IMPORTANT UPDATE:  We’re adjusting pricing – Effective June 3, 2019. Agent Evolution, an IDX Broker company, will adjust subscription pricing (on June 3, 2019) to match our current retail rates and to more accurately reflect the value our clients receive from our products and services. We have proudly served the real estate industry for the last decade, and this is the first-ever increase for our fully-hosted and supported TurnKey website product. The decision to raise pricing going forward is not one we take lightly. But, we are confident in the value we’ve added into the product over th ..read more

Envious of another real estate agent’s social presence? Do their posts seem more polished and professional than yours? Feel like you could never get your posts to that level? Truth is, you can step up your lackluster social game. All you need are the right tools. Graphic Design Made Easy Let me introduce you to Canva. This free online tool produces great results with little effort. With over 60,000 templates, Canva can help with social media posts, email campaigns, flyers, presentations, infographics, and more. An intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes tweaking templates simple. Change colors, a ..read more

Ever read product reviews before ordering on Amazon? Checked a movie’s score on Rotten Tomato before buying a ticket? If so, you aren’t alone. Nearly 70% of online shoppers read reviews before purchasing. Looking to the opinions of others is the phenomenon known as “social proof”. When you get a recommendation from family, friends, or any other trusted source, it has a greater impact than any other form of advertising. Social proof isn’t just for choosing the best shower loofah on Amazon, it applies to how people choose a REALTOR®, too. Here is a list of creative ways a real estate agent can u ..read more

In our first article on website image optimization, we looked at tools to identify large images that could slow website load times. Now it is time to discuss tools that can fix image problems by shrinking file sizes. Requirements There are 3 main ways to reduce the file size of an image. A good solution allows for manipulating all 3. Crop Cropping removes unwanted areas of a photo, making for better composition. Too much sky in a listing photo? Crop it out to “zoom in” on the house. It also allows changing the aspect ratio. This comes in handy when needing to turn a rectangular image into a sq ..read more

Images are an integral part of the modern real estate website. They account for the majority of elements on an average page; and whether those images are optimized, plays a big part in the performance of a website. Why Is Website Image Optimization Important? Bad User Experience Large, bulky photos take a considerable time to load. Slow loading pages negatively impacts bounce rate because visitors lose patience and leave the site. Each “bounced” visitor is the loss of a potential lead. Poor SEO Not only do visitors dislike a slow loading website, Google does too. Slow sites are not index ..read more

MLS home search is one of the most important pieces of a real estate website. It provides value (i.e. listing details) that can be exchanged for contact information (example: homes by email). Those conversion points account for a large chunk of the leads generated on many REALTOR® websites. When adding MLS home search to a WordPress real estate website, there is no better choice than the IMPress for IDX Broker plugin. Co-authored with our parent company, IDX Broker, this free plugin seamlessly integrates their home search services into any WordPress.org-based website. This video takes a deep l ..read more

The popularity of podcasts is at an all-time high. Nearly one in four Americans listen to podcasts on a monthly basis. With those numbers, it makes a lot of sense for real estate agents to have their own podcasts. Using Amazon Polly for WordPress, building that podcast from a REALTOR® website happens automatically. Harness the Power of Alexa It is amazing how lifelike Amazon’s Alexa sounds when reading the news or search results. There are pauses for breathing, changes in pitch, and rate fluctuations just like a real person. Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that uses much of the same t ..read more

Surely you’ve received loads of emails over the past several weeks from companies saying they’ve updated their privacy policy or need to re-confirm your email address. This is all due to GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, established into law by the European Union. Without getting in to the legalese of the law (spoiler alert – I’m not a lawyer), and while it may be annoying in the short term, ultimately the protections are in place to better protect you and your privacy online. So that’s all great, but you may be asking yourself: What does that mean for me and what do I need to ..read more

Maps are an essential part of any real estate website. They’re used to show the location of listings and the boundaries of communities. The visual and interactive nature of online maps adds a lot to the user experience of an agent’s site. When it comes to online maps, Google is king. Nearly 14% of the top 1 million sites use embedded Google Maps. That is 46 times greater than the next closest competitor. With such a large share of the market, any change to Google Maps can have a major impact on the Internet. Just such a change happened this week. Google Maps API Key To this point, you cou ..read more

Thanks to the social media trend of #ThrowbackThursday (or #tbt), what’s old is cool again! With that in mind, when we came across some photos from the 2009 REBarCamp in San Francisco, we just had to share. If you’re not familiar, REBarCamp provided a forum for those in the real estate industry to connect and share ideas. This “un-conference” had no predetermined agendas or presentations. Attendees simply signed up to lead a discussion on a topic of their choosing… very different from the huge real estate conferences of 2018. To refresh your memory- in 2009 social media and blogging were in th ..read more