Everything You Wanted to Know About Prospecting/Auto Emails but Were Afraid to Ask: Ask Technical Terry

Everything You Wanted to Know About Prospecting/Auto Emails but Were Afraid to Ask: Ask Technical Terry

by | Nov 21, 2017

Ask Technical Terry is a series RMLS™ aims to offer once a month. RMLS™ subscribers will drive the content—submit any question about RMLS™ to Technical Terry in the comments or by emailing communications@rmls.com. Don’t be shy—we won’t identify you by name.

Dear TT-

I’m hoping you can clear up some questions I have about Prospecting/Auto Email. First, I have a hard time understanding the difference between the two terms. Can you help with that? It seems like they’re used interchangeably and they can’t both mean the same thing! (Can they?) Second, I suspect I’m not setting up my clients correctly because they never seem to get the first set of listings that match the criteria I’ve set up for them. What should I do?

Struggling in Stayton

Dear SS-

I’m happy to help! And I hear you about those two terms being used interchangeably. Let’s start with the term “prospecting.” Prospecting is simply a set of search criteria you’ve saved in RMLSweb in the Prospecting Profile module. In most cases you will name the saved criteria something related to a specific client.

Remember to NOT use your client’s full name here, because if you allow Reverse Prospecting (I know, another confusing term) and your client’s search criteria matches the descriptive elements of a listing being reversed prospected, the subscriber running the reverse prospecting search would be able to see your client’s entire name! Just their name, nothing else, but still probably not a good idea!

Are we good here with that the term “prospecting” means in RMLSweb? Let’s move on.

Now how do I use this set of saved search criteria going forward? In most cases you will associate this Prospecting Profile with a contact in your saved contacts on RMLSweb, and then set up Auto Email, the process whereby RMLSweb searches and automatically sends out listing matches to your client. (Note that you can associate up to five unique contacts per Prospecting Profile!) You could add the client info in Contact Manager (Toolkit->Contact Manager) before or after creating the Prospecting profile—whichever works for you.

Once you’ve chosen a saved contact or created a new contact to add to the Prospecting Profile you can then set up the Auto Email variables. You have a lot of choices here: frequency of delivery, type of client report, whether to CC yourself, customization of the subject line, and so on.

Here’s a key piece of information for you, SS: only new matches will be sent to your client(s) on the day(s) chosen in the Auto Email setup. The initial matches must be selected manually and sent in a separate email message!

Once you have this process set up and running automatically, RMLSweb will alert you of new matches by illuminating the New Prospect Matches button in the upper left corner of the RMLSweb desktop page. You may also be receiving the emails if you chose to CC yourself when setting up the Auto Email. If you did not choose to be copied on the emails you can still view the email history by navigating to Prospecting Profiles, finding the contact name, and clicking “History” in the contact record.

I sure hope this info helps. Remember that we have a variety of documents in RMLSweb covering all of this. The following are particularly excellent resources for your question:

Document 1737: How to Use the Auto Email Feature
Document 1772: Reverse Prospecting
Put RMLSweb to Work for You

Technical Terry

Everything You Wanted to Know About Prospecting/Auto Emails but Were Afraid to Ask: Ask Technical Terry

Home Energy Score Button Coming in Early December (Updated December 6)

by | Nov 10, 2017

RMLSweb Home Energy Score Button

REALTORS® working in the City of Portland should be aware that as of January 1, 2018, all homes listed for sale in the City of Portland will require a home energy score report to be obtained and made accessible to any potential homebuyer.

RMLS™ has been working with Earth Advantage® to facilitate populating this important information to listings on RMLSweb. On December 6th, RMLS™ will release a “Load from Green Building Registry” button in the Green/Energy Supplement on RMLSweb. All homes with a listing address in the City of Portland will have this supplement automatically included in Listing Load. While we are introducing the ability to populate this information in a listing, the fields will remain unrequired.

When this button is selected, the listing address will be sent to the Green Building Registry database. If an address match occurs and the address has a home energy report on file, the score and report URL will autopopulate into the Green/Energy Supplement form. In addition, the home energy report and report URL will be added to the end of the Public Remarks field in data feeds, including IDX sites that get listing information from RMLS™.

Completed Home Energy Score Information on RMLSweb

RMLS™ is aware that some properties may have Portland addresses that do not fall within the jurisdiction of the City of Portland. The Administrative Rules of the Residential Energy Performance Rating and Disclosures, Part 3.3.1, provide guidelines to determine if a property must have a Home Energy Score. If a property has received a Home Energy Score but the “Load from Green Building Registry” button did not find a match, contact RMLS™ so we can make improvements to this process. This situation could occur if the address entered in Listing Load does not match the address recorded in the Green Building Registry. REALTORS® are encouraged to use PortlandMaps as a reference to find the correct listing address.

Read more about the City of Portland Home Energy Score program.

UPDATE (December 6, 2017):

The Home Energy Score button is now live on RMLSweb. Earth Advantage has produced a short demonstration of how the feature works, below. RMLS™ will produce a similar tutorial in the coming weeks.