Our friends at the Guild of Professional Estate Agents are encouraging their members (many of whom are Expert Agent members) to embrace their TV and video technology. The result is that most have their own .TV channels - for example Newton Fallowell's http://www.newtonfallowell.tv/ site shown below:

A key element of the Guild TV initiative is the ability to send pre-valuation and post-valuation emails to potential vendors.

Ideally you want these to be set up in Expert Agent. This will save copying and pasting email addresses to Outlook and will ensure that the emails you send are recorded and chased up properly.

The following shows you how to achieve this

Setting up your .TV Valuation Emails in Expert Agent 

We'll do this for you if required. The cost is £60+VAT (reflecting an hour and and a half of liaising with The Guild, creating the email and sending test messages to make sure all is well). If you want us to do it, contact Ian or Nikki our Account Managers on 01225 303500 option 2 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Currently, we've got a backlog of design related jobs till April next, though and there are over 300 Guild branches uses Expert Agent so we'd have 10 weeks of work to do on this alone if you all asked us to do it at once.

However, it is really easy to do this yourself and you get full control over format.

You will need:

1. a copy of the email from The Guild. Apparently, they've sent you this already

2. a reasonably competent Expert Agent user

Step 1 - Copy the HTML email

This might be the hardest bit!

In theory, you've been sent this by The Guild. if not, there's a way of getting it. You'll need your Guild Client ID and branch ID - something like 

Client ID: 1234

Branch ID: 59000

We've got a list of these so if you're stuck, log a support ticket in Expert Agent asking for them and we'll reply.

The Guild have given us two website URLs that show the finished emails. 

All you have to do is copy them, paste into the address line in Internet Explorer (important that you use this, not Chrome for this job) and substitute the client ID and Office ID before you press [Enter]

Preval Template

http://joomla.propertylogic.net/createTViEmailer.php?networkID=2&clientID=1234&officeID=59000&emailerTemplate=preval

Post VAL Template

http://joomla.propertylogic.net/createTViEmailer.php?networkID=2&clientID=1234&officeID=59000&emailerTemplate=postval

Your email format should appear. if it doesn't, you've got the wrong IDs.

Once your email opens up in Internet Explorer, right click and choose View Page Source. You'll see the HTML that makes up your email. Select it all (CTRL-A) and Copy it (CTRL-C).

Step 2 - create an email in Expert Agent

 Log in to Expert Agent

1. Go to Tools>Configuration>Outputs

2. Choose Templates

3. Hit the Add option (+)

The form below is displayed:

1. Choose HTML

2. Give your email a suitable name

3. Choose Appointment for the Pre-Valuation email and Property for the post valuation email

4. Choose Next - the edit form appears

5. Choose Edit Content

The editor appears as below

 1. Hit the scary HTML button! You'll see a blank page

2. Paste the HTML from your Guild email - CTRL-V is the Windows shortcut for paste

3. Click the Design button. Your lovely email will appear.

You'll notice that The Guild have put place markers in for where they want you to enter the name, date etc. They've put these in square brackets and if you've set up our letters before, you might be fooled into thinking that these are our codes - they're not! You need to remove them and replace with the proper codes as explained below:

You now need to add the codes to bring in the name, appointment date, time, negotiator etc.

Normally, when setting up an HTML template, you should look at the Merge Field Code section on the right, expand on the appropriate section (appointments and property in this case), find the required field, put the mouse cursor where you want it to appear and click to make the field appear. However, the merge fields are just text in square brackets - when you produce a letter or email, EA has a list of field names, looks for them and does a simple replace. So, you can cheat - just type the field names (with the brackets) into the required place.

The screen grab below shows you what to put in each spot (for the pre-val email)

Of course, there are lots of other fields you could use. You'll certainly want to use these in the post val letter - there's the price text, advice to client (the "we recommend you redecorate... " paragraph). You'll find these in the property codes section of the merge codes - just expand it, find the required one, position the mouse where you want it and click it - it will put the [....] bit in for you.

That's it!

Now the fun bit - test your new email!

Sending your .TV emails

assuming you've set your emails up as above:

To Produce the Pre-Val email

Book yourself a valuation into the diary (direct or via Book a valuation in a property record)

In the appointment form, don't use the new "confirm with email" button - that's a fixed format email. instead, choose Letters/Emails and choose your email. If you can't find it, you set the type wrongly - change the type to all, find it, edit it and change the type to appointment (pre-val) (or property for post val.  If you don't use the diary, you'll need to set your email up as type property and just do Letters/Emails/SMS>Create Letters/Emails/SMS  from a right click in a property record.

To Produce the Post-Val email

you'll have needed to set your email up as type property. Choose Valuations>Confirm Valuation, fill in the fee, feetype, price text, advice to client and anything else you want. Then, just do Letters/Emails/SMS>Create Letters/Emails/SMS  from a right click in a property record.

To Automate the Emails

Once your emails work well, you can set up triggers to make them appear automatically when you save a valuation appointment or confirm a valuation. see Event Template Triggers