Spare the swag, spoil the Realtor

The holiday season is undoubtedly a time for corporate gift giving. This is really the only time of year when all consumers get a chance to regain faith in the word free. I have included a illustration, by PurpleElephant.com, of the sort of holiday swag we have come to expect of our corporate friends.

Everyday, at the Zoo, we offer our great features to the public for free. But for the holidays, we are pulling out the festive goodiebag to give you even more. At the RE/MAX 26th Annual Canadian Conference, last week, we gave away 2 Blackberrys 8520 courtesy of our two favorite Rogers Dealers Steve Dunn and Hummaad Ahmed. This was just the beginning.

This year, the Zoocasa team has deiced to spare the swag and give real estate professionals free Ad space! If you have 3 realtor-friends and you get along with your boss, we are offering you not just free Ad space but also a chance to win a Blackberry Curve 8520.

The Nuts & Bolts are Simple:
1. Get three agents to email us, with your name in the subject line, to get free Ad space today.
2. Get your Broker Owner/Broker of Record to put all of the listings in your office on Zoocasa.com to get a free Ad for yourself + a chance to win a Blackberry Curve 8520.

If you are a Broker Owner/Broker of Record, do not fear, you can still get in on the promotion. Simply email us and put your office's listings on Zoocasa.com to receive a free Ad and a chance to win the phone.

Worldwide, gift giving is a way to bring people together and keep us in touch. The Zoocasa Referral Program gives you a reason to get in touch with a friend and offer them something with real value. So go ahead, spread the joy and get a wonderful holiday Ad on the house!

Hope to hear from you soon,

Vanessa

Your First Impression of Zoocasa.com

As we say goodbye to November to ring in the Holiday season, I would like to highlight some of the pivotal firsts that have happened at the Zoo this month. Never before has Street View been available on Zoocasa.com, never before have I been lost while hiking in Banff and never before has our team organized a Referral Promotion Program for real estate professionals. There is just something thrilling about venturing into uncharted territory!

As Zoocasa is working with Real Estate Boards across Canada, to make it even easier to get agent’s and broker’s listings onto our site, we are introducing ourselves to many of you (industry professionals) for the very first time. From our presence at the RE/MAX 26th Annual Canadian Conference in Alberta to our participation with the Mississauga Real Estate Board's 2009 Annual Trade Show, November has seen a decided rise in the number of you getting a first impression of us. With the support of industry leaders, like Elton Ash at RE/MAX of Western Canada and Michael Mills at the Mississauga Real Estate Board, we expect to see you all again next year. But in the meanwhile, we want to remind you that the Zoocasa team is working hard to market your listings. We are here to help and we are always happy to provide you with support when you need it.

According to Ghyslaine Roy, a Realtor in Nova Scotia, first impressions are critical in real estate. To honour this philosophy, Zoocasa wants to ensure that you each have a great first impression of us. We want to do this by thanking you for joining Zoocasa.com! Welcome to all of our new users and for all of our regulars, we thank you for making our site the fastest growing consumer home search site in Canada.

Thanks again,

Vanessa

I Refuse to Entitle this Post "Catch your Wife Cheating with Google Street View on Zoocasa.com"

Hello World,

Monday was a big day at the Zoo. We were celebrating the coming together of two very powerful tools. Our ever-talented developers have worked their magic and found a way to marry Zoocasa's real estate goodness with Google's Street View. After much planning and excitement this union has launched! As of Monday, beyond viewing homes on Zoocasa's interactive map, you can find yourself virtually standing on the street in front of a listing. If you like, you can even have a little stroll down the street and take peek into a potential-neighbour's backyard.

If you are new to Google's Street View, don't fret, it will only take a moment to catchup. Google has amassed millions of images, taken at a street level, for 11 cities across Canada. These cites include, Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Squamish, Whistler, Ottawa, Kitchener and Waterloo. With all of these images, Google's Street View allows you to walk the streets of Calgary from the comfort of your personal computer in Halifax.

On the other side of this union, Zoocasa brings Canadian real estate listings, neighbourhood factors and school information together. We take all of that useful-home-buying stuff then make it easy to sort and fun to filter. With the Street View tab, located on Zoocasa listing detail pages (along the top of the map), home buyers are able to really view a listing and its surrounding's from a 360 perspective.

Those millions of images were collected by Google cameras, mounted in slowly moving vehicles, months before they were released in Street View. As Saul Colt pointed out last night, these images do not create real-time representations of street views. With this in mind, some of my co-workers have noted that one could use Street View to peek into their own home and see what was really going on while they were at that conference in Chicago in June. Instead, Zoocasa has decided to utilize Street View to offer you a fun way to see more of a listing from your own home or office computer. Thankfully, the wise development team has worked hard to make Google's Street View an important part of your home search and not your witch hunt.

Be sure to come search for a few listings on Zoocasa.com today and checkout this new dimension in at-home real estate search technology!

Cheers,

Vanessa

P.S. If you still want more info about Google Street View you might want to watch this cute stop-animation film. It explains the Street View production process with the use of a simple narrative about a single little robot who works tirelessly to collect, assembles and manipulate images: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5bALLcEygc

Real estate search in the palm of your hand

Jodie spends all of here time here at Zoocasa making sure our users are well cared for. So after Saul's last blog post about the release for version 2.0 of the Zoocasa iPhone app she decided that she needed to show everyone how great it was...great thinking Jodie!

Inspiration can come from anywhere. Here is why we have a new Zoocasa iPhone app!

In a recent(ish) survey by Cellular-News.com it was discovered that 75 percent of people feel it is perfectly appropriate to use Internet-enabled smart phones in the bathroom. Taking that to heart, and knowing that there are 30+ million people in Canada who possibly are looking for a home, and with 75% regularly using the internet in the the bathroom we saw this an an opportunity to attract over 20+ million possible new people to Zoocasa by making our Zoocasa iPhone application way better than it was before.

So that is what we did!

The completely new Zoocasa iPhone app (rebuilt from the ground up and available now in the iTunes Store) is fully featured and gives you the power to explore Zoocasa.com like never before, all with one hand.

With this version of the app you can find the closest homes to where you are standing by using the built in iPhone GPS or you can jump from city to city or neighbourhood to neighbourhood.

Dare we say that with this app is one of the best ways to quickly check what new properties are available in your key areas. (I tired very hard not to use the word "areas" in the bathroom analogy section of this post but couldn't avoid it there) By setting up quick search filters you can narrow down your search in seconds and the app will keep your history to you can show others what you found.

Bathroom, Bed or Bus, How you use our app is really up to you. All we ask is that you give it a quick try and please let us know how you like it. We read all the reviews on iTunes and are even planning an amazing contest around them so watch this space for news on that but for now please give our app a whirl and if you happen to be part of the 75% that read the internet in the lavatory, we say thank you and welcome to the club.

To get your own copy of the Zoocasa iPhone app or to update the one you have please go to the iTunes Store and search "Zoocasa" or just follow this link