RealTown's RealTalk

11/21/2008 @ 2:49 AM HST

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Janet Stefano:

As a teacher for many years, I also found that COLOR CODING  is great:  Yellow--check book in hand; Red--seriously looking and soon;  Green-- looking but not immediately; Blue--everyone else who I know or expressed interest.  Colors are eye-catching and once you get into a routine of what each folder or category means...it's a great time saver. 

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I used to be the queen of color coding...got teased all the time by other agents in my office and even my own assistants, but it works! :-) A few years ago I bumped into one of my former assistants in Tahoe. She couldn't remember my name right away but she could remember my "pink contact sheets". LOL 

I now use a modified version of the color system (mostly for contracts), but I've used just about every system out there. Fortunately,  technology has made my systems very simple <thank goodness>. I now only have 4 categories (past client, active buyer, active seller, buyer/seller lead).

Most of my new leads buy or sell in 1-2 months...mostly without me doing anything. Buyers I have contracts with (the only Buyers I'll work with) usually buy within 1-2 weeks (going out maybe 1-2 times); Sellers take about a month, but mostly because I give them a pretty long list of items that have to be done before we list.

Thanks for posting your information about Outlook. It sparked an idea that i knew about but failed to put into action.

Ed Mawhinney - Nextage Realty

New Jersey

I thought I would pass on some info here related to Outlook since our software, RealeSeller, works with it and we have had a lot of feedback on these two issues lately.

First, in Outlook 2003 and 2007 you can change both the Sensitivity and the Importance of email you send, either individually (the way I recommend) or by default from the Advanced Email Options menu. Until lately, this hasn't caused an issue.  But, what people started noticing is their mail didn't seem to be delivered by some email systems and contacts were not being synchronized.  This is intolerable because of the way we all currently do business and we communicate through email more often than not. It appears that there is a bug in Outlook 2007 (not Outlook 2003).  When you set either the default Sensitivity or Importance of an email to something other than Normal, Outlook 2007 automatically marks all new contacts you create as Private.  While on its surface this doesn't seem like a problem, if you are using a Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox, your contacts will not sync with your other computers. Items marked as private simply aren't synchronized, so that is the first major problem. The second problem is that for some reason, some email systems will not deliver email that is marked as private.  Your clients will think you are ignoring them even though you are not.  So be careful about the Private setting on your email.

Now for the second issue, mostly an irritation, and not a big problem like the above issue.  Many people are buying the MagicJack product (I have and love it).  It is saving me about $40 a month and any place I can save money right now, I'm doing it.  I even went so far as to write a module for RealeSeller that adds MagicJack to the list of Softphones that we currently support for dialing clients. So, the problem is, the folks at MagicJack have an Outlook add-in that allows you to automatically dial a contact phone number, and it works fine... but, if you are like me, when I go up to an Outlook menu, like File or View, Go, Tools, etc. I expect that the menu will fully expand since I have Outlook set to do that. The slowly expanding drop-down menus waste time so I have turned that feature off.  Well, the software installed by MagicJack somehow interferes with this feature and it doesn't matter what the setting is in Outlook, it causes Outlook to use the slowly expanding drop-down menu method! Ouch! At first I thought it was some new bug introduced into Outlook by one of the latest updates, but it turns out that the MagicJack add-in was the source of the issue. Our built-in dialer doesn't cause that sort of issue, but if you have that feature installed and are using the MagicJack dialer to call with, this is why your menu's are doing this. After I uninstalled their add-in the problem stopped.

Larry Perry
RealeSeller - Transforms Outlook Into a "Genuine Real Estate Software Application"
(972) 377-9769
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