The Qube Exchange

Check out some of this weeks great conversations taking place on Propertyqube!

I have a listing agent who’s time is coming to an end very shortly. I will give to new agent.
What happens if old agent has a buyer that decides to make offer after time runs out. But party was in the mill while old agent had property.

First answered by Judi Bryan of Bloomingdale, IL: The regulations on that may vary from state to state, but certainly in Illinois…and likely elsewhere…once a property has been listed by another broker, the NEW broker is your agent and the entire process (regardless of when it began) would be theirs. [Read more]

What are the most important upgrades a seller can make in this market before listing their home for sale?

Answered by Steve Belt of Scottsdale, AZ: Paint should always be #1. Paint your home real estate beige, with white trim. After that, make sure the entry way is inviting and clean. If your front yard isn’t up to shape, make it so. After that, it’s the kitchen. And finally, the backyard. [Read more]

What happens if the city puts a lien on your house? Does it collect interest and do I worry about it only when I sell?

Answered by Kathleen Ploch of Torrance, CA: Hello Sonja, Not knowing exactly what would be causing you to have a lien on your home, I am going to answer in more of generalities. As with many cities, they all have a process of citing and recording liens if necessary. The City of Compton Building and Safety division starts by sending out a corrections notice or citation of the violation. [Read more]

Check out these and other conversations in your Local PropertyLife Community!

PropertyLife Makes Its Debut!

What’s PropertyLife you ask? PropertyLife is a way to experience the local community you live or work in. It’s a way to connect, share, discover and learn about all that’s happening around you, in the real estate world.

To join go to propertyqube.com, log in and check out your local PropertyLife scene.

So how can PropertyLife benefit you?

Be part of our PropertyLife Blog Network:

Have a blog? Well don’t let all that hard work go to waste. Get it in front of a wider audience at the local level! When you feed your blog into Propertyqube, it will be distributed to four different places throughout our network. It will show up front and center on your local PropertyLife page, in a widget on every listing in your area, on our main blog page and on the user home page of every user in your local area.

We eliminate all the work on your part by automatically importing your entries as you post them, complete with links back to your blog. When a user clicks on the title of your blog entry, they are brought off of our network and onto your blog so they experience YOUR brand.  Not only that, but the SEO benefit for your blog is great!

Give Advice and Generate Leads

On every local PropertyLife page are the recent conversations going on in your area. When consumers visit these PropertyLife pages, they see the great advice you give to the community and get a better sense of who you are and what you’re able to do for them! So get out there and show off that knowledge!

What now?  Get Involved in your Local PropertyLife Scene!

Brand Your Listings!

We’ve also released the ability for you to your listings and tag them to your profile. Simply search for your listings using our newly refined criteria box, scroll down to the contact widget, click “Claim your listing,” accept the disclosure. That’s it! Your photo will automatically show up on the listing along with a link to your profile, your contact info and a small blurb about your expertise. Not only that, but if you have a blog, your blog will feed into the listing page to be discovered by passerby’s.

Photos, Photos, Photos!

Help consumers get a feel for the local community! When
you upload photos, we’ll distribute them to your Local PropertyLife
page and to the user home pages of everyone connected to you. Browsing through photos is one of the best ways for interested home buyers to relate to the local community when not there in person.

Check out some our most popular blogs already in the Propertyqube Blog Network (in no particular order):

Kay Thomas: Manhattan Beach Real Estate-Redondo Beach Townhomes

Joseph Ferrara: Sellsius real estate marketing blog

Shane Leady: Table Talk With Apella

Steve Belt: Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog

Freshome: Home Design| Decorating Home | Interior Design | Furniture Inspiration

Amy McAllister: Hood River & Gorge Blog

Kristal Kraft: Denver Real Estate

It is with much excitement that we unveil several new features and products that we’ve been working on over the past couple of months. We’ve been building up to this point since our initial test site launch back in September and we are finally at the point where we are ready for the world to take a peek.

When we first took the wrapper off of Propertyqube, we took it off knowing that our initial release was just the first stepping stone to showing you what we would ultimately want to deliver. We strongly believe in helping professionals build their own brand and wanted to create a community that was truly local, not just one that touts to be local. Along with that, the phrase “PropertyLife” (in our tag line) was released back in September but until now, it didn’t really mean anything. Well next week, PropertyLife will become more clear!

Stay tuned for more details! If you are not part of our blog network, you should become part of it. It will come into play for this launch.

Over the past couple of months we have been working tirelessly on several new features/products based on all the great feedback we constantly get from you! We are excited to announce the big day is coming soon and we will launch them all next week. These features will change Propertyqube as we know it and will start to show our longer term strategy of who we want to become!

Stay tuned….

We talk to lots of people throughout the industry and we always get the question, “What’s Propertyqube working on next?” I think when we first launched Propertyqube, we took a very hush hush strategy but lately, we’ve been taking a lot more of an anti-stealth kind of approach. At the end of the day, success is achieved based on execution of your plans and ideas. So with that, you’ll be hearing more and more about the products and features we’re working on a lot earlier in the development cycle.

So what IS Propertyqube working on? Well over the past month, we’ve been focused on the launch of User Home Pages and refining a bunch of other pages throughout our platform to get the message about who we are across more effectively. The User Home Pages are in early beta and so you can expect some tweaks in the coming months as we learn more about what you want to see when first logging in.

As we try to create some of the most comprehensive profiles in the industry to set you apart from the crowd, we are now working on a way for Realtors to link their profile up to their listings flowing through Google Base. We have ideas on how we want to show these listings in your profile (think widget or a dedicated page) but we want to hear from you! Feel free to drop a comment or email us with your thoughts on how to most effectively show your listings off!

Here at Propertyqube, we love when we get feedback from our members and when we do, we work furiously to incorporate it into our network. Based on some of the feedback we received in talking with all of you, we thought it was necessary to spruce up a couple of pages in our network, most notably, user profiles!

We are happy to say we just released new profiles along with a new join now page! You’ll see lots of other changes here and there but these are the two most notable changes. Go check em out! of course, let us know what you think.

Profile shot:

Join page:

We’re doing a little early summer cleaning up and hitting a few pages and processes to make them more appealing and easier to use.

For starters, we are hitting the user profile page. We like the information our user profiles contain but the information widgets need to be shuffled around a bit. Along with that, we are applying a more appealing design. The second change you will see relates to the “invite a connection” page. These pages will be more intuitive with a much better design. You’ll also see a different “Join Now” page.

We plan on releasing these enhancements over the next week or two and we hope you like them! Feel free to drop us a note if you want us to consider anything and let us know if you want to have a sneak peek at the new designs!

With the launch of User Home Pages last week, we are thrilled with the feedback and results we have already started to see. Your new User Home Page is the jumping off point when you log in to Propertyqube. It’s the “bring it all together” page that enables you to get a great glimpse into your network within Propertyqube. One of the great things about this User Home Page includes the ability for you to DISTRIBUTE your blog throughout our entire blog network to the people who matter.

So how does it work? When you JOIN Propertyqube, you have the ability to feed your already existing blog into our blog network using RSS. It takes about 15 seconds to setup. After logging in or joining, simply click on “My Blog” in the second navigation bar, click on “Import Your Existing Blog,” paste in your RSS feed url and choose a category for your blog entries (ie: local community info, home buying advice, etc). The location is defaulted to your sign up location but feel free to change it if you live and blog in separate places. That’s it! It really is that simple.

So you may be asking yourself what happens next?
Well every time you blog, we’ll automatically pull in your entry and distribute it throughout our blog network and site. This means it gets hosted on our main BLOGS page and gets distributed to every single User Home Page located in the city and state you chose in the blog import sign up process. Talk about hyper local distribution! I personally discovered a couple of local New York City blogs.

Need another reason to import your blog?
When we import your blog entries, we import the entry complete with links to your blog. When users click on the title of your blog entries, they are sent directly to your blog…so you realize the increased traffic and visitors experience YOUR brand.

So go try it out! Join our fast growing blog network and let us know what you think!

Here’s an example of my User Home Page:

(click to view larger image)

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks over here at Propertyqube but we all seemed to get through it alive. As you know, we have been experiencing some technical problems, all related to our hosting company. We were humming right along and before we knew it, service started deteriorating and our site started experiencing downtime. We decided it was time to pull the plug on them.

Over the past couple of weeks, we have been busy with getting a new hosting environment up and running and transferring our infrastructure over. We are happy to say we are 99% complete and back better than ever! Our site is faster than ever before and we are excited to announce some much needed functionality in beta, accessible to all through your main profile page!

Today, we released a snazzy page that ties together everything you do on Propertyqube. From the groups you converse in, to the local conversations happening around you, to the local blogs in your area and the photos being uploaded by your network. You got it…USER HOME PAGES are now live in beta!

The idea around our new User Home Page is to give you an easy way of staying up to date with everything going on around you in the Propertyqube community. Here’s what you can expect to find:

-Favorite Blogs: All the recent entries from your Propertyqube Favorite Blogs now flow right to your home page. If you haven’t favorited any just yet, the widget won’t show up.

- Local Blog Network: Have a local Real Estate Blog? Distribute it to a targeted audience. When you choose to create or feed a blog into our network, your blog is fed to everybody’s User Home Page in the state you localize your blog within. It’s great for the blogger (wider distribution) and better for the user (local content they can discover and favorite).

- Group Activity and Local Conversations: Belong to a group or two? All the recent activity in the groups you belong to flows to your user home page. We also have a widget that brings in the local conversations happening in our general Conversation Forums. This gives you an easier way to stay up on the conversations going on…all from one centralized place!

- Photos: There’s nothing better than a photo stream! Any time a connection uploads a new photo to their profile, it appears in your User Home Page Photo Stream! It’s just another way to discover the cool projects and local community photos being uploaded to Propertyqube on a daily basis.

So go check it out! Go to your main profile and click on the link that reads “Get a sneak peek at our new user home page.” We hope you like it!

As always, we want to hear from you! Don’t hesitate to send any feedback our way.

Drum roll please……Steve Belt!

Steve has been an incredible evangelist of our community. He has been instrumental in refining functionality by giving us his candid feedback on how the user experience could be made better. He is super active on Propertyqube and we see home buyers and sellers who seek advice benefit from the great guidance he gives time and time again (check out his profile for a complete view of his contributions). This is why he is part of the Propertyqube Elite Huddle!

Congratulations, Steve!

You can check out Steve’s profile and connect with him HERE.