This week, Harley goes over individual Market Watch Reports.

 

Video Transcription

Harley:

Hello and welcome to Tech Tuesday presented by Delta Media Group, where we've figured out the secret of what turns cranberries red. They saw the Turkey dressing. Ha! Sorry. Thanksgiving's coming up. All right. Today, we are going to take a look at MarketWatch reports. Specifically I'm going to look at Market Watch Reports that are created on an individual basis. This would be a Market Watch Report that you would go into a customer profile account and create for a specific customer, as opposed to the Market Watch Reports that you can create in bulk.

Harley:

The bulk Market Watches you would generally create for like social media sharing or to add to a large group of customers all at once. But for this one, we're going to look at the individual ones. First off, what a Market Watch Report is, is a system that will send a regular email out to your customers, and you can choose what the frequency is on those. That will give them information about a specific target market. You can define that market by name or by map area.

Harley:

But what they'll do is they'll get a usually monthly email that contains things like market statistics and a sampling of listings from whatever market you target. It just kind of keeps you engaged with the customer and continually gives them useful information about either the market their home's in or a market that they're interested in. That's why it's neat to set these up on a per customer basis because you can really fine tune them to the kind of properties and kind of market information by proxy that that customer's going to be interested in.

Harley:

The first thing we'll take a look at here is how you can set a custom template. Well, not a custom template, how you can choose a template or select your template to use for these Market Watch Reports. Now, this is how you select the template that is specific to the email Market Watch Reports. If you were creating the bulk ones for social sharing, those are going to use a different template. But this one's going to look specifically at when you do set up those individual ones, what template is used for that email.

Harley:

To set that up, we're going to go to the email message settings page. I can get there by either typing email message settings or just email message up here in the quick actions and you can see the first result here is email message settings. And if I click on that, it takes me straight through to my message setting page. I also could have gone over here and clicked on the gear to get into my settings and I could have searched for it and found it there as well.

Harley:

If we scroll all the way to the bottom, you can see there is a section that says Market Watch email design. And if I expand that, these are all the different templates that I can choose from. In order to select one, I would just select the radio button for that template. And then down at the bottom, click the update Market Watch email design button, and that would save that template. So then all those individual Market Watches I set up would then use the template I have selected here. Keep in mind that your template selection may not look exactly like mine.

Harley:

Which template show up here is kind of dependent upon the company. You could have some additional custom templates, or you may not have all the same templates here. Once you've selected and saved your template, in order to actually set up a Market Watch, we're going to need to go to a customer profile page. To do that, I can either type the customer's name up here in the quick actions bar and I can select there, or to go over here. If you've got CRM tab over here, you can click on that, either there may be a manage customer button up here in this list.

Harley:

You can scroll down to the hot new customer section or the customer detailed list and click on their name. You could go to customer list over here under CRM and customer list. Now, this side navigation is customizable on a per company basis, as are these tiles. You may have a link to get to the customer profile page in a few different ways, but usually the easiest way is to just go up here to the quick actions and just type in their name. We'll go to good old Charlene Baltimore. Their customer account comes up here.

Harley:

I'll just click on it in the auto completer and that takes me to their profile page. So however it is you chose to get here. Once you do get here, you can scroll down to the save searches and Market Watch Report section. And to set up a new Market Watch, we'll just click add Market Watch. From here, it gives us an option of choosing how we want to define the area for Market Watch. You can see, we have a number of different options here.

Harley:

By market would allow me to type in a market name and it would come back with everything that matches that market name, much like just using the quick search on the public site. You would just select from that market, select from the auto completer and that would be the market that it uses as the target area. Next, you can define this by radius. That'll load up a map and you can choose the center and the diameter of the radius. This is particularly nice if maybe you just worked with a customer on buying a new home.

Harley:

And now that they're in that home, they want to continue to be apprised of the market information in their area. You could set up a Market Watch by radius that's centered on their home, and then expand that out to say a five mile radius, so then they would have market information for all the properties within five miles. Now, you can go by shape. From here, you could actually draw a polygon on a map. It's nice if you want to draw a box around a specific neighborhood to just look at the market information there. You've got boundary area.

Harley:

From here, you can choose from either public record boundaries that we have just pulled in from public records. Things like school districts, even school attendance zones are available in there, the city boundary areas. The kind of nice thing about the boundary stuff is that it's pulling in the property data based on whether or not the property fits within the boundary area that's defined, regardless of what city was entered for that at the MLS, for example, or school district might be a better example.

Harley:

Let's say that an agent adds a property to the MLS, but they either don't put in the school district or they put in the incorrect school district. Well, since this can search by the school attendance areas and the actual school district areas as a boundary area, if the listing falls within that area, it's going to get counted as part of this, whereas it wouldn't if it was based on just searching by name because the wrong name of the school district is attached to that listing. That sounds a little convoluted, but you get the general idea there.

Harley:

The next thing we can do is we can go by predefined areas for Market Watches also. Now, this actually looks at all of the bulk Market Watches you have set up. The bark Market Watches. I have dogs on the brain, I guess. The bulk Market Watches you have set up and allows you to select from those. The idea is that if you are... Let's say I set up a Market Watch for Canton, Ohio, and I was reusing it a lot. Like I had a lot of customers that either lived in that area or were interested in that area. I could set up the bulk one.

Harley:

And then whenever I set up a new one, I could click on predefined and you can see it loads up a list of all my bulk ones. And then I would click add to basically add that Market Watch to this customer. And then I could customize it for this customer specifically. It just gives me a good starting point for those. In this case, just in the name of getting a Market Watch added here, I'll just click on the first one and you can see it dropped in a Market Watch. So now that added a Market Watch here. Now, if I click on edit, we can get into the specifics of this.

Harley:

And if I had chosen a different type and you see I even have a back button to change type, so let's say I had gone based on market area, it would've taken me directly to this page where I would type in the market area here and then select the market from the auto completer. Other than that, the process is the same. There we go. You can see my auto completer here. Had I chosen by market area, I'd have typed in Canon and then I would choose what I want from here, so probably Canton under city in this case, and then go on and set up the rest of the report from there.

Harley:

So now that our market is selected, the next thing we can do here and a recent addition to the system is we have the ability to add a custom message. This will actually appear on the Market Watch that goes out to the customer. We'll say, this is my custom message. Here we go. Now we have a custom message added to our Market Watch so we can see how that shows up. Next, we can choose an initial sending date on these. If I don't want it to start going out right away, I could actually choose a future date for this to start sending out.

Harley:

If I only wanted to send out for a limited amount of time, I can actually set an expiration date here as well. Let me go out and just say we want it to run until the end of May. That's how long it will run before this Market Watch will stop sending out to this customer. We can now give it a name. We set this as Canton, so we'll call it our Canton Market Watch, but we don't have to type market watch, because you can see here, it says the phrase Market Watch will automatically be appended to the title. We don't have to put that on there.

Harley:

Next, we have the interval. It'll be set to monthly by default, but you could actually change this to go out semi-annually, quarterly, again, monthly, biweekly, or even as often as weekly. Monthly is usually a good place to start with these, kind of a good way to go. I would say if you have a customer that is actively in the market and they're really searching all the time, weekly or biweekly might make more sense. But in most cases, you're kind of maintaining contact with these, so monthly is usually a pretty good choice.

Harley:

Now, the next thing we have here is we have the ability to define a specific market or a property type for this Market Watch to look at. By default, it's looking at all residential properties. However, we could set up a Market Watch that just looked at land or just looked at commercial listings. You can see how you can choose from those different options. Now, you can't have it look at one primary category, or you can't have one Market Watch look at multiple primary categories, I should say. So just keep that in mind.

Harley:

If you did want a customer to receive a Market Watch for this area that looked at residential properties and commercial properties, you would just be looking at setting up two Market Watches for the same market at that point. One of them you would set to look at residential. The other one you would set to look at commercial. Now, the next thing you can do to fine tune this is you can actually exclude some specific areas. Now, we find that this is useful from time to time when you're looking at say an entire city for a Market Watch.

Harley:

But you know that within this city, there's a specific zip code that is not representative of the rest of the market. That could be just really high dollar properties are in that market, so it would throw off the average if you include that. You could exclude areas by defining them that way here, and you can see the kinds of things you can use, subdivision, school district, city, zip code. If you type those in here, the auto completer will come up and you can use those to exclude those areas.

Harley:

Next, you can define the properties that this looks at by kind of standard property criteria information. You can see we've got price, home size, beds, baths, acreage, and year built, and you have both a minimum and maximum on those things. That just helps you fine tune the properties that this report looks at to better tune itself to the person that you're having it sent to. Next, we have an option to limit this to only waterfront properties if we so choose.

Harley:

And then we can also affect the last updated information here, which is useful, particularly in a market where properties have stayed on the market for a particularly long time. Really high dollar listings can fit there, kind of meet that qualification from time to time. The idea is if you want to look at only a specific state of the market... Now, it's looking at the sold listings that'll show up on these if you do have sold data as well.

Harley:

But what it allows you to do is say you don't want to look at particularly old data for this report, because the idea is that that's not going to be as representative of the current state of the market. It's usually not a bad idea to put this out to maybe 60 days, so then you're looking at only listings where the activity has taken place in the last 60 days to get a better idea of what the market looks like right this minute. Once you've set all these options up, you just click on done and you can see it adds the Market Watch here.

Harley:

Now, in this case, we were editing a Market Watch, so all it did was make some changes to it. But now it's all set up. From here, if I let it run, it's going to go out on the day that I set it to first go out. I can click on details, and I can see its next send date. I can see that last updated information, so how recent of properties I want it to look at is probably the best way to describe it, when it expires if I have an expiration date, the custom message that I've added to it, and the frequency at which it goes out.

Harley:

I can see all that information, and I can modify all that information here. I also have the ability to send it out or take a look at a preview of it, edit it if I want to make any changes, or just go outright, delete this. All that information is here, but there are some shortcuts right here as well. As we use the edit button takes us into actually edit it. Delete will get rid of it. Send will send it out. And then preview is what we'll take a look at now where we can actually get a look at what our report is actually going to look like.

Harley:

Click on preview, and then I can either send this out as an email if I want to see that. I can click on print, which actually shows me a different template. There's actually a print specific template here that'll look a little bit different, or I can click on in browser and I'll see a preview of the actual email that it's going to send out, but right here in my browser. You can see it has my branding information at the top.

Harley:

Now, this account just happens to be a part of a team that's set up to use the team branding, so that's why that team information is here. But yours may not look like that, depending on whether you're on a team, or if you are, how your team is configured. But we can see some information here. This is the market we're looking at. Here's my custom message right up here at the top. We've got some market statistics on this report. We have some sample properties or sample homes that come up that are in this market.

Harley:

And then we also normally would have these market trend graphs. You can see there's no data here. That has to do with how I defined that market. If you're defining this for a market that you do a lot of business in, or just a market that has a lot of properties in it, then these trend to charts will more than likely already be here for you. They'll actually show average days on market, average list price, and average number of properties on market. There you have it.

Harley:

That is how you can set up a Market Watch Report or rather an individual Market Watch Report and also how you can modify those and how you can work with that system. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to send an email into support at deltagroup.com or give us a call and we'll be happy to help you out with this or anything else you need. Thanks a lot.