PocketListings.net BLOG

Our co-founder and service featured in Top Agent Magazine’s Nationwide, Los Angeles, New York City, and Ventura/Santa Barbara editions.

Closer Connections
A new idea in real estate is eliminating barriers and erasing geographic lines

Top Agent Magazine Feature Article

We’re pleased to announce the rollout this past weekend of PocketListings.net version 2.0!

It is jam-packed with new features to help you, the agent, do more deals, and give you, the client, more options when selling and searching for real estate. We did a fabulous tutorial on all of the great new features and how they work, so please take five minutes of your day and check it out.

Some major new features we’d like to highlight:

Real Estate Match™: As buyers and sellers post to our site, we do a little Match.com magic to match criteria and facilitate a potential transaction. Agents can post any property they have that is not listed on MLS, and ALL of their buyers looking for homes. If no matches are found immediately, when some do show up, emails will be sent. It’s online dating for real estate.

Privacy Options On Posts: Pocket listings are tricky in that some clients want the most exposure possible, while others want little to none, but they still want their property sold. When an agent posts a pocket listing on our site it is immediately searchable, but agent controls what information about the property to share, and with whom.

Principals Only: Inspired by our friends in commercial real estate, we give you the option to request anybody that contact you act as a Principal.

Saved Searches For Members: Do a search, save it. Refer to it later. Get emailed when posts fitting that criteria show up on our site. Simplifying your success.

Sharing with Social Networking: Whether you are the person that posted, or you’re someone browsing our site and you come across an opportunity that you absolutely must share, we make it easy. Using third party applications you can “Like” or “Send” any posts via Facebook, and share or repost via Twitter, LinkedIn, email, Digg, Stumbleupon, and so much more. Do a post, spread the word, and tell those in your circle to spread the word too.

Email Notifications of New Matches: Whether you save a search, or posted to our site and we’re looking for matches for you, we’ll notify you via email when something shows up on our site that might be a match.

How We Use Twitter To Get Posts More Exposure And Deliver Results In Real Time: It’s pretty simple really. Every post that hits our site is fed to our Twitter profile. It becomes searchable and we create hashtags for the city (#city) and a unique hashtag for our site that allows Twitter followers to see results only in their city of interest (#plcity). The more followers we get (and we’re getting a lot), the more exposure you get to your post (respecting your privacy options).

Those are just a couple of the big new features we released with this version. We actually have several more features lined up that we’re hoping to release as soon as possible.

We’ve already been written up in Top Agent Magazine, and press inquiries are coming in. The bottom line is that there is more real estate opportunity out there than what is on MLS, and clients deserve an alternative. Please help us help you by spreading the word and using our site today!

-PocketListings.net Tutorial
-PocketListings.net
-Top Agent Magazine

Dear Members,

Looking for this?

That was our beta version. We launched it. We got tons of traffic. Agents closed deals because of it. We learned from it. We killed it.

PocketListings.net Version 2.0 is live! We changed at least 100 things since the beta version and we have made a completely overhauled service available to you. The general concept is the same, but now we have tons of new features including Real Estate Match™, Saved Search, a Principals Only feature, Social Networking and Sharing options, Increased Privacy Options, and so much more, all available to help you close more transactions and get more and more happy clients!

Our beta version was a result of hundreds of emails I see weekly from one agent to another both marketing pocket listings, and looking for them for their buyers (buyer need), so we tweaked what we had, and the result is amazing.

Version 2.0 is a 100% feedback driven, and we can’t thank you enough for the valuable insight you have provided.

The new homepage looks like this…

As a current member, you might be wondering what the heck happened to your old account. This is definitely a valid concern, but something you absolutely don’t need to worry about. We have transferred all of the previous accounts over to the new version successfully, your username and password are the same, and and ALL of your posts (including photos) are still live on the new site.

This new version automatically expires posts after 30 days and pulls them off the site, but any posts transferred over will remain live for 60 days from 10/1/2011 (who luvs ya). After 60 days your post will simply Unpublish, but it’s easy to republish it so it remains visible on searches and matches.

To learn all about the new version in detail or if you ever have any questions, please refer to this awesome Tutorial we just threw together. For future reference you can always find it at http://blog.pocketlistings.net/tutorial. We will continue to update it as things change, so don’t hesitate to refer to it later.

We hope you like the new site, and we hope you tell your colleagues. It took us a REALLY long time to release this new version, but we didn’t want to release something with which we weren’t 100% satisfied. We are truly taking a leap forward in the real estate listing industry and we hope you stay with us, as we already have a laundry list of future services to add to help you do more deals even further into the future.

List and search is old school. List, Match, Search, Share, Tweet, Expire, Like, and Link are new school. We are the Dean.

As an active real estate agent in the city of San Francisco, I can categorically state we are filling a void in our marketplace.

We value your business and are striving to make our service something you and your clients come to know and trust, and we hope that you and your clients realize there is now an alternative (not competitor) to MLS. Use your Multiple Listing Service, and use us too. Your clients deserve options, as do you.

If you have any questions about the new site, please refer to our Tutorial from here on out.

As always, may your pocket listings sell quickly, and your buyers find what they need.

Sincerely,

Alexander Clark
Co-Founder

There is opportunity knocking in the form of a beautiful Victorian building in Hayes Valley, San Francisco…a stone’s throw from one particular coffee kiosk (Blue Bottle Coffee) that arguably revolutionized coffee in North America forever (If you’re really up on your history it was actually started on the other side of the Bay, but that’s trivial.)

We’ll spare you an entire run down of just how cool this building is, and instead send you directly to the property detail page.

There is another unit with this building, and we’re not sure if/when that will come up for sale separately, but we do know (without a shadow of a doubt) the entire building could be had.

-Hayes Valley Pocket Listing, $1,399,000 [PocketListings.net]

Have a look at our press page to see past articles about PocketListings.net and pocket listing, in general (New York Times article).