House-Advertiser.co.uk now has the ability to include lettings in its listings. If you’re a Lettings Agent or a landlord with an expansive property portfolio, you can now get them online with us.
Plus, if you’re a Lettings AND Sales agent, you can now list all your properties on House Advertiser.
And…. we’re offering the chance to list with us FREE, so do get in touch. No cost, no risk, no problemo. It’s a complete no-brainer.
Support staff report that there are currently some problems with the House Advertiser servers defaulting to random foreign languages. This misconfiguration seems to be an intermittent problem mai qui se produisent à tout moment. You may experience the odd glitch while technicians look into this.
Right now, technical staff are working de corriger le problème et définir la langue du serveur à l’anglais. On nous a promis un délai until approximately 12 o’clock pour le correctif du serveur. At times, vous mai expérience de l’étrange changement de la language – usually French or German, but sometimes a dialect file will be selected as a language subset. Tha’s a roit rum’n when that ‘appen ‘n orl.
Bitte Telefon nicht im Büro, wenn Sie dies zu sehen – please use email only.
Finally, je vais vous rappeler qu’il est le 1er avril, so this kind of thing is probably to be expected.
Steve Hall
IT Director, House Advertiser Ltd.
Although it’s early days here at House Advertiser, we’re pleased by the performance of our property portal on Google. We’re noticing searches coming in for properties in geographical areas with quite specific search terms. Our Bournemouth Estate Agent, St. Quintin & McConnell is currently enjoying the benefit of this attention, with site visitors hitting their properties directly.
Here’s an example from our stats of the kinds of searches finding us - just related to properties for sale in Bournemouth…
… some of them are pretty specific in their location. It looks like our site should do quite well on the search engines!
If you’re an agent or developer in another area, maybe you should come on board with House Advertiser and see if we can bring in this kind of interest for your sales (and your lets too, quite soon!)
NEW IT POLICY AT HOUSE ADVERTISER
It’s official. The PCs in the H-A office are being replaced. After a brief but enlightening exhange on Twitter with Alec Hanson of Just Do Property about the merits (and otherwise) of using computers, a large metaphorical lightbulb has been illuminated above my desk.
I’ve just been in touch with Regents Park and have organised a long-term leasing arrangement for an infinite number of monkeys. Paper and crayons will be from Viking Direct. I’ve sourced a pretty good deal on bananas too.
I ran the numbers through a spreadsheet and worked out it’ll probably increase our office output exponentially but accuracy of information and customer-facing performance may suffer a slight downturn.
But it might. Just. Work.
Steve Hall
IT Director and Primate Coordinator.
By Steve Hall
House Advertiser’s IT Director
I’ve been getting into the Bad Science blog site recently – all those pseudo-scientific adverts and lazy journalists’ news articles had put me into ‘Grumpy Old Man’ mode and I’d been on the web looking for kindred spirits!
I was reading a piece on the site about Rentokill and how they’d used a questionable computer model to come up with a press release about bugs in train carriages. That was all very interesting, but it then lead on to a section about the way they had been running their Twitter campaign.
It seems they’d annoyed some people by the way their PR company (their social networking campaign is outsourced) had been finding Twitterers using certain keywords in their Tweets to send them direct marketing messages. The debate on the Rentokill blog became quite involved, with some people (although not all) being pretty offended by this policy.
It certainly got me thinking in-depth about House Advertiser’s own Twitter policy. It’s a campaign in its infancy (as is the company) and we want to get the balance right. We don’t target Twitter users in this way, but we do aim to follow individuals as well as companies (there is a social aspect to Tweeting after all) and wouldn’t like to annoy anybody – ‘cos we’re very nice chaps and chapesses here at H-A :)
I wonder…. where would you draw the line? What’s on your do/don’t list when it comes to Twitter. Does your business’ policy dictate that you only follow other businesses? Do you send marketing messages to individual Twitterers?
Have you even considered creating a formal social networking policy for your company? We’d be interested in your thoughts.
We’ve just let loose the dogs of war software programmers on our website again. This time, we’re getting them to add Lettings and Commercial Property to our list of features. It shouldn’t take too long, so soon our estate agents will be able to list their whole portfolio with us rather than just sales.
See – we listen!
Here’s a story in The Mirror about some guy selling his house using Twitter. Mind you, he built a website for the sale too. Ended up selling it to a local purchaser after around 30 viewings!
The press do love an agent-bashing story, don’t they?
We’re working on the promotional side of our service right now – we realise that we have to make it easy for both the public and the property industry to see what we’re up to. That’s why we’ve now linked our Wordpress blog to Facebook and Twitter. It’s a start.
Each of our properties’ pages already has links to the main social networking sites, so that people interested in each property can share their interest with their networking friends and colleagues. House Advertiser’s own Facebook and Twitter page now give us a way to ‘get the word out’ as well as connect with our users to get fast and valuable feedback from them.
Cheesy saying for the day: ‘Property promotion – it’s a two-way street’ 
