Entegral Company Blog

Google Maps adds real estate options for USA - what about South Africa?

2009-10-31T07:55:00.000+02:00

Google has made it a lot more easier to find real estate listings on its map service by added the one-click 'real estate' option to its Google Maps in the USA. (it was also available previously but only through the search dropdown option). Read the official Google blog release here.

This will put a lot of competitive pressure on USA property portals like www.zillow.com and www.trulia.com. You simply cannot discount the impact that Google will have on real estate search judging by the impact it had on navigation companies like Tom Tom and Garmin with their shares falling by more than 15% after the day of announcement of google navigation.

Overseas I think it is starting to be a threat for MLS organisations, also read Matt Cohen's blog on this.

We think it will be a matter of time before Google launches real estate search for South Africa on its http://maps.google.co.za site.

Estate agents in South Africa should prepare themselves to disclose the physical location of their listings if they want it to be displayed on Google Maps. There will also be an impact on local property portals, but I think less significant in South Africa, since property locations are not made available by 90% of estate agents, which will make a google real estate map search not that usefull with very limited stock.

Google Maps launched in South Africa

2009-10-28T11:51:00.000+02:00

Exciting news is that Google Maps South Africa has been launched at http://maps.google.co.za

Entegral attended the event at Helderfontein Estate in Midrand today.

As with the USA version, it can pinpoint properties by exact address and provide driving directions. Google Streetviews is also expected to launch next year in South Africa covering some of the major cities ahead of the 2010 World Cup.

Driving directions sample: (notice it even gives you the estimate time it will take)

Search an address sample:

New email platform launched - 10GB mailbox sizes and 100% uptime

2009-10-22T22:12:00.000+02:00

We are proud to announce the launch of our new email platform, PremiumMail:

http://www.entegral.net/?c=products_email

If offers industry best features including:

- Massive 10GB mailbox sizes, never delete your email again!

- 100% uptime. Multiple servers host your email!

- Comprehensive anti-spam and anti-virus features;

- More advanced webmail feature;

- Optional custom branding of webmail interface for your business;

- Advanced mobile features;

The webmail has a very easy to use interface, powerful search function and functionality to manage your calendar, contacts, tasks and notes all online.

Choose on of our packages and get started today or contact our support team!

Users currently on our South African email solution will be upgraded to our new Premium Mail solution in the near future.

Also check out additional options like the full archiving feature - it archives all your office's emails (in case you need more than the 10GB storage!).

Our new PremiumMail solution is immediately available to all our existing clients in South Africa, Namibia and the USA as well as any new clients.

New online support launched

2009-10-22T21:41:00.000+02:00

We are proud to announce the BETA launch of our online support system on the OMS and Entegral website. The online support feature provides a method to chat directly to our Customer Service or Sales teams.

You will notice a new support banner that says 'live support' - either online or offline:

Click on it and it will open the following window and put you into direct contact with Entegral staff.

The online support on the OMS is intended to resolve quick questions. You will still need to follow the normal support channels to request email accounts, new suburbs etc.

We will evaluate the system over the next 10 days after which we will decide whether to implement this as a permanent feature.

Now how about offering something like this on your own website for potential buyers and sellers? An easy way for them to get into direct online contact with one of your agents.

If you are interested please email us! - note setup and monthly fees are applicable.

New RealNet website launched

2009-10-08T17:42:00.000+02:00

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new RealNet website today - visit www.realnet.co.za to have a look. It offers several new features including faster property searches, location maps of properties viewed and a enquiry spam prevention feature for agents on their property listings.

Limited banner space now available on MyProperty

2009-10-06T11:30:00.000+02:00

Looking to market your business to a targeted real estate audience of over 100,000 visits per month?

We've just released limited space on the new MyProperty website located at: www.myproperty.co.za

Only 2 prime banner positions are available:

Large banner : R5000/month - 160x600 pixels - one of 4 rotating throughout most parts of the site;

Small banner : R1200/month - 160x160 pixels - one of 4 rotating throughout most parts of the site;

To book your space (minimum 6 months), please contact our sales team: http://www.entegral.net/?c=contact

Thanks for your feedback on the new MyProperty website!

2009-10-06T10:59:00.000+02:00

We've received valuable feedback on the new MyProperty website through the feedback link located just underneath the search box. (You can still post your thoughts by clicking here). We've also had lots of calls and emails from our client base in South Africa and Namibia.

Apart from your own site, MyProperty is in most cases the site generating the most traffic and enquiries on your properties from the host of websites we export to. So suddenly making major changes to a long trusted website is not done lightheartedly! Various factors triggered the release of the new website with the 2 major ones being:

- Keeping up to date with the latest web technologies including SEO techniques;

- Allowing more rapid and ongoing improvements to be made on the website;

When we released the website just over a week ago, it was not going to be the 'final version' for the next year or two. From all the feedback that we've received our team have been tweaking the new website relentlessly. Various enhancements are envisioned for the near future while we've made some major improvements to the slow search speeds experienced the first week of launch.

The results will also soon pay off in terms of increased traffic, with new SEO improvements implemented that took months to develop.

So, thanks for your feedback - positive or negative! We'd like to know that what we develop, works for you, and works for your client base in return.

Subscribe to this product blog to keep up to date with future enhancements to the MyProperty website.

Website reincarnation? New HomeQ launched!

2009-10-05T23:09:00.000+02:00

We came up with a great idea on Friday. While we've launched the new MyProperty website just over a week ago and our R&D team is busy tweaking it further as we speak, are we going to throw away the old MyProperty website completely?

The new MyProperty websites was a complete redesign in many ways to cater for an ever increasing demand in traffic and new web technologies: we're doing the SEO differently, the site was build on Microsoft's .NET framework 3.5, we're now using SQL Server 2008, we're integrating with social networking apps like Twitter and Facebook and for the first time, MyProperty was a team rather than a one-man development effort.

Although MyProperty still enjoys top ranking in Google for popular keywords such as 'Property in South Africa', we thought it would be a great idea to still keep the old website alive, and enjoy the additional stream of top SEO referral traffic for property searches.

Hence www.homeq.co.za was born!

Nothing special in that name, we just wanted something "short-and-easy".

Now search engines need to completely re-index the website under the new domain which will take some time - but it is worth a try, and our gut feel says it will work and provide additional traffic for our real estate clients. The 'new' property portal is operational and feeds directly from our OMS management system.

Now is this a case of 'website reincarnation'?...

Did you know - fascinating facts about the internet

2009-09-30T17:26:00.000+02:00

Over 31 Billion searches on Google every month - where is your real estate website ranked?

Excellent SEO traction for new MyProperty SA website

2009-09-24T10:56:00.000+02:00

It is still early days to determine the success of the new MyProperty South Africa website search engine optimisation work but we still enjoy good traction in the major search engines for popular keyword searches. Here are some examples:

#1 in www.bing.com for the keyword search "property in south africa"

#1 in www.google.co.za for the keyword search "Property in South Africa"

#1 in www.google.co.za for the keyword search "Houses"

We are monitoring the enquiry rates on the new website on an ongoing basis with our aim to improve the "enquiries per property" rate for our clients with the new website.

MSN Property (powered by Entegral) is also enjoying an increase in traffic thanks to regular prime spot banners on the MSN South Africa home page. With Entegral's OMS solution estate agents can advertise on all South Africa's major property portals and affiliated partner portals from one easy to use online system.

New MyProperty Mobile website BETA up!

2009-09-23T00:18:00.000+02:00

Hot on the heels of the New MyProperty South Africa website comes the new MyProperty Mobile website in BETA release @ http://mobi.myproperty.co.za

Yes, there are lots of tweaks we need to do, but considering we already had lots of public enquiries on properties through this mobi website in the last 2 days we are confident that this will be an excellent online marketing extension to the full MyProperty website once fully completed.

Visitors can now browse a scaled down 'mobi website' of MyProperty on their mobile phones, view property details, photos, make enquiries and read real estate news .

The powerful search function we dubbed 'iSearch' (short for intelligent search) is also implemented on the mobile website, allowing complex property searches to be performed using natural language text.

Simply type in what you are looking for e.g.

'roodepoort houses for sale 3 beds under R1M'

'douglasdale,fourways,bryanston to rent up to R5k'

....and the mobile site will quickly return the most relevant results!

New MyProperty website is live

2009-09-21T09:47:00.000+02:00

We are proud to announce the launch of the New MyProperty website
It is packed with new features including:

iSearch: an advanced natural language property search, a first for South Africa
Automatic maps on Property Details showing the area location of a property
More streamlined design with advanced SEO techniques that will significantly up our visitor rate over the next few months
Social network integration including facebook, twitter and more
Property basket feature which allows visitors to save properties to a basket for later retrieval

We have one or two surprises still to come including free mini websites for estate agents - watch this space for more info!

With the new website more updates and refinement will be be done on a continuous basis. We are for instance working on a comprehensive map search facility.

New MyProperty website to launch with advanced property search

2009-09-14T11:41:00.000+02:00

We have implemented the advanced search function with multi-suburb selection and location map on our beta website: http://mpbeta2009.myproperty.co.za
The mult-suburb function allows visitors to select more than one suburb to search on. This solves the limitation on the current website where you can only search one suburb at a time.
The map will automatically update based on the country, town and suburb selection.

MyProperty beta website up

2009-09-05T13:16:00.000+02:00

We have the new MyProperty South Africa beta website up and running at:
http://mpbeta2009.myproperty.co.za

The site will be launched soon pending some tweaks we are busy with. Our biggest new feature (appart from the much improved SEO) is the iSearch function where you can search in natural language e.g. Randburg houses with 3 beds under R1.5m
or even search a couple of suburbs e.g. Lonehill Douglasdale Paulshof R1.8m

Have a look at the content we generated for all areas e.g. on Krugersdorp:
http://mpbeta2009.myproperty.co.za/suburb-results/property/for-sale-to-rent/2_south-africa/2_gauteng/103_KRUGERSDORP.aspx

Property details have auto-generated area maps and there is plenty of RSS feeds available on agent and office portfolios, areas and news.

New MyProperty website - updated screenshot

2009-08-22T09:15:00.000+02:00

We've been hard at work getting the new MyProperty website ready for launch in between all the other projects we're working on. I am pleased to say we are in the final phase with updates done on the design this week. Have a look at the screenshot of the homepage below, showing a cleaned up interface, larger south african map and reworked logo.

The menu has been moved above the new iSearch feature - one of the big new features on the new website. the iSearch feature allows property searches in natural language so you can type in 'houses in cape town under R1.2M with 3 beds' or 'clusters in sandton with 2 bedrooms a pool to rent'.

We are busy with some updates on the property search results and property details before releasing it to the public next week.

New MyProperty website features

2009-08-03T15:10:00.000+02:00

We are getting ready to launch the new MyProperty South Africa website. We have compiled a list of some of the new features to expect, click here to view the PDF.

New features PDF

Smartsell goes live

2009-07-02T13:44:00.001+02:00

Entegral's new national client, Smartsell - http://www.smartsell.co.za/ - went live with their new website. They have about 1000 sole mandate listings on the website and currently specialise in the Gauteng area.

Are you a smartphone developer?

2009-06-15T21:51:00.000+02:00

We are urgently looking for a smartphone developer. You should be able to delivery state of the art mobile applications on one of the following platforms:

IPhone (Objective C)
Blackberry (Blackberry JDE)
Windows Mobile (.NET Mobile Framework)

Either contract or full time. Get in touch with us ASAP, send your cv to solutions@entegral.net

PMI website live

2009-05-20T12:11:00.000+02:00

We have just launched the new PMI (Project Management Institute of Southern Africa) website. You can visit the website at www.pmi.org.za
The delivery included survey and email campaign functions and is the first of several phases to be launched.

Scoop: New Zealand listings soon available on MyProperty

2009-05-19T06:04:00.000+02:00

We are finalising integration of New Zealand property listings on the new MyProperty website. In a deal with one of New Zealands's major real estate groups, listings will be interfaced to the new MyProperty website on a daily basis. Here is a sample screenshot:

New Tyson Properties website up

2009-05-15T20:31:00.000+02:00

The new Tyson Properties website is up and running.

Visit their site at www.tysonprop.co.za

The new site is divided into 3 sections:

SALES / RENTALS / COMMERCIAL

Tyson Properties offers over 3000 homes for sale in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa.

The Entegral Team has achieved a couple of new technical milestones on this website:

The site is completely CSS driven;
The site runs of the latest SQL Server 2008 database;
New Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques which will result in more trafic;
Developed on the latest Microsoft .NET 3.5 framework;

Entegral attends digital symposium

2009-04-02T00:03:00.002+02:00

Entegral attended the annual Harbari Media symposium at Spier Wine Estate for the second year in a row. The symposium is held every year and attended this year by a projected 200 delegates. The purpose of the symposium is to share the latest online developments, trends and to educate the market.

Some of the most influential and clued-up international and local speakers addressed the delegates attending the symposium (including Tom Bowman from the BBC), sharing some of their latest research findings and developments in the online market.

Interesting facts were shared such as the staggering number of web surfers using social networks such as Facebook & Twitter, the different segments of the newly found Black Diamond market in SA and the reasons why any marketer should add mobile to their marketing mix.
Once again, research has proven that online and digital mediums are the way to go when marketing your product.

US trends show more buyers come from internet, less from print

2009-03-30T22:16:00.001+02:00

Where home buyers found the home they purchased- 2001 vs. 2008

Have a look at the very interesting figures published for USA home buyers on:

http://rismedia.com/2009-03-29/buyers-becoming-more-successful-finding-homes-through-internet/

The NAR statistics show that 7 years on from 2001, 32% of home buyers found their home through the internet. What’s even more interesting is that print newspaper hardly makes an impact, a mere 3% of buyers found their home through print.

Earthhour tonight - remember to switch them lights off at 8.30pm

2009-03-28T09:36:00.000+02:00

Entegral supports the Earth Hour Campaign against climate change.

Everyone is encouraged to switch off lights tonight (28 March @ 8.30pm) for one hour as a sign of solidarity against climate change.

For more information visit:

http://www.myproperty.co.za/c/earth-hour-video

Entegral @ RealNet 2009 franchise conference

2009-03-25T21:07:00.004+02:00

Once again we were privileged to attend and present at this years RealNet conference at the Riverside Hotel & Conference centre. It was great meeting up with the RealNet management team and franchisees. With nearly 100 franchise areas established in only a few years, RealNet has some great strategies for 2009 and beyond.