All About the
Real Estate Industry on the Internet
Communicating on the Web
If you are new to the web, or have not really explored all the possibilities, there are some fantastic features that you must learn. E-mail has already eclipsed the phone as a business communication medium. The ability to send any kind of file (letters, reports, spread sheets, presentations, etc.) by attaching to e-mails will eliminate the fax. The transmission of high quality pictures, drawings and even video is possible today. And even an ability to "chat" world-wide via instant messaging. All of this at no expense other than that of having a computer and Internet access.
For the real estate professional it means that you can instantly send your customer any kind of information. Whether he is down the street, across town, in another state or on another continent this information is transmitted in seconds. It also means that we have to adjust to a wholly different set of communication time frames. We will no longer have the luxury of a time cushion as snail mail is being delivered several days later. In one day we can send and receive information responding back and forth multiple times within hours. It will drive us crazy until we develop a protocol for dealing with it. This article will be read by people around the country within hours of my writing it.
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SENDING FILES (MSWord, Word Perfect, Publisher files )
You can basically send any file you create in an application on your computer to other people on the net. This is done as an attachment to your E-Mail. Your E-Mail program generally has a tab that says "attach". When you have written a note to someone and want to attach a file you just click on the attach tab. A separate menu will come up as if you were going to open a file. Go to the file location in that menu and click on the file you wish to attach. The program will upload the file and send it with the E-Mail. Be sure that the receiving party has an application, either the same as yours or similar, that will open the file. You can have photos scanned at a local copy shop and send them in the same way. When you have this scanning done ask that it be saved to a jpg or jpeg file. Be sure to bring a floppy disk with you to the copy shop as they will need this to save the file on. Tell them you want a medium quality file of less than 50,000 bytes. This level of quality gives very good results over the net.
FORMATTED E-MAIL
Service providers like AOL have e-mail programs that provide an ability to "format" the text and layout of an e-mail letter. When corresponding with people who are not on AOL keep in mind that they may not have an E-Mail program that can handle this formatting. This can make your E-Mail hard to read.
SENDING PHOTOGRAPHS
You can attach photo files to your E-Mails. Want to send a customer a photo of a house? Scan the photo in a jpeg file format and attach it to your e-mail. Try to keep the resolution down to 200 DPI or 300 DPI so that the file is not too large. For less than $150 you can buy a good flatbed scanner that will serve your needs.
USE A SCANNER TO SCAN AND FAX DOCUMENTS
With a scanner you can scan documents into your computer and fax them to your clients. You can also save them as HTML documents and send the file attached to your e-mail. Your customer can read these files with their browser.