Last Chance for IDX Sale!

Attention Agents!
Spring is the perfect time to seed your business for big growth in the future. Give your website a BOOST by adding IDX! IDX lets your website customers search for MLS listings on your website in Customer Format. Don’t get left behind by your competition. Having a strong Internet presence is essential to agent success!

According to the NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 75% of buyers used the internet in the home buying process. Of these buyers, 90% found their real estate agent online!! Statistics show that the number of internet buyers is increasing, while the number of traditional buyers is decreasing. These internet homebuyers are younger and purchasing more expensive homes than other homebuyers!

SPECIAL OFFER
Sign up for EZ or FULL IDX in April and get FREE SETUP! EZ and FULL IDX are templated versions of the active MLS listings in customer format. You choose the color, we do the rest! Click here to see a sample EZ IDX or a sample FULL IDX.

Sign up for CUSTOM IDX, FTP Feed, XML Feed, or VOW Feed in April and SAVE BIG BUCKS! Setup Fees have been slashed to $200 during the April Spring Fling for these data solutions!

ATTENTION EZ IDX CUSTOMERS: Upgrade your IDX to FULL IDX for $100/mo. Save $1200 a year on this one time only upgrade. Offers expires May 1, 2008 so act now.

CALL COLLEEN YASUHARA TODAY at 1-808-748-8751 or E-mail Colleen: colleen@alohaliving.com

READY TO SIGN UP NOW? Download an IDX Application!

Real Estate Marketing Ideas

With everybody and his brother talking about the slump in the housing market, agents are looking for more creative and interactive ways to reach new prospects. As I was browsing through my RSS feeds today, I thought I would share some of the more interesting new Real Estate marketing ideas I found around the web with you. Enjoy!

Local Jacksonville, FL Agent Hits the Streets to Drum Up New Business
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZXbZDbCze8 (YouTube Video, Under 60 seconds)

Do You Twitter? If so, you can now prospect to other local Twitter users in your market area using TwitterLocal.net. Don’t even know what Twitter is? Read this article. It will get you started.

Creating a Killer Listing Presentation – Web 2.0 Style

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Blog Post by
Beth Berry
Director of Sales and Marketing
Hawaii Information Service
AlohaLiving.com
Beth@AlohaLiving.com

IDX Spring Fling- Save a Bundle!

Attention Agents!
Spring is the perfect time to seed your business for big growth in the future. Give your website a BOOST by adding IDX! IDX lets your website customers search for MLS listings on your website in Customer Format. Don’t get left behind by your competition. Having a strong Internet presence is essential to agent success!

According to the NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 75% of buyers used the internet in the home buying process. Of these buyers, 90% found their real estate agent online!! Statistics show that the number of internet buyers is increasing, while the number of traditional buyers is decreasing. These internet homebuyers are younger and purchasing more expensive homes than other homebuyers!

SPECIAL OFFER
Sign up for EZ or FULL IDX in April and get FREE SETUP! EZ and FULL IDX are templated versions of the active MLS listings in customer format. You choose the color, we do the rest! Click here to see a sample EZ IDX or a sample FULL IDX.

Sign up for CUSTOM IDX, FTP Feed, XML Feed, or VOW Feed in April and SAVE BIG BUCKS! Setup Fees have been slashed to $200 during the April Spring Fling for these data solutions!

ATTENTION EZ IDX CUSTOMERS: Upgrade your IDX to FULL IDX for $100/mo. Save $1200 a year on this one time only upgrade. Offers expires May 1, 2008 so act now.

CALL COLLEEN YASUHARA TODAY at 1-808-748-8751 or E-mail Colleen: colleen@alohaliving.com

READY TO SIGN UP NOW? Download an IDX Application!

Attention Obeo Customers

Attention Obeo Virtual Tour Customers
Obeo is restructuring their business in Hawaii, and as a result, ordering new tours is temporarily unavailable. While we will continue to offer Obeo Tours to agents, brokers, and vacation rental managers statewide, the following changes will are immediately in effect.

1. All Obeo Customer Service calls will now go directly through Obeo. If you have questions about a tour, problems with a tour, or need something on your virtual tour changed, please call Obeo directly at 1-800-SAY-OBEO.

2. When service resumes, ordering Obeo Tours can still be done through the MLS by clicking on the Order Virtual Tour link on the Listings Tab in REsearch. You can also still call our office and speak to Colleen Yasuhara to order and Obeo tour. But the easiest and most efficient way to order a tour is to go through the Obeo website: www.Obeo.com.

3. Big Island Customers: It is with great regret that we inform you that Heather Lange will no longer be shooting Obeo brand tours for customers on the Big Island. Obeo will be hiring photographers statewide, and service will resume as soon as photographers have been trained to the quality of service that you have come to expect. Heather has been such a wonderful member of our team. We are very sorry to see her go!

Heather, thank you for everything! You’re wonderful.

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If you currently have an Obeo tour on your listing, you do not need to do anything in regards to this announcement. We will notify the membership immediately when Obeo Tour service resumes and you can begin ordering tours again! Thank you for your patience as Obeo reorganizes their efforts in Hawaii.

Ask AlohaLiving: How are you Marketing?

Today’s answer will cover the following questions.

1. How and where are you marketing my listings?

2. I spend a lot of money on Search Engine Optimization. Am I going to
be competing with AlohaLiving.com for top placement on major search
engines like Google?

Since AlohaLiving.com is operated by your MLS provider, Hawaii Information Service, we carefully consider how and where we market our MLS Public website so as not to be in direct competition with our participants and their websites. This is a very competitive time in internet advertising, and there are agents and brokers who spend thousands of dollars each month to have their websites constantly optimized for top billing on Google and other search engines. We feel it is a conflict of interest for us to compete directly in this space, so we have always chosen to not aggressively pursue top placement in search engines for our public real estate sites.

We take a more subtle approach to Google, primarily participating in Google AdWords so that we have coverage on all islands for the most popular Hawaii real estate and vacation rental keyword buys.

Right now, AlohaLiving.com derives 15 percent of all traffic from organic google searches (non-paid), and another 10 percent from our Google AdWords campaigns. We also send our listing data to Google Base every 24 hours. So, more than 25 percent of our traffic comes from Google without us being among the top results for certain search keywords. And those numbers should improve each month as we add more content, and Google begins to index more of our data. The key to our search engine marketing is content. We’re adding new content daily to drive more traffic to AlohaLiving.com.

That being said, we are taking very aggressive steps in creating relationships outside of Google and other search engines that will drive significant traffic to AlohaLiving.com, and therefore to our brokers, agents, and advertisers. We have recently signed listing agreements that will make us the exclusive Hawaii listing partner on CyberHomes.com and the AOL Real Estate Channel. Anyone who searches for properties in Hawaii on Cyberhomes or AOL will be directed back to AlohaLiving.com to see the property details of our agent’s and broker’s listings. We are also in final contract negotiations to implement the same arrangement with an aggregator that will give us the same exclusive relationship with Yahoo! Real Estate, Zillow.com, Trulia.com, MyRealty.com, Oodle.com, Homescape.com, Homes and Land Magazine.com, Hotpads.com, Vast, and FrontDoor.com (HGTV’s new real estate portal).

It is our policy that AlohaLiving.com will not distribute listing data with any website or partner that will not directly link back to our detail page. Getting the traffic back to your listings is our ultimate goal, and we are committed to making that happen.

We are continuing to reach out to the village of existing real estate portals who want to get complete listing data from the MLS, but would not necessarily make the same type of deals with individual agents or brokers. By creating these strategic partnerships, we will be able to drive more traffic to AlohaLiving.com, and ultimately more traffic to your listings, your contact information, and to you!

AskAlohaLiving: Your Google Map Pins Are Perfect! How Did You Do That?

Question: When I view a listing on AlohaLiving.com, the Google Map of the property has the map pin in the correct location. But when I do a search for property on Google.com Maps, the pin is in the wrong place. How can I correct the map pin on Google.com’s property search result maps?

Answer: Google geocodes properties using address ranges which leads to inaccurate placement of property pins on maps. Aloha Living uses the Geographic Information System (GIS) embedded in the REsearch MLS technology which is parcel based for almost perfect accuracy. You will not find better placement of property pins than Aloha Living for the state of Hawaii. Do a search on vacant land and you will be amazed! No one else comes even close to our accuracy.

Thanks! Our GIS team will be thrilled that you noticed!

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Did you know that our staff GIS experts have been working with Google to encourage them to adopt the same GIS method of placing property pins on the Google Map servers. Our mapping team and Google’s mapping team are in regular communication over these types of issues, and Hawaii Information Service is playing a role in improving Google’s mapping module for all of Hawaii.

Ask AlohaLiving: How Often is it Updated?

Question: How often is data updated on AlohaLiving.com?

Answer: Listing data is updated every 3 hours on AlohaLiving.com. Agent and Office information, as well as photos are updated twice a week during the Monday and Thursday evening complete database update.

We are working to shorten the update times, and hope to have listing data updating every hour, and a complete database update nightly in the near future.

Please Let Us Know! If you do not see your listing after these update times, please call customer support and give them the MLS number. We want to identify any data update issues before we shorten the update times.

Ask AlohaLiving: Why are you asking people to register?

Question: Why are you registering clients on Aloha Living main page? Who sees the list of clients? Does any real estate agent ever see or have access to the registered client list?

Answer: AlohaLiving.com encourages users to register for My Home Toolkit in order to take advantage of many personalized features of the site, such as Saving a Search and the Hotlist feature. We also provide a free basic public record report on each active property to all registered members. In order to recognize a user when they login and to deliver their personalized information, we must require them to register with the site and give us basic information.

At this time, only staff members of AlohaLiving.com have access to the registered users list. We will use the list to communicate with registered users about AlohaLiving.com enhancements, features, and updates.

We are working on a module that will help us to distribute qualified leads to agents and brokers directly though the AlohaLiving.com lead management system, but at this time, that system is not ready to be implemented. When the system is ready, we will provide detailed instructions on how to use the feature, and how it is integrated with REsearch, your MLS system. And don’t worry, we do not have plans to sell leads back to you. Leads will be distributed at no cost to you.
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WYSIWYG– What You See is What You’re (Gonna) Get! All of the development you see going on at www.AlohaLiving.com is work that we are doing to improve our Interactive product line to brokers and agents in Hawaii. All of the features and enhancements that you see on AlohaLiving.com will eventually be available to fuel your personal websites. One of the reasons the Aloha Living iniative was born was to serve as a test environment for the new suite of features and functionality we plan to offer to our members.

So, if you have a website with Hawaii Information Service, and you’ve been waiting for hot new features like Saved Searches, Hotlists, Map Searching, and Lead Management, keep a close eye on what is going on at AlohaLiving.com. Very soon these features will also be available to add on to or replace your current website technology!

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GOT A QUESTION ABOUT ALOHA LIVING?
E-mail ASK@ALOHALIVING.COM TODAY!

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Blog post by Beth Berry
Director of Sales and Marketing
Hawaii Information Service
Aloha Living Network
beth@alohaliving.com

Ask All About Aloha Living!

Attention Brokers & Agents–

We launched your new regional real estate portal, AlohaLiving.com, on February 8th, and since then the site has gone through many changes. Improved speed, easier navigation, and more content are just a few of the enhancements that have been made over the past two months. Have you been to AlohaLiving.com lately? If not, you may want to take a new look.

And over the next few weeks, we’d like to hear from you and have a chance to answer your most burning questions about AlohaLiving.com and The Aloha Living Network. We have gotten tons of great feedback about the site, and many of the change you have requested have been made over the past couple of months. Now let’s kick it up a notch. From now until April 15th, I will be blogging answers to your questions about Aloha Living.

Feel free to ask anything you want about AlohaLiving.com, The Aloha Living Network, and The Aloha Living Blog Network. Curious about why your MLS is taking on a regional portal initiative? Want to know how you fit into the AlohaLiving.com picture? Wondering if AlohaLiving.com is competing for your valuable Google AdWords placement? Interested in our Marketing plan? Want to know how many visitors we see every day, and how people are finding your listings on AlohaLiving.com?

We hope to answer these kinds of questions, and more! Each day, I will pick the most commonly asked questions, and answer them on the blog. I’ll aslo send out the blog post via e-mail so you don’t miss answers to your questions. I am not promising to answer all of the questions that get sent in via the blog, but I will post the ones that are asked the most often, and even if your question doesn’t get answered on the blog, I promise I’ll answer your e-mail directly with an answer.

The ONLY RULE: Go to AlohaLiving.com and look around before you ask a question. The feature you’re asking about may have been fixed, enhanced, or added since your last visit to the site.

Send all questions to ask@AlohaLiving.com . Questions will be answered by team members who have been working on the Aloha Living project since the beginning. And if we don’t know that answer to your question, we’ll hunt down somebody who does. Answers are guranteed!

Please, please, please! During the Ask All About Aloha Living promotion, send your questions to ask@AlohaLiving.com. Do not send your questions to Customer Support. Do not send your questions to Accounting. Do not send your questions to the CEO.

SEND YOUR QUESTIONS TO ASK@ALOHALIVING.COM.

APRIL 4-15, 2008: SEND IN YOUR QUESTIONS TODAY! ask@AlohaLiving.com

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Blog post by Beth Berry
Director of Sales and Marketing
Hawaii Information Service
Aloha Living Network
beth@alohaliving.com