MRIS Blog

Did you know that MRIS has a YouTube Channel? You might ask why we have one.

One of the most common requests we hear from our subscribers is for more online help for the products and services that we offer. We do provide a KnowledgeBase on mris.com that has a lot of helpful information, and our products also have User Guides that are available on mris.com. However, not everyone has time to go look for those articles and user guides, or do a lot of reading.

So we thought that offering short online videos would be a good way to provide online help. We have been featuring these videos on Matrix News and on the MRIS Blog. The goal is to keep each video under 6 minutes, so that you can take a few short minutes to watch a video find out how to use a new product or feature.

So far, our videos include:

• setting up Teams functionality in Matrix
• switching between Teams in Matrix
• the Lingo Translation functionality in Matrix
• the new polygon and radius tools for the Matrix Map search

We hope you take a few minutes to visit our YouTube Channel and see what we have to offer.  You can even sign up to get email alerts when we add new videos.Our goal is to provide easier and more convenient ways for you to get information about the products and services offered by MRIS. Let us know what you think!

Have you used the new Polygon and Radius tools for the Matrix Map Search? If you haven’t, this short video will show you how to use them, and how they can help you to deliver better information to your clients.

You can find more helpful videos on MRIS’ YouTube Channel.

Transform your transactions from tedious paperwork into dynamic marketing and referral tools!
Join us today to:

• Discover how RELAY can streamline your business
• See the advantages of Online Real Estate
• Learn how to start your own online transaction
• Start saving time and attracting clients!

Title: RELAY® Introduction for MRIS Users
Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

Space is limited.

MRIS, in collaboration with industry gurus, presents a series of videos for the public to view on YOUR Web site.It’s what every Web site needs; engaging content, a way to promote YOUR Web site to clients and prospects, and generate traffic to YOUR Web site. Topical videos fill a need for reliable, trustworthy information and give people a reason to visit your site again and again.

Check out the video on Curb Appeal. This short video highlights something that most sellers can’t comprehend, the importance of “curb appeal” to the sale of a home. A non-threatening approach delivers the message that no matter how nice the inside is, if you lose the buyer at the curb, that buyer is gone forever. This video removes the emotion from an emotional topic, allowing you to have an open discussion with the seller in order to realize a maximized price.

For Sale By Owners often feel they can easily sell their own home because they don’t realize all that is involved. A real estate attorney clearly promotes REALTORS® as providers of expertise in negotiation, facilitation, and counseling while demonstrating professionalism in their field. This video provides a “soft sell” for you and your services.

More videos are on the way. To build interest, MRIS will update the videos with timely topics and current information. These will be updated automatically; you won’t have to do anything to get the latest videos. The fresh and changing information will give buyers and sellers more reasons to visit YOUR site.

Post these engaging videos on your company or personal Web site.  Instructions to add these videos to your ActiveAgent® or Lingo® are available on the MRIS Knowledgebase, document #25021.

Click here for the MRIS Spotlight Video Series.

Now that your assistant or teammate has a separate token, you might be wondering how you can still have team based printouts?

This video will show you how, in less than 6 minutes. I’ll show you how to create a team, add a team name to your printouts, and how to add a team member who can impersonate you — meaning when they work, your name will show up on the printouts. Perfect for a personal assistant or when another agent is covering for you.

I wanted to give a heads up on feedback that I’ve seen come in from customers right after we rolled out the recent enhancements to Matrix.

Some of the feedback included

• when trying to drop listings from search results
• trying to print listings the print button would not be active
• when printing listings from a reduced set the full set would print instead
• certain buttons on the search results page not activating or deactivating properly

I’ve spoken with the folks over at our help desk, and they’ve found that most often this is a result of pages saved in your browser (in something called the “cache” or the “temporary internet files”) causing problems.

If you find that your search results pages are not acting properly, you can clear out those files and refresh them by clicking the Refresh/Reload button in your browser or pressing Ctrl and F5 at the same time on your keyboard.

Give that a try, and if things still look funny, give the folks over at our help desk a call and they’ll get you straightened out.

In this video you’ll see how to select your favorite photos that you adjusted in the last lesson. These photos are resized and exported to a new folder. By resizing you’ll ensure that your photos will upload quickly and look great.

In the video you’ll see how to resize your photos to a smaller size that will make uploading to Keystone much faster. If you routinely use Picasa to adjust and edit your photos, this technique will work great.

On the other hand, if you don’t use Picasa, or just want to resize a batch of photos you might also be interested in an earlier lesson showing how to resize in a batch using VSO Image Resizer. I should emphasize that you DO NOT need to use both programs. Just use whichever feels more comfortable to you. Personally, I use Picasa for nearly everything so my work stays in one place and I only have to learn one program.

In previous lessons, we’ve created a basic workflow that should get you good-looking and quick to upload photos. Now we’ll turn our attention to a few techniques to take better pictures, and to fix common problems with photos.

Today’s video shows a quick way to correct the color of a listing photo if the colors look a little “off” due to an incorrect white balance setting.

If you want to learn more about white balance, there are a lot of information and tutorials out on the web.

So far, we have installed Picasa, had it find all our existing photos, and seen how to import new photos from our digital camera.

Today, the rubber meets the road. We’ll take a look at how to adjust those photos so that they look great when you upload them.

We’re going to see three particular sections at work: Tuning, Straightening, and Sharpening. Tuning is used to make sure that your pictures are bright enough in Keystone, Straightening allows up to make sure the photos are nice and level. After making those two adjustments, we’ll sharpen them to make sure the detail pops out.

By the way, the techniques demonstrated here will also work great on any other snapshots you take.

Next we’ll look at selecting the right photos for upload.

Yesterday we downloaded and installed Picasa. If your install was successful, Picasa perused your hard drive and found all the pictures that are currently there. (I bet it found a whole bunch of pictures you had no idea were even there!)

Today, we’ll look at how to get the pictures off your camera, or off the CD you got from the photo developing place, and into Picasa.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at how to edit those picture you just imported to make sure they look as good as they can when you upload them.