By popular demand, we’ve introduced a new Print Flyer function on all vFlyer landing pages. This allows viewers of any vFlyer to print a simplified version of the Flyer with the title, summary information, main photo and up to four gallery photos, location information, map, contact information, and photo and logos. This means that if you’re a real estate agent and a potential buyer finds one of your vFlyers through one of our partner marketplaces such as Trulia, that person can simply click the Print Flyer link instead of having to try to print the landing page itself (which isn’t set up to be printed) or (dare I say) write down the necessary information for the listing. In other words, this new Print Flyer link makes your vFlyer landing pages that much more functional and valuable to both you and the viewers of your vFlyers. And isn’t that the whole idea?

Here’s an example of the new print version:

Our members have always been excited about our Widgets because they’re an easy and effective way to increase traffic to their Profile and Listings, but we realized that there was room for improvement. In the prior release, Widgets could either display all of your active listings or just one of them. So we decided enough is enough and, a few weeks ago, rolled out some major enhancements to our Widgets. Now, when you create a Widget, you can:

In other words, we’ve given you more control over the content of your vFlyer Widgets. For example, if you wanted to highlight your listings from a particular subdivision, you could create a Widget that displayed just those listings. Or, if you had both rental and for sale listings in the same account, you could create a separate Widget for each. Or, if you wanted to include a non-vFlyer web page in one of your Widgets, you could do that too.

Creating a List allows you to decide which listings to show in a particular widget. A List works in the same way as a music playlist; you choose the items for the list, just as you would choose the songs for a playlist. When you create a Multi-item Widget, you simply choose the List you want to use for that Widget.

To include content not hosted by vFlyer in a Widget, use a Teaser. A Teaser is an enhanced link designed for use in vFlyer Widgets. Each Teaser requires a title and a URL, where the link in the Teaser will take viewers. Additionally, you can add a price and summary information and upload photos to your Teasers. You can then add Teasers to your Lists just as you would add Flyers.

We’re thrilled to be allowing our users to integrate externally-hosted web content into their Widgets and decide which of their Flyers and Teasers to put in their widgets. We hope that you all take advantage of these great new features!

We had a fantastic time exhibiting at Inman Real Estate Connect last week. The show gave us a chance to share with real estate agents and brokers, technology managers, and other attendees all about the benefits of using vFlyer and gave us the opportunity to catch up with some longtime vFlyer members and meet other members for the first time. vFlyer members who stopped by our booth included:

Also, the winner of our vFlyer Basic Annual Subscription Giveaway was vFlyer member Tom Plant of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Wildomar, CA. Congratulations Tom!

Thanks to all of you for stopping by and saying hello!

Also, our very own Oliver Muoto was a panelist on a panel discussion titled, “The Hottest Productivity Tools.” Way to represent, Oliver!

The Inman show is a great chance to learn about, discuss, and debate the most important trends in real estate technology and marketing. We’re delighted to have had the opportunity to participate in the conference again and look forward to future Inman Real Estate Connects.

We’re very excited to be exhibiting at Inman News Real Estate Connect 2008 here in San Francisco this week. We had a great time there last year and are looking forward to “RE-connecting” (sorry, I couldn’t resist) with our partners, our friends at Inman News, and our members! We’ll have a booth set up in the main exhibition hall on Wednesday and Thursday - if you are at the show, stop by and say hello! Or, if you are going to be around but don’t think you’ll make it to our booth, send an email to inmanconnect@vflyer.com letting us know and perhaps we can figure out a time to chat.

For more news and information on Inman Real Estate Connect 2008, visit Inman Connect.

We are excited to announce the addition of FrontDoor as a syndication partner for Residential for Sale Listings. FrontDoor is the newly-launched and highly anticipated real estate website of HGTV, the television network that gave us House Hunters and Designed to Sell. Following the lead of those shows, FrontDoor takes a comprehensive approach toward the buying and selling of a house.  In addition to listing millions of properties for sale around the country, it provides useful, accessible tips to sellers about raising home values, home staging, and other topics, and to buyers about what to look for when shopping for a house. 

We recently added the real estate marketplace CyberHomes as a syndication partner site, which means that real estate for sale listings can now be automatically submitted there! This is great news, as this website is a rising stars in the world of online real estate marketplaces. CyberHomes (which is the exclusive provider of real estate listings to AOL) offers detailed information and statistics on homes for sale, neighborhoods, and metro areas around the country as well as market trends. It also provides useful reference material for buyers and sellers of homes. Be sure to update and republish listings to take advantage of this new service benefit.

We recently completed an extensive review of all the widgets we offer and made a number of changes and fixes that improve the look and performance of the Flash version of those widgets. The Flash version (as opposed to the Javascript version, which we also generate for each widget) is the one most compatible with the largest number of websites. Changes we made include a streamlining of the contact information and photo and logos on Basic Gallery and Basic Flyer widgets; the removal of Price and Location labels when those fields have no values in them; a better display of summary information for each listing; improved alignment of the widget title and flyer titles on the vertical Recent Listings widget; and improvement of the scrolling function on the premium Sliding Gallery widget. Here are a few examples:

Widgets are an effective and (best of all) easy way to create more exposure of your listings because you can easily embed the HTML code for the widget in your website, blog, and/or social network profile.  These improvements we made should give vFlyer users all the more incentive to configure widgets and put them on those sites!

Many of you have probably noticed changes to your vFlyer account homepage since Thursday morning. We did an overhaul of the account homepage and made it into a dashboard where you can access the Craigslist HTML for any of your flyers, email and print any of your flyers, access the HTML for any widgets you’ve created, and more. You can think of your account homepage as a kind of “mission control” for your vFlyer account, which is how it should be! Now you no longer need to go through multiple steps to get the Craigslist HTML for a flyer, track the activity of a flyer, or do other flyer-related tasks - it’s all right in front of you when you log in to your account.

We hope this makes using vFlyer even easier. If you have feedback for us on the new dashboard, let us know.

If you’ve ever had your unsaved work on a flyer lost because your session expired while you were writing a long description, then you know how frustrating it can be. That’s why we recently introduced an autosave feature in the Flyer Editor and Photo Editor that automatically saves any work you’ve done on a flyer after 29 minutes of inactivity (or activity only in the description field). It’s still a good idea to click the Save Draft button every ten minutes or so in case you encounter a network problem or some other error, but the autosave feature provides added security against losing work you’ve done. 

Note: The autosave feature only applies to the Flyer Editor and Photo Editor.

As many of the readers of our blog know, vFlyer launched its beta back in Oct 2006. What many of you may not know is that we opened our private beta in July 2006. One of our earliest users of the service was Eppie AhKiong of Palazzo Realty in Long Beach, CA. Eppie was using the vFlyer service to create Craigslist postings. Over the first few months, we received not only suggestions but also great feedback from her usage of the vFlyer service.  Yesterday, we received a beautiful and tasty fruit basket form the Palazzo Realty crew with a note saying that the basket was from vFlyer’s #1 Fans.

After enjoying fresh pineapple and strawberries (some of which were chocolate coated), we took a vote for our #1 Fan.  We would like to take this opportunity to thank the community that utilizes the vFlyer service. We love the feedback and suggestions. We try to choose the suggestions that are going to benefit the overall community the most and implement those first. Please keep the suggestions coming.

Many of you have probably seen already that vFlyer now supports Wellcomemat as a video host. Wellcomemat is a kind of social networking site built around videos and devoted to the Real Estate market. You might call it “YouTube for Real Estate.” Thousands of real estate agents and brokers and other people selling houses use Wellcomemat to host the videos they make for their houses and properties. Now, as a vFlyer customer, you can embed Wellcomemat videos right into your flyers! It’s easy - just follow these steps:

1. You’ll first need to open a Wellcomemat account. It’s free and it will allow you to upload videos to the site.

2. Once you’ve created your account and uploaded a video to Wellcomemat, click the MENU button in the bottom right corner of the video.

3. Click Get URL/Link, then click Copy URL.

4. Log in to your vFlyer account and create a flyer.
5. In the video section of the Flyer Editor, select Wellcomemat from the drop-down menu and paste the URL for your video in the box.

Note: Video embedding is available only to vFlyer business subscribers (vFlyer Starter and above).

Trying to get more done in less time? Of course. That’s why we recently introduced a multi-photo upload feature for any flyer created on vFlyer.com. It makes uploading gallery photos a snap! Simply click the Setup Photo Gallery link in the Flyer Editor and then click the Upload Multiple Photos link. From there, click the Browse button and select the photos you want to upload while pressing the Ctrl key. Once you’ve selected your photos, click Upload. Voila! Your gallery photos are uploaded in one fell swoop.

With the addition of the new Century 21 design theme, vFlyer now offers six premium broker themes to business subscribers! We have themes for the following brokerages:

Century 21	Keller Williams	Alain Pinel
Coldwell Banker	Prudential	REMAX

Premium broker themes are available to all vFlyer subscribers (vFlyer Starter or better).

Responding to customer demand, vFlyer now allows its users to change their account names! This change is part of a larger restructuring of the Account Profile setup in which we’ve added sections for Settings, where you can adjust various settings in your Account Profile,and Basic account information, which displays your account name, account URL, and the date the account was created.

vFlyer Agency now supports multiple accounts and users, giving Real Estate and other sales professionals the flexibility to delegate work and choose different service and pricing levels. Brokers can create multiple accounts, invite team members to create their own accounts, or delegate management of their listings to team members or even clients, the company said in a press release. Fees for multiple accounts can be aggregated, or agents and clients can be billed for accounts directly. Contact sales@vflyer.com for more information.

Inman News did a nice piece on the release titled: VFlyer offers more options for service levels, pricing. The article quotes Aaron Sperling as saying:

The new capabilities should benefit both brokers and agents…because brokers don’t have to pay for services they don’t need and agents can access vFlyer at a discount through subaccounts already populated with their listings.

The article also mentions some of the corporate customers using vFlyer Agency including

Classified industry analyst Greg Sterling focused on vFlyer impact on the publishing industry with his post vFlyer Turns Newspapers into ‘Agencies’. Greg says:

What’s interesting to me about it is that vFlyer now is doing/trying to do for newspaper classifieds what the local SEM firms … are doing for yellow pages publishers.

and concludes that vFlyer potentially turns the newspaper into an “agency” for local realtors and brokers who want a “one stop shop” to advertise their listings.