It’s been just over 1 year since Zoo Property launched and as part of our continual offering to our clients we’ve been working on some significant updates over the past 2 months. Outlined below are a number of enhancements and features which are included in the most significant Zoo Property update since our launch 12 months ago.

Contacts Section

This is a new section being deployed to Zoo Property which allows you to add ‘Contacts” to your office account. Contacts can be in the form of property vendors, landlords, property seekers, or potential/past landlords and vendors. The contacts section is made up of 4 areas:

Contacts tab – this includes a list of all contacts (in the same format as the Listings tab) allowing you to sort and filter contacts. You can ‘Add” a new contact or ‘Edit” existing contacts along with view their “Alerts” or “Notes”.

For contacts added to the system you have the following tabs:

Details – This includes all of the contact’s contact and address details along with the type of the contact they are, who they belong to, who can access the contact and also how the contact heard about your office.

Alerts – The alerts tab highlights the contact’s buying/leasing preference and allows you to narrow this down to suburb, price, bed, bath and property type.

Notes – This tab provides a summary of the office’s correspondence with the contact. Notes can be created for past correspondence or can be created as a reminder for future correspondence. The appropriate team member will be emailed a reminder with the ‘Contact’s” details on the date the correspondence should take place.

Both Alerts and Notes can manually be entered for Contacts by team members along with automatically be remitted through the Zoo Property API from your agency website or other Zoo Property powered applications.

Property Section

When you Edit a property you will now see a number of additional tabs included across the top of a page. These tabs include:

Details – the property details
Media- images, floorplans, brochure, audio and video
Open Times – Current open inspection times, past open times and open inspection attendees.
Exports – Select which portals you’d like to export the property listing to.
Status – Select the status for a property along with enter Contacts who submitted offers and purchaser/lessee of a property.
Notes - Outlining all correspondence between the Office and Contacts for that property along with highlighting the number of property views generated through Zoo Property powered applications.

Further Explanation:
Media Enhancements - We’ve revamped the media section for a property using a flash player to allow you to more efficiently load images, floorplans, brochures and audio for a property. A major enhancement is that you can now select multiple images at once (up to 10) and load these at the one time. We’re also saving to the database the original size (dimensions) for your images allowing you to have images larger than the industry standard of 800 pixels wide.

Note: We’ve had to write back the deployment and use the old media section for browsers using IE. Some versions of IE could not run the flash so to avoid issues we’ve decided that all IE browsers will use the old method.

Property Videos – You can now load a video for each property, the options available for adding a video include:
1. Video url - You can add the url for a video which is hosted on another server.
2. Video Embed Code – You can add the embed code for a video located on a 3rd party server.
3. Load video to the system using YouTube- if you have a video in any format you can load it into Zoo Property and an embed code and video url will be automatically generated. We use the YouTube API to crunch your video and convert it into a streaming video hosted with YouTube. When loading the video through Zoo Property you are asked for your YouTube Channel/account so the video will simultaneously be added to your YouTube account. If you don’t have a YouTube account then by default your video will be loaded to the Zoo Property YouTube channel. Once a video has been loaded to YouTube, YouTube will automatically remit to Zoo Property a url and video embed code for the video which we save to your property.

These codes are then passed through to your website where they will appear in the property page.

Open Times
- we’ve enhanced this section allowing you to add multiple open times for a property which occur on the same day at the same time of each week.
- Your past open times are saved allowing you to add open inspection attendees to each open inspection.
- Attendees can be sorted and viewed at the bottom of the page.

Exports
For listings which have not yet been made ‘Available” and are still in “Draft” status you can uncheck portals which your office would normally send exports to. Once the status of listing has changed to ‘Available” you CAN NOT uncheck a portal.

Note: We’re still finalising the export scripts to not send an export with a portal is unchecked so at present this feature is not activated. It will be working early next week.

Notes
- The Property Notes section highlights all the users who have viewed or contacted the agency in relation to a property.
- You have the opportunity to enter ‘Contacts” who have enquired about the property
- Any contacts who have filled in a property enquiry form for the property will automatically appear in the Notes section.
- You can sort contacts in relation to property enquiry type.
- You can also see the number of users who have viewed the property for any Zoo Property powered application.

At present this information can be sourced from your office website, mobile phone website, individual property website and ipad website. Other possibilities include mobile phone website and facebook website. Through the Zoo API data can be remitted into the system in relation to any enquireis or page views for a property.

Note: All contacts assigned to a property are also automatically added to the Contacts section helping build your agency’s database.

Team Member Enhancements

There have been number of enhancements to the team member section of the system
- You can select Suburbs which agents specialise in.
- You can load a video for each agent in the form of a url or embed code.
- You can load an audio file for each agent
- You have the ability to load an agent image larger than the set image sizes accepted by Zoo Property. We’ve built a tool which allows you to crop agent images as per the size images we accept meaning you’ll never have a stretched agent profile image again.

Property Listing Template Improvements

- You have the option to allocate a 3rd agent contact to a property.
- We have included a maximum price for properties meaning there is now a minimum and maximum price allowing for a price range.
- We’ve included half bathrooms meaning you can display .5 bathrooms on your website eg 3.5

Layout Changes

- We’ve moved what was known as the ‘Message Centre” from the main navigation placing it on the right hand side of the header and renamed this ‘Support”. The ‘Contacts” section can be found in between the ‘Team” and “Tools” section of the Agent system.
- You’ll note that we no longer use lightboxes on the Dashboard or Listings page for the options available for each property (photo, floor, open, status). If you click on these links for a property you will be directed through to the specific page for that section of a property.

Bug Fixes

- Quick Search for properties in the main navigation has had the Sphinx bug sorted.
- When a property does not validate the radio button for price does not default back to the default ‘Price”.
- We’ve adjusted the Google map so it encourages you to set the Google coordinates for a property.

We hope these updates improve your experience using Zoo Property and help make your task managing properties and team profiles as seamless as possible. We’d appreciate any feedback you have or any new feature requests you’d like to see added to the system.