An attractive headline

A great headline draws visitors’ attention right away. Remember those magazines on the checkout counter of grocery store? For an online ad, it is even more important with all the distractions that one can get while surfing the web.

Providing a clean and user friendly ad page is always the highest priority of our site and we put the headline at the most visible location and stay away from things like popups. However, we sometimes see ad with title like “Condo for rent”, which doesn’t really say anything and probably will be ignored by the visitors. Your can make your ad’s headline better by simply adding some specific information to start with. For example, comparing with “Condo for rent”, “Two bedroom condo at a convenient location for rent” looks much better; or to make it even more appealing, how about “Two bedroom condo in [insert city name]’s most sought after neighborhood”?

Be specific

What is the best feature that you love about your property? Nice jacuzzi tub, cabinet space, or the big swimming pool you enjoy during the summer? For an existing homeowner these may be taken for granted, but for a potential renter/buyer, these “little things” can be exactly what they are looking for.

We provide ways to include these important features in ad publisher so make sure include your “fenced in yard” or “swimming pool” in your ad. When someone search these specific terms on FindMyRoof.com or online, what do you think the odds of your ad showing up if you don’t have these keywords included?

One of the biggest advantage of advertising online is that you are not charged by the number of words that your ad has (in our case, it’s free) and you have better and more ways to present your property. So in order to make your ad stands out, list the things you like the most and present them as best as you can, which leads to my next point:

A picture is worth a thousand words

I know, the phrase itself has been used zillions of times. But it still holds especially true for real estate ads. Photos truly benefit the ad viewers and that’s why we allow unlimited number of photos at FindMyRoof.com. With the quality of today’s digital cameras, there’s really no excuse to skip the photos. You can upload them easily form your computer or an online source using our ad publisher, so take as many shots of your favorite features about the property as possible and let them be seen.

“Online” can not replace “offline”

This may sound ironic since FindMyRoof.com itself is an online platform. But the fact that most of the real estate is still marketed to the local people makes offline effort equally important, if not more.

There are several ways that you can try to advertise offline:

• Place a for rent/sale sign in front of your property with a brochure box.
• Spread flyers about the availability locally in public places where bulletin boards are installed. Best places are schools, work place, or churches. FindMyRoof.com offers flyer generation tool which you can use to create pdf flyers for your ad with a couple of click.
• Consider the local papers. It’s probably a waste of time and money to try to put classified ads on big newspapers these days. But sometimes great spot can be bought cheaply on some local publications with small circulations. If targeted correctly, an ad can gain some good visibility.

Lastly, understand the risk and protect your identity

When your ad is on the Internet, it can be viewed by anyone with a computer and Internet connection. Although WE BLOCK the access from visitors outside of United States, there are still spammers who manage to scrape our content and re-post them on other websites. It is a hassle for property owners, to say the least.

Besides using more diligence when describing your property without revealing your personal information, you can also consider using our privacy protection feature like “hide your address” so the identity of your property can be better protected as well. And as always, do not trust anyone who don’t want to meet, or have an excuse to avoid meeting in person.

EDIT:

After watching this video I think “being honest” should be added to the list above. Even it is “painfully honest”.

It’s always fun to explore a neighborhood that you don’t know. To make it a better experience, we recently upgraded the site to include “view neighborhood” feature, where you can view the surrounding areas of an ad and get a better “look” right on the page.

So what have been added?

The Google street map

This is not exactly new but we made it better. You can now view the Google street map and navigate around the block in camera view if it’s available.

Yelp.com business reviews

Yelp (yelp.com) is a website that connects people with great local businesses. It provides a nice API to show the businesses in a specific area. With the API, we are able to “mash up” the business reviews on Yelp into our listings. You can find their locations, ratings and reviews right on a map. So If you want to see what kind of food, shopping or local services you can get, open up the neighborhood view and the information is there for you.

Movie theaters

Everyone wants to enjoy a movie once in a while. And we put Americans’ number one entertainment choice in the neighborhood view as well. If you are a movie fan, it’s probably not a good idea to live in a place where there is no theaters around so make sure to check it out!

Schools and libraries

This is a great addition for those who are looking for family friendly places. Of course we all do but if you have kids, it’s better to know what are school options, how far are they, and whether there are libraries close by so you can easily borrow books for the little ones. With this information, I hope moms and dads have a easier time to make their decision.

This is an exciting upgrade and it’s also just a start. Since there is so much information about a neighborhood and different visitors may have different areas of interest, we are looking forward to adding more interesting and useful subjects. As always, let us know your thoughts and feedback!

Some of our users who use Internet Explorer (IE) have been experiencing problems with signing up or logging in. With the new release that we just put out, this issue should have been fixed.

If you still experience problem like being randomly kicked out of a login session, please make sure email us.

Although only a very small percentage of our users who are using IE browsers (not all the IE users are affected) had these problems, we felt the issue was serious enough and basically rebuilt the authentication mechanism for the site.

Oh by the way, Firefox is a much better web browser and we love using it.

Hello FindMyRoof users,

Happy 2009!

You might have noticed that the site has been updated. The main objective of this release is to deliver a better browsing and searching experience.

Now you can search your location from the location bar by putting in a state, a city name or zip code.

As we all know, real estate property is about location, location and location. We want you be able to find your location easily and quickly.

How about the searching the property features? You can now do it from the left hand side of the listings. With more open spaces we added more search criteria so you can quickly get what you are looking for.

So that’s about it. As always comments or suggestions? Feel free to drop us a line!

We have added the “calendar” to the ad publisher.

You can select a date or a date range and specify the availability. We believe this will bring more complete information to our site visitors and hopefully a step toward bringing more leads to your listings.

Enjoy!

We’ve just updated FindMyRoof.com with a new release! It has been a while since our last major update so we are quite pleased with this one going out of the door.

Below are some of the highlights:

New ad publisher makes it even easier to create and manage your ads.

The new ad publishing page uses the flexible tab design so different aspects of the ad can be accessed easily. If for some reason a new post was not finished, a draft would be automatically saved and kept for up to 48 hours so you can always come back later and pick up from where you left.

More features added to each ad type

One big strength of FindMyRoof.com is the capability of presenting the customized information based on different ad types. In this release, we’ve enhanced this feature and added more property amenities. “Vacation rental” category sees the most changes in this area with a lot of additional features added, and hopefully this will be a great help for the property managers.

Enhanced interface

We have made some small look and feel tweaks to improve the site’s usability.

Google map street view is in

Google map street view has been covering more and more cities. It is such a nice tool and we don’t want our users to miss out on this one. A “view street map” link will be added to each ad and if the street map is available a cool camera view will be displayed side by side with the regular map to show a “virtual tour” of the street view.

More control over spam

It has become quite an issue now that scammers have been snatching legit ads online and turning them into scam bait. Maintaining the ad quality and controlling the spam have been the most important goals that we are constantly improving on.

There are a lot of other changes in this release and I’m not going to list all of them here. As always, suggestions and comments are welcome!

Cheers!

In the past couple of weeks we have released new community features in FindMyRoof.com. The FindMyRoof community aims to provide more real estate related news and information which ultimately benefit our users. Focal Point is our aggregated news section which provides the latest news and best stories that picked by our users. The forum is where you can share the local city/town information and discussion is encouraged. If you own a real estate related business, you can submit your profile on REACH.

All in all this is just a small step toward our goal to provide our users a better tool and platform to share the knowledge and I hope you enjoy it.

Sometimes we get emails from our user asking whether the number of views on their ad is available. The answer is “yes” and “no”. We do record the view count for a page but the data is very raw. What I mean is that when a page is hit by someone, this “someone” can be a real person, a search engine bot, or even a a bot from scrappers or spammers. So the count is pretty meaningless in terms of revealing how many times an ad has been viewed by a real person. It will be a quite expensive process to filter the hit to make the total count closer to the actual human page views so we decide not to include this feature, at least for now.

FindMyRoof.com has just released some enhancements this past week and here are the highlights:

Save your findings - If you like an ad, you can save it on your browser right away under the “saved” page. This is a cool feature for you to keep track of what you have been finding and are interested in.

Share your ad - We’ve added the capability to easily bookmark your posted ad, save it on Del.icio.us, and to share it on social network site such as Facebook.com. The ultimate goal is to get more people to see your ad; by sharing it on your Facebook profile, it could be a great way to let all your friends, and friends of friends to see it.

The “My Ads” page has been redesigned to help users view their ads in a category-list format. This is especially good for users who post large quantity of ads. And an ad counter has been placed there for ad posters to know exactly how many ad slots that are available to them. You’ll like all these enhancements.

Cheers!

Hello everyone,

Time flies and 2008 is almost here. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone to support FindMyRoof.com. It has been a great year and we enjoyed the rapid growth and some nice media exposure as well. This is the best gift we received for the holiday season.

Going forward, we will continue provide the service that will truly benefit our users. I wish everyone happy new year!

No fluff, just listings.
FindMyRoof