Training tools from cheap parts

Sharing the lessons from The Academy with your team will help you to develop skills collectively. If you have a weekly meeting, why not spend five minutes of this watching one of our videos with your team and discussing ways that you can put what you have learnt to use?

And just because times are tight, it doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune to deck out your meeting room for training purposes. Check out this video from TED.com (a goldmine of inspirational ideas) which shows how to use the remote from a Wii games console to create sophisticated training tools...

Time For Change

Are you still offering clients the same service you were during the boom times or have you adjusted your offering to stay ahead of the game? Julian O'Dell will show you why simply doing the same things more won’t necessarily work and identify new ways you can boost your business with efficient and proven methods in this lesson.

Find the value of any home on your iPhone

Zillow.com is one of the most popular property portals in the US. It's model is much the same as recent UK upstart Zoopla.co.uk in that it provides data on every property, not just those that are actually for sale using an automated valuation model. It also provides agents with a pay-per-lead model for marketing properties which are actually for sale like Propertyindex.com.

Zillow's 'Zestimates' have earnt them plenty of praise for their innovation and plenty of criticism for their inaccuracy, but the appeal of having current data on every property has certainly proved popular with US homebuyers and Zillow is now the 2nd most popular US property portal. Taking this success from conventional online to the mobile marketplace was a logical step and Zillow has achieved several hundred thousand downloads of it's new iPhone application within just a few weeks. The application uses the iPhone's built in GPS to pinpoint your location and tell you the value of the properties around you. See how it works in more detail in this video...

Any good agent should be able to pick holes in a price obtained by an automated valuation model, but tech-savvy buyers are bound to use this facility to compare automated and actual asking price for peace of mind or even as a point for negotiation. Zoopla already has some fairly basic iPhone apps, but it will surely not be long before they or another of the portals bring this technology to the UK market.

Building an Exceptional Lettings Business

Lettings has traditionally been viewed as, “the icing on the cake” of agency business but as time goes on it would appear that there may be a long term shift in the housing market. As more and more agents realise the importance of a great lettings offering, how can you ensure that you are building a business that will produce long term, high quality fees from loyal customers? Peter Chapman explains.

Advanced Features of Google Search Options

If you thought you knew how to use Google Search think again. This video explains some of the options that you can now use to get more relevant results when using the ubiquitous search engine.

Compliance - Mark Hayward

As well as the Property Misdescriptions Act and the legalities of HIPs, there is much more legislation that agents must comply with. With an agent having just been jailed for 8 months and the Ombudsman has just reported the largest fine ever, now is the time to ensure that your agency has full compliance and won’t be caught out. In this lesson, Mark takes you through this legislation and looks at exactly how you can ensure you remain within the law.

Technology as a core business decision - Charlie Wright

You wouldn’t let your painter and decorator choose the colour scheme for your house and the same goes with technology decisions made for your business. As the business owner, you should make these decisions yourself, not leave them to your I.T. guys. In this session, Charlie highlights how you can start learning about technology quickly and easily and how to utilise your new-found knowledge to maximum effect.

Window Shopping

Estate Agents and shops both enjoy a high street presence but with rather different sales propositions. With most of your work being carried out in full view of your clients, both existing and potential, how can you ensure they are motivated by what they can see through your office window? Clare shows you how.

Tweeting new listings

Despite having been around for a fair old while, Twitter is currently enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity and has steadily climbed the list of the UK's most visited websites thus far in 2009.

For the iltwitterate amongst you, Twitter is a social micro-blogging site; a what? A social network that lets you post very short statements (there is a 140 character limit) known as "Tweets". Much like the status feature on Facebook, Twitter can be used by the individual to inform their friends or "followers" about what they're doing, what they're thinking, or to pose a question.

Ignoring the affront that Twitter poses to Facebook in providing a broadcast mechanism for people's self-obsession and randomness, it does have more sensible applications and some are using it to keep applicants abreast of new properties and other news that they can't get on their own website or the portals quick enough. A good example of this is gumtreefltLDN

Twitter is almost instantaneous, the moment you click the update button, your followers will be able to see your Tweet. If you are serving a fast-moving rental market with typical tenants in their twenties, you will definitely find your audience receptive to receiving updates via Twitter, probably more so than phone or e-mail.

If you do have a conventional webpage for the property, you can link through to it. Twitter compresses web addresses using TinyURL and other services to help keep you within the character limit.

Another example of someone using Twitter for properties is Globrix, who have a Twitter page called PropertyPorn which they use to showcase some of their nicest pads, but this is more of a novelty than a way of actually promoting listings seriously.

If you think that promoting your properties through Twitter is worth a try, ask one of your more web-savvy negs to set it up for you. It won't take them long, it won't cost you anything and may just give you a useful new channel for marketing your listings and maybe a point of difference from your competitors for a while at least.

The Julie Ryan

In this session Peter highlights the successful techniques used by an estate agent called Julie Ryan. Her networking skills amongst her sellers’ neighbours have led her to become the best known agent in her area achieving top levels of instructions. You will learn how to harness her methods to ensure that you too are the best known agent in your area.