While others have been easing back into the work year, we’ve already rolled out a new look for the search function on our standard websites. Have a look below!
The new suburb search is much quicker, and there’s the additional search criteria under “more options”.
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| New look search |
If you have a standard website with us, go and take a look - the upgrade has automatically been rolled out to the properties pages of your website.
We think it’s a fantastic new look - let us know your thoughts. And as always, please don’t hesitate to contact us should you need anything.
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) |
Updates to your admin console Properties page
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We have just completed a major update to the web-box admin console Properties page. You can now search, sort by column, download to excel/pdf or print. You can even choose which columns are displayed and change their order.
We know these changes will be of great value enabling you to quickly find properties, easily see the information you need and print reports.
We also know all these changes can be confusing, so at the top of the page (in your admin console) is a link to further help. Or please (as always) just call us and we will very happily talk you through any issues you might have.
We’ve made your web-box admin section more secure
You might have noticed when you log in to your web-box admin that the URL (website address) looks slightly different.
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| New URL for your web-box admin section |
Instead of http at the beginning it now says https, with the ‘s’ standing for secure site. This is because the information travelling between your web browser (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Opera etc) and our server is now encrypted (converted into a code especially to prevent unauthorized access) with the same type of encryption used by banks.
You will also see the Comodo Secure logo at the bottom left of your screen while you are in the admin section. If you click on this logo a pop-up box will appear with our security credentials and some info on just what security this provides.
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| Comodo Secure Logo |
We take your security seriously. Please contact us if you have any questions.