shelleydraper.com

The NEG Board of Realtors has increased the number of potential property photos from 4 to 24. As you know, I’ve been pushing for this as the overwhelming majority of my emails ask for “more photos”.

It will take awhile for agents to populate their listings with more photos, but many are already exceeding 4 per listing with new listings and some are going back and adding more photos to existing listings.

This is a win-win-win for sellers, buyers, & Realtors and hats off to the board for implementing it. I’m sure the coding and increased bandwidth and storage doesn’t come cheap.

Incidentally, if you’re looking for a previous listing and can’t find it, we’ve decided to purge all listings that have less than 4 photos posted by the agent. However, give us a call and we’ll get the listing information to you if needed.

Our number one request is by far, “more photos”. It’s crazy, close to 10 emails a day with just basically, “more photos please”. Apparently, for now, our MLS only exports 4 photos per property. What does this mean? Basically, we display every picture we can; there are no more.

Kip has set up a cheap, simple virtual tours site, in an effort to get local agents to post more unbranded photos so we, they, and other agents may better know, promote, and sell their listings. Additionally, agents that utilize these tours will have them linked from their listings that appear on our website.

With that in mind, we thought we would provide a friendly online “petition” to perhaps get a more public view of the kind of feedback we receive on a daily basis:

Dear Northeast Georgia Realtors,
I would like to see more than 4 photos per listing…

Seems our Realtor-only tool for accessing the NEG MLS database has been hit by the early Spring forward bug. The full reports show the proper time, but when you update, the “Last updated” time is an hour behind.

I don’t think half the agents up here have a clue about IDX and broker reciprocity. If agents just have to help themselves to using our Company website(we know, it rocks) as their free MLS searching resource, they should at least educate themselves on the published rules and regulations before they pick up the phone or flame us from the website.

I got a call (preceded by several nasty emails) last Friday night from an irate local agent (that I’d never heard of) wondering why her listings were on my website and demanding that I remove them immediately. I tried to nicely explain “broker reciprocity” (circa 2000) to her, to which she proceeded to cuss me out, told me I would be hearing from other Realtors, and hung up on me. She then had several of her agent friends email from our website, asking why their listings were on our site. Read the rules & regs or ask your broker ladies. Frankly, it’s not my responsibility to educate you, especially when you conduct yourselves in such an unprofessional manner.

Then Tuesday morning, I was on the receiving end of another good ol’ Southern cussout and hang up call from a competing agent (that I know) for not having his listings on OUR Company website. He claimed one of his listers could not find their listing on a Google search >> our website. Um, first it sounds like you need to focus on your own website if your clients are using ours, and secondly, we filter all kinds of spammy listings (mobile homes, less than 3 photos, misleading/false data, missing/lazy/illegal descriptions, etc.) to make it a better browsing experience for our target audience. We also listen to user feedback on their buying and selling experiences and apply that data to our filters on an ongoing basis. What makes it on to our website is our business.

To summarize: In a period of less than a week, I was cussed out and hung up on by one agent FOR having her listings on our website, then by another for NOT having his listings on our Company website.

• Do we need a broker reciprocity class? Yes.
• Are there too many agents with too much time on their hands? Obviously, 400+ did not renew w/ our board for ‘07—we were due for a purge though.
• Why are other agents so concerned or threatened by our lil’ ol’ mom-&-pop, non-corporate website? Well, I just don’t know.

Beer and wine will be served with a maximum of 3 drinks per person.

Received this message from the Board today. That’s a bit insulting for an old lady but I can live with it. Moreover, I will give the Board the benefit-of-the-doubt, in that, probably due to the lack of ticket sales, they pulled some pretty big teeth to make this quasi-cash-bar happen. Bravo, but bring it back to Brasstown next year and let my bartender make the call on how many drinks to sell me.