Wednesday, February 18, 2009

BAS Live on NorthstarMLS!

Starting today - February 18th, agents and office staff administrators can access BookAShowing.com through the Matrix MLS system. For more details, please review the "news" section of Matrix!

Appointment scheduling is currently disabled for agents and the anticipated "live" date for that is March 5th. Use the time between now and then to configure your account settings, add instructions to listings, set-up listings for automatic showing confirmation, etc.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

BAS Launch on NorthstarMLS

Starting very soon, agents and office administrators of NorthstarMLS will be able to access BookAShowing.com through Matrix to setup your account. Appointment scheduling is currently scheduled to be enabled on March 5th, 2009. More information for office staff is available. Agents - watch the news section on Matrix for updates!

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Upgrades and Enhancements

We've updated BAS and added lots of new features and enhancements. Several of these changes include (broken down by account type):

Agents:

1. We updated the calendar views and "compressed" the view a little to fit more appointments.

2. You can now turn off "conflict checking" in your account. BAS always blocks existing appointment timeslots but if you want to allow overlapping appointments, head over to the Settings page -> Listing Defaults section and change the "Appt Conflicts" to YES.

3. If you are part of NorthstarMLS, you can enable Showing Solutions from the Settings page -> Listing Defaults section. Note: You must already be an existing Showing Solutions customer!

4. You can now setup default client options for anytime you are adding a new client. Look in the Settings page -> Listing Defaults section

5. If you don't want to use BAS for showing feedback, you can turn feedback off at the Settings page -> Feedback Defaults section. You can also change the "frequency" - the number of days after an appointment to send a request to the showing agent for feedback.

6. You can now setup a number of hours required for appointments. For example, if a listing requires 24 hours notice for showings, check out the "Set Appointment Availability" link from the edit listing page. You can set this from 1 hour to 48 hours. A message is displayed to the showing agent when they are filling out the form if they don't give enough notice.

7. We added lots of new tutorial videos. From your account, check out the Video Tutorials link at the bottom of any page.

Office Staff:

1. We updated the calendar views and "compressed" the view a little to fit more appointments.

2. You can now add "custom activity messages" to save keystrokes and for consistency. Look for the "Add custom activity messages" link in the showing activity box. Custom activity messages can also be set to email the showing agent, email the listing agent, set a waiting for call back icon or approve an appointment.

3. We added a new "waiting for call back" icon in the appointment header bar (what you click to hide/show the appt on your home page). You can click the phone icon to turn it on (shows red) or turn it off. If it's on, you can hover over it and find out exactly when it was set. A custom activity message can also be set to turn this on automatically.

4. You can now customize the feedback questions for your entire office from the Settings page -> Feedback defaults area. You can also customize feedback questions for an individual listing from the edit listing page.

5. When editing a listing and choosing a seller from the drop-down list, an "edit" button will appear automatically. You can click the edit button and save any changes necessary without having to save the listing and go back just to edit the seller.

6. You can now setup a number of hours required for appointments. For example, if a listing requires 24 hours notice for showings, check out the "Set Appointment Availability" link from the edit listing page. You can set this from 1 hour to 48 hours. A message is displayed to the showing agent when they are filling out the form if they don't give enough notice.

7. A new "listing defaults" area on the Settings page give you the ability to disable conflict checking for your listing agents, setup default client options for when you're adding new clients and if you're a member of NorthstarMLS, you can enable Showing Solutions for your listing agents.

8. The "showing defaults" area has been renamed to "Showing/Activity Defaults". You can also add/edit your custom activity here.

9. A new "feedback defaults" area has been added to the Settings page. From here, you can disable BAS feedback for certain listing agents (they can do it to from their account now) or customize the standard feedback forms for you entire office. The custom feedback questions will then be used for all listing agents and listings - as long as the agent has added their own or the listing doesn't have it's own questions.

10. The "weekend response" is being renamed to "Out of Office Response" since it can often be used other times besides the weekend. Functions exactly the same, just a new, more appropriate name.

11. If you don't want your agents to be able to "edit" listings (showing instructions, assign sellers, etc) you can put them in "read only" mode from the Settings page -> Office Settings area. They can still request appointments and do everything they normally could, they just can save changes on the edit listing page.

12. We added lots of new tutorial videos. From your account, check out the Video Tutorials link at the bottom of any page.

There are lots of other new features and enhancements too, many too trivial to list. Let us know what you think!