Video Transcription

Good morning and welcome to another episode of Tech Tuesday presented by Delta Media Group where if you ever find yourself teleported back to medieval times to fight a dead eyed army, don't forget your chainsaw.

So today we are going to take another look at market watch reports. We've added some functionality to them. You can create them in a few different ways now. You can attach them to customers in a few different ways. So we'll just go ahead and give it a good once over and see what we've got. So let's go into the DeltaNet, take a look.

All right. So the first way that we can set up a market watch or rather what a market watch is, it's probably more important to you at this point, is a report that basically shows some market statistics and some sample properties from a market that you choose. And that market can be defined by a boundary area. It can be defined by a city name, a school district, a county name, a zip code. So all kinds of different ways. But that's what it comes down to. You set up this market for the area that the customer is interested in and then the system can automatically send that report out to them periodically or, you can send that report out manually, or you can even share it out to your Facebook page.

So you have a a fair amount of options with market watch reports these days. So to set one up, I'm going to go to customers and down to customer center and we're going to go ahead and pick a customer. Let's do Prince Lonestar. Why not? So here we are. So I just click on a customer's name to go to their profile page. Now I could do that ... I did it from the hot new customers list on that page. Basically that's customers with recent activity, but I could go down and do it from the all customers list if I want it to also.

Long story short, click on their name and you get to their profile page here, and then as we scroll down, we have a section for saved searches and market watch reports. So I'm going to go ahead and click add a market watch, and you can see we have numerous options for how we're going to define the market here.

So first if I do by market, I have a market field here and if I start typing it's going to bring up an auto-completer and then I can select the matching market name. So, and you can see the kinds of things that it matches on. This is all test data so you can see here, school district it picked up. So play in local schools. It'll do area for play in township, it'll do subdivisions, it'll do cities. I can do zip codes in here I believe. Not if I type the wrong zip code. There we go. So I've got zip codes and I believe I can even do a county with this. There we go. Or I can do the entire county and you can see it shows me the number of listings that come up in each one of those market areas.

So if you know the name of an area you're going for there, then my screen flashed behind me. Crazy things going on. It must be close to Halloween. So you see that I can define my market by a variety of different, just search terms there. If I know the name of what I'm looking for. So I'm going to go ahead and back out of this instead of finishing through the report. I'll go back to add market watch again. And this time we'll look at radius.

So if I do it by radius, the map looks a little odd here because I'm zoomed into a smaller area than my radius. But I can type in an address to center the map if I want or I can just grab that little pin here and I can move that around however I'd like, and we'll shrink it down here. There we go. So I can define it this way. And the whole idea is this is just a radius around a pinpoint.

So if you ... and the beauty of these reports is they're good, not just for people that are interested in buying or selling, but people that aren't even really in the market right now. This is a good way to stay in touch with them because you could set up a report like this and center it to make it like a five mile radius on the home they're living in now, and they get some insight into what their local market is doing. Because that's something that's interested even if you're not necessarily in the market right now and it's a good way to stay engaged with your customer and make it so that if they become interested in buying or selling, or know someone interested in buying or selling, you're the one that comes to mind. So that would be radius. So we'll close this out, take a look at the next one. Out of market watch.

By area. So now by area, this allows me to, there we go, this allows me to actually define a polygon. Now I'm making kind of an odd polygon here, but you can see I just click in points and that puts down anchors and then when I connect them at the end, I've built a polygon. The beauty of this is I can actually really get specific about defining a neighborhood. I can follow street lines for this. And then once I set it up I can actually move pieces around too, to set it up the way I want. So I have a lot of options as far as what I can do in creating a custom polygon like this.

So I'll close that one out. And my next option, I can do it by boundaries. So if I click that, now these are going to be boundary areas that we have picked up from public records. So under boundary type, I'm going to say school districts as a popular one. You can see school attendance zones are in here also, which can be very handy if someone's looking for a specific elementary school, things like that. But I'll do district for now. You can see it loads up another drop down and let's say we want to do Canton city.

Well there you go. So it loads up my boundary area above and that's all I have to do. I've set up my market boundary at that point, and I have a number of different things I can do here. So like I said, we did school districts, we could do counties, not that you can't do county by typing it in anyway, but school districts, attendance zones, things like that. And even subdivisions are really nice for these pre-populated boundaries.

So we'll close this one out and then our last option is predefined. So what this is, is this is the same as boundary area, but these boundary areas are specifically those that have been defined at the company level already. So the company has gone in and they've created some boundaries specific to your market, like things that we wouldn't have public records for. But our common areas are commonly named areas where you are.

So this is kind of nice because the company can go in and build these, and then you can just go in and select from them, and you have stuff that's really specific to your area, really specific to your region. So to set those up, I just go in here and I'll click add, and then that basically creates it with my, here we are, with my boundary areas defined. That it was the saved search, but there we go. Market watch. So builds it in with the polygon area from what's been defined already.

All right, so I'm going to click on market watch one more time and we're going to go ahead and run through the process. So I'll say by market, just for the sake of simplicity, we'll do Canton because that's where I am, and then we'll begin sending on so we can choose what day this wants to, or what day we want to start sending this out.

By default it'll go with the current day. But you can set that out just by clicking on it and picking some day in the future if you want. If you don't want to send it indefinitely, you can use this expire on field to choose when this will stop going out. So I'll go ahead and say I want to send it out for a year because, why not? So we'll go end of October-ish. There we go. So we have an expiration date on there. We can give it a name, which is always a good idea, if for no other reason than it helps you define it later on, or helps you pick it out if ever you needed to edit it or delete it from the list anything like that.

Next we can fine tune the kind of properties that this market watch takes into account. It'll be residential by default because that's what these were built for. But I can add in multifamily and land if I want, or really define it, specify it to multifamily and land, not really added in because the whole idea is it's trying to look at like properties. So the next thing I can do is I can specify different price variations on those.

So right now it's looking at all properties in that market. But if that's a mixed market where you've got some real low end and real high end stuff all in the same zip code for example, and you're setting this up on zip code, maybe you want to only limit it to the higher end listings. So you can put a price range in here. You can also do home size. This is square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms. So you have a variety of different options here that you can use to really fine tune that market watch to the properties in the area that your customer is interested in. And the whole idea is the more specific you make it, the better you are engaging with your customer.

So we'll go down the line. Now the next thing I can do here is I can show properties that have only been updated within the last few days or within the last number of days. The idea here is that if I'm showing sold properties and stuff like that on these markets, like if I have sold data coming in, I don't want to show particularly old sold listings on these market watch reports because at that point, if they sold two years ago, they're not really indicative of the market anymore. So the idea is I can use the slider and I can say, "Well let's look at only sold properties or only properties within the last 90 days or if it had been updated in our system in the last 90 days."

The for sale listings are for sale no matter what. So we don't care when the first sales came on the market, they'll show on the report anyway. But if they're not for sale, then some other status or sold, then it can be a good idea depending on the market in the area you're in, and how much activity that market sees, to limit that.

Now, one thing I'll out about that is that the market watch reports send out about, I want to say, they send out up to 50 sold, so it'd be the 50 most recently sold listings. So if you're setting this report up for a market with a lot of activity, 50 listings might've sold in that market within the last few months. If that's the case, then the slider doesn't really matter because you're only going to see the last few months worth of listings. But if you're doing this for a market that doesn't see as much activity, maybe 50 listings have sold in the last year, well then you're going to see year old sold listings on your report unless you use this slider. So, I hope that makes sense. I think it makes sense. I don't see any comments in my little text thing, so it must make sense.

All right. So if I hit done, that saves my market watch. So we can see we have the Avondale one we just set up, and then the Canton one that we just set up now. So the Avondale was the one we picked from our polygon area. Now that I have it set up, I can change the frequency of it. So by default it's going to send to this customer monthly. But I could do quarterly, semi-annually, biweekly, or weekly if I want. And then also I can determine if I want to be copied on this email. So if I hit this copying me on this email, every time the system sends this market watch to the customer, it'll also send a copy to me.

Next, I have a button where I can go in and edit it. I can delete it from here, I can force it to send out now, or I can click on preview and have a few additional options. First, I can send myself a preview email by just clicking the send email button. I can click in browser to preview it in the browser and I'll go ahead and click on that. Because why not? Oh, I was expecting this to take longer to load. Well, there you are. So this is the report loaded up. We're always working to modify our templates for these emails and things. So I think we have even a new version of this in the works at some point. But for now this is the market watch report. You can see we have some trending graphs at the top. Our for sale properties up here. And again it's all sample data and then sections for just listed, contingent, pending, and price changes.

So all of these sections will appear on those market watch reports as long as you're choosing to include them. And there you go. They'll actually fill in with properties, assuming you're not looking at test data like I am. All right, so we'll go back one. Now the other thing I can do here, and I'm going to have to reload this page to do it. Here we go. So I'm going to go back down to my market watch and I'm going to say this time I want to preview it, but I want to preview a print copy. So we'll click on print. I'll close this other one out. And there we go. So you can see the print template is different but it's different by design, but the idea is this would just be a nice printable copy of the market watch report that you could even set up, print out, and put at a listing that you have for sale. That way you have that market information just available on the countertop at the listing that you're taking people through. So that is the printable market watch report.

Now we'll back out of that. All right. So the next thing we can do is I'll go ahead and delete this one because I created it, so we'll just click the delete button and then I have the option to confirm and then that market watch is gone. So that's all there is to it when it comes to connecting a market watch directly to customers.

Now the other options you have for market watch report, if I go over to listings, and then down here to market watches, you can see that I have market watch report set up here also. These reports are set up in exactly the same way except they're not attached directly to a customer initially. You would just set them up here and then this allows a Facebook auto-connector to pick up these market watches and auto-post them to your Facebook page if you have Facebook auto-connector turned on. You can find that under Facebook and then post tools, and we've got videos on connecting your account there and setting that up.

Now the other thing that you can do from here is I can click on this market watch segments button up at the top, and these are all the sections that you saw in that market watch report that are available to show up there if there is data to display on them. And I can sort those and change the order on those if I want. I can just drag and drop and it'll change the order just like so. And then I can also hit reset if I want to set it back to defaults. If I have mixed it up too much. And the next thing I can do here is I can print from here, I can preview from here, and I can also force the share to go out automatically from here. The interval is set on these. In this case, these aren't actually being sent anywhere. So all this interval is about is how often that market watch report has regenerated.

Let me see, I can click on preview and that'll bring up the market watch preview the same way. There we go. But it looks a little bit different because it's not built to be an email. It's built to be like a Facebook posting. So we have this image at the top and then our same kind of market information here. There we go.

Now I do have the ability if I wanted to create them here and I had Facebook auto-connector turned on so it would auto post these, but I don't want it to post this particular market watch. I just want to use this one either for my own use. So I can click on ... so I can go in here and print it or generate to previews of it if I want or send it out manually, but I don't want Facebook to share it. See, here's our print copy. I could just uncheck this Facebook auto-post button and then all the rest of them will be picked up by Facebook auto-connector. Again, if it's turned on and the one that is unchecked will not be.

The next thing I can do is I can copy the URL. So if I want to paste a link to this market watch report somewhere other than where we provide here, I can copy the URL and paste it wherever I'd like. And then like the other features in the DeltaNet, if I click on the little plus sign over here, you can see it opens up some additional options. Of those options we can delete it and edit it just like we could with a regular market watch report. Or what is unique here is I can click on add and I can add it to customers all at once. So to take you through the scenario for that. The idea would be say I have a group of customers that I've created and I've organized into a group and they're all interested in the same market, so not necessarily the same house overall, but, the same market.

So I could come over here, I would add market watch and go through the process to create my market watch report, which again is just the same as the one that I would create attached directly to a customer. And then once it's created, I'll expand it here depending on how wide my screen is and go down and click on add and then I'll type in my customer group name.

Fortunately I have customers named group, I'll select it, and I could add multiple groups if I want. And then I'll click on done and the system will add this market watch to every one of those customers automatically. So that is kind of a quick and easy way that if you have a lot of people shopping in the same market, you could go ahead and attach a market watch to everyone all at once.

So the nice thing is at that point it'll start going out to them automatically based on the frequency you have in here. One thing to keep in mind with that functionality though is that it's kind of a onetime copy. So when you do that, it copies all the market watches over to those recipients. So all those customers have them, they'll start getting them. But if I go back into this page and delete this market watch, that's not going to affect the one that I attached to those customers because it made a copy and attached them to those customers. So they'll keep getting it even though I deleted it from this page because it's not actually like a reference to this market watch. It is actually their own market watch at that point. And the nice thing about that is if I wanted to go in and tweak it on a customer-by-customer basis to make it more specific to what that customer is looking at, I can go in and change it for just them without affecting it for everyone else that has that same market watch.

So there you go. That is the market watch system. We'll take a look at one more piece of it real quick. So I'm going to go down to preferences and email messages, and then I do have some options on this page that allow me to fine tune those market watches. So if I scroll down to market watch report, we'll click on that. You can see that I can modify the paragraph that appears at the top of those emails. So it just gives me a little bit of ability to further customize what appears or what goes out on my behalf with those market watch reports.

So there you go. That is the market watch report system. It's getting bigger and bigger so the videos are getting a little longer, but it's worth it. Right? I'm entertaining you all. That's, that's my goal in life, so ... All right. So as always, thanks a lot for joining me. I you have any questions, concerns, feel free to comment on any of our videos on Facebook or YouTube, or give us a call, or just email into support@deltagroup.com and we will be happy to help you with whatever you need. So thanks a lot for joining me this week and I'll see you again next time.