Enhancements for Office Staff

We've added a few more features to BAS designed to help Office Staff manage activity for the entire office. The new updates include:

1. You can now sort incoming appointments on your home screen by Showing Date/Time or by Entered Date/Time. The setting will "stick" once you set it so the next time you login, you won't have to change it.




2. Staff can now filter the month, week, and day view calendars to show only appointments with or without feedback. If you are constantly looking for showings that don't have feedback yet, this is for you! The updated listing report (from the Listings menu) also has an option to filter by Feedback.





3. Listing activity - need to keep little notes about a listing rather than a particular appointment? Now you can add "activities" for any listing in BAS. You can access activity from the Listings page or by searching in the "Add New Appointment" box and clicking new activity icon (the pencil).

Agents can also read, add, and delete listing activity as well from their own Listings page.

Activity icon:

4. Preview is now a choice for showing type when setting up appointments for agents.

5. Need to export all of your clients into Excel? Now you can! Hover over the clients menu option and click "Export All". The system will prompt you to download a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file that is readable by Excel. Use this file to create letters, mailing labels, or anything else you can think of.

Agents can also export their own client list using the same method as above.








Do you have an idea for us? Please let us know!

Short BAS Outage

We've experienced some brief periods of outages this morning with BookAShowing.com and we have traced the problem back to a power outage at our hosting facility. We've contacted them and they are running on their backup generator equipment with no further planned downtime. We apologize for any inconvenience.

New features for Agents

We've added a couple of new features for Agents. The first is a new dashboard for upcoming showing activity on your listings. We've also renamed the "upcoming appts" section to "My Showings". The new agent dashboard is labeled "My Listings" and clicking on each status will bring up a report of all your upcoming showing activity for your listings. From there you can further refine your search or view the report for a specific listing.

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The next new feature is the ability to require feedback comments on all of your listings. Many agents have asked for this feature and now its available! Just click on Settings, and under the Feedback Defaults section, set the option for Comments required to YES. No more "excellent, excellent, excellent" and no comments feedback forms!

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The final new feature in BookAShowing.com is the ability to display a map of the properties you are setting up showings for. This can help you decide which order to go in and how long it takes to travel from listing to listing. The map is provided by Google and will open in a new window so you don't loose your work in BAS.

Latest BAS Enhancements

We've added a few enhancements to BookAShowing.com to make your overall experience better. We'll touch on each one briefly and if you have more questions, please contact us.

1. WEEKEND MODE. We've added a weekend mode for offices that use an agent as the on-call person on the weekends. By turning this mode on in your office staff account, you can display a (optional) message to showing agents when they setup appointments and/or you can choose an agent to receive the office's requests in their account. We've added a new section to the agent's home page just for this weekend mode:



When this option is turned on, you'll notice a black bar at the top of your office staff account as a reminder to turn weekend mode off after the weekend:

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2. SHOWING DEFAULTS. You can now set default settings for any appointment you setup in BookAShowing.com. You can set the length of time for each appointment (defaults to 30 minutes), the agent type, the showing type, the start hour/minute/ampm, and any agent notes you'd like to include for each appointment. Office staff can also set a default buyer name.

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3. NEW REPORTS. We've added a couple of new reports including listing analysis and top showing activity. You can access these new reports from the Reports menu option.

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4. MORE NUMBERS FOR CLIENTS. We've added fields for additional contact numbers for home, work, cell, and fax for your clients. We've also loosened the restrictions and allow you to type small notes with each number (800-826-7155 BAS HQ). But remember, for client text messages to work, a valid 10 digit cell number ONLY must be present in the client' cell phone number field.

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5. ADD ACTIVITY REFRESH. We've updated the activity box to "update in place" so your screen won't jump to the top of the page when you add a new activity.

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6. ADD NEW LISTING. Office staff: Have a listing that is not in the MLS system? Now you can add that listing into BAS manually. Just click the "Add Listing" link from the Listings page:

New "Keep Private" option for your clients

We've added a feature to all clients in BookAShowing.com that allows you to hide the name of your client from the listing agent/office. While we feel this isn't quite in the best interest of the person selling their home, many agents are simply scared to enter their buyer's information for fear of "poaching" by other agents. To satisfy the needs of all agents in BookAShowing.com, each client now has a "Keep Private" setting that, when checked, will prevent the client's name from showing to the listing agent (no other client information was ever displayed).



We see many agents enter bogus client names and that really isn't using BookAShowing.com to its full potential. With this new "keep private" setting, agents can now confidentially add their clients information and keep it "private" (and still benefit from perks like procuring cause records).

And while we're talking about adding client information, be sure to include your client's email address when ever possible. This will allow your clients to receive showing notifications via email, feedback sent directly to them, approve showing requests online, and provides your client with their own BAS login account.

SCAAR and FlexMLS

We've just heard that the integration between BookAShowing.com and FlexMLS for the St. Cloud Area Association of REALTORS® will be installed tomorrow (Tuesday April 3rd) night is now live in the FlexMLS system. While it was originally scheduled for April 1st, we understand that delays can happen and we can assure you the team at FBS has done a great job with the integration.

A video is avaiable to see this in action and it will be covered during the agent training sessions as well.