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Using Flickr photos in listing presentations

February 22, 2008 Flickr is one of the most popular online photo sharing services and known for their high-quality photos - uploaded by amateurs and professional photographers. This tutorial will show how to use Flickr images with the RealBird Listing Publisher service for creating a great looking online listing presentation. RealBird allows you to spice up your listing websites with background images. This is a great feature for visually highlighting some of the main characteristics of the property. Many of our members are using high-quality property pictures or a nature photo to capture the mood of the property, like ocean or mountain view or to emphasize that it is a horse property. The challenge for the high adaptation of this visually captivating feature is that many agents do not have access to high-quality, royalty free images to upload as a backdrop.

This is where Flickr comes for our rescue. Flickr provides a way for its members to decide under which licensing term they are sharing their photos with the public. While the default setting I believe is "All rights reserved", that is, fully copyrighted and no reuse is permitted, many Flickr users opt-in to share their photos under one of the variations of Creative Common licenses.

In order for you to reuse Flickr photos, you have to make sure that the creative common license is such, that it allows commercial reuse. There are other details which you have to pay attention to. See the tutorial below.

Let's take an example of property which has an ocean view. Probably you will want to upload a background photo of the ocean, sunset or similar. Besides searching for "ocean view" or "ocean sunset" on Flickr, you can also add some additional characteristics, e.g. California, so that the random images will more likely represent the natural attributes of the California coast vs Florida or the South Pacific.

While it is not a licensing issue, but more of a best practice consideration, selecting a general purpose design with no geographically specific visuals is advised, to avoid confusing your visitors. The background image is a very powerful visualization tool and you may mislead visitors unintentionally, if they think that the background photo was actually taken from the house or relates to your property. The goal here is to choose an image which symbolizes the main characteristics, but in the meantime, does not imply that it is an actual photo of the property or its surroundings. (Of course, this is not a problem if you are using your own images of the listing for the background overlay)

The tutorial assumes that you already created a RealBird single property website.

Step 1 - Search for photos with proper licenses Step 2 - Choose the photo and download it Once you found the image you like, you will have to get the link to its high resolution version:

Look for these logos below the Flickr picture: Step 3 - Using the image on RealBird

One of the options of the RealBird listing website theme customization feature is using an uploaded photo as a backdrop. To use the Flickr photo downloaded in step 2, follow the steps below:

Step 4 - Attribute the work

From the Creative-Common license: "Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."

The best way to do this is by adding a link to the Flickr photo page (the Url in Step 2, Item 2 above) at the bottom of the description of your property using the RealBird editor. The link should say something like "Photo courtesy of [Author's name]"

That's it, you are done.

I hope you find this tutorial helpful for your next RealBird listing presentation.

-- Zoltan

I hate to do this in a blog tutorial, but since we touched some licensing issues, here comes the RealBird disclaimer: This is not a legal advise on how to interpret the legal context of the copyright and licensing terms on Flickr. We are providing a technical tutorial about how to use Creative-commons licensed photos if you decide that you have the rights to do so. Please do not use copyrighted material with RealBird, unless you have proper permission from the copyright holder.

Posted at 08:55 PM in Flickr, listing marketing, Listing Publisher, mashup, real estate, RealBird Listing Publisher, Single Property Website, Syndication | Permalink | Comments (2)


Capturing buyer leads from portals

January 13, 2008

Gabe's article is below.

-- Zoltan Szendro


A Novel Approach to Lead Generation for REALTORS®

by Gabriel Gross, President, RealBird.com

For more information, please visit http://www.RealBird.com


Map-based MLS Search 2.0

December 10, 2007 Introducing the RealBird Map-based MLS Search 2.0


The solution 



End of the slideshow as we know it


I received an email from the Animoto guys this morning that their service is available for the public as of today. Animoto uses a patent-pending technology to produce high-impact video from your pictures and music.

Since we started to promote real estate videos more than a year ago, one of the main barriers to entry for most real estate agents was the high "cost" of production. While the cost of hardware and software to take and edit video is insignificant, the time and expertise required to actually produce it with an acceptable quality made it prohibitive for most of the agents.

Animoto might very well be the answer to this. The process is quite simple. You create a free account with them and upload your property images and music or choose from their selection. Their rendering engine takes care of the rest. Analyzing the music, it will create a high-impact, music video style, embeddable slide-show widget.

Amazing technology.  And of course, fully supported by the free RealBird Listing Publisher property website builder to enhance your listing presentation.

Here is the work-flow I suggest:

Below is a short example clip using photos of my baby nephews:

I would love to feature some of your listings on this blog if you are using Animoto. Send us your RealBird property link with Animoto clips embedded  (or add it as a comment below) and we'll feature it in our case studies category.


Posted at 10:53 AM in animoto, listing, listing marketing, marketing, mashup, real estate, real estate video, RealBird Listing Publisher, technology | Permalink | Comments (4)


RealBird mashed it up big time

August 06, 2007

Just in time for the Inman Real Estate Connect, - which we were a gold sponsor of - we introduced a new product and a bunch of new features. We mashed up new 3rd party services, such as Zillow, Yelp, Zvents, Yahoo Traffic besides the existing ones ( Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and ValPak) With the new product release, we have a new business model also, which we believe will suit the fast changing real estate industry better.

We are going to write several posts tracking the development and best practices of different aspects of the new services. For starting, let me provide an overview of the new product mix and the most significant features.

RealBird Listing Publisher After some fun brainstorming sessions , we made the decision to let RealBird fly free. The updated RealBird Listing Publisher is now a completely free service with no limitations and no advertising. It's a full featured online listing marketing tool for commercial and residential real estate agents and brokers. With the  Listing Publisher service, you can create unlimited property websites with unlimited photos, unlimited multimedia and content and  unlimited design themes. The system provides distribution to 3rd party classified sites via automatic syndication and via real estate widgets for websites and blogs. Real estate agents can use the service to create stunning listing presentations for properties or use it as a seller acquisition tool with "draft" flyers for listing interviews.  It's a free service, so why don't you take it for a test fly

Summary of features:

Learn more about the features

or go straight ahead and sign up now FOR FREE

RealBird Real Estate Yellow Pages We are glad to announce that we also released a real estate portal for consumers ( SearchOnMaps.com ) The service features a full-screen map-based portal interface with 3 main functionalities:

The service mashes up quite many 3rd party services. Real estate data is provided by RealBird (listings via Listing Publisher and business profiles via the RealBird Yellow Pages service), home valuation by Zillow with local agent recommendations by RealBird. Data overlays include Yelp local reviews, Zvents local events, traffic incidents by Yahoo and nearby ValPak coupons. The service allows consumers to email, social bookmark and share properties, home valuations, business profiles or a specific map extent and to subscribe to RSS updates on a specific map via the unique "Watch this map" tool.

This is also one of the first services to promote the real estate blogs of the listed professionals along the yellow pages entry and  also with their  featured listing post. Real estate blogging is now mainstream  and promoting your blog just got easier with the RealBird Real Estate Yellow Pages service.

Another unique visualization feature is that the service shows the photo or logo of the listed professional when users hover over the  location icons. This gives a personal touch to the service and face recognition value to the whole deal, plus it looks cool, I think.

We welcome all kinds of real estate professionals to post their business listings including residential and commercial sales professionals, lenders, appraisers, builders etc.

Read more about this service

Visit SearchOnMaps.com to see how others are using it

RealBird Map-based MLS Search

We have released several updates for the map-based IDX search service too.  We made it very easy for members to link the map widget to their existing IDX service for property details and to configure main features such as hiding or showing the header and footer and property addresses. A widget configuration tool is also available to generate embed code with the desired width, height for real estate website and blogs. We applied several performance tunings and we are happy to let you know that we increased the performance by two folds. The service is significantly faster now.

Visit RealBird.com to learn more

As always, please send us your feedback, comments and RealBird sightings.



RealBird Inc.

Posted at 10:38 AM in google maps, listing, listing marketing, marketing, mashup, real estate, RealBird Listing Publisher, RealBird Map-based Search, RealBird Real Estate Yellow Pages, Syndication, technology, ValPak, virtual earth, Yahoo, Yelp, Zillow, Zvents | Permalink | Comments (3)


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