Jan 2017

Our members have enjoyed looking up full addresses from postcodes without the extra charges many of our competitors levy for this.

Royal Mail have changed their rules and Allies Computing our long-term supplier has slapped a huge cost increase on us (£8k PA to £60k PA).

We've therefore written our own postcode lookup that mainly uses  public domain data and only uses the Royal Mail PAF file for new postcodes. However, we can't give you house names or numbers -

BA11 3EG will give you Vallis Road, Frome and you'll have to type "57" in.

We've swallowed the development costs and a marginally increased anticipated annual cost but we've learnt a lot about public domain property data and you'll see us use more of this in the coming months to give you a competitive advantage.

If you really want the full capability back, you can pay separately for a Royal Mail PAF File licence but we are required to charge £55 per NAMED user per annum. So, if you've got 6 EA subscriptions but you've actually got 10 people when you take into account Saturday staff, viewing staff etc, you'd need to pay 10 X £55 = £550 per annum just to save typing in door numbers that by definition you've had to ask for and we can't see many members doing this  - chat to your account manager team (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) on 01225 303500 option 2 if you want to have this.

You can configure as many utility types as you want to - gas, electric, cable tv, phone, LPG, Oil etc etc.

Set them up in Tools>Configuration>setup prompts - see the Utility Types setup article.

You then need to set up the Utility Companies themselves. These are general contact records - go to tool>Contacts to see the grid and add options - the Contacts article gives you more information.

When you've done all this, you are now ready to start entering Utilities and meter readings onto your property records and/or tenancies.

Utility details are stored on the property records because the the meters are physical devices bolted to the property. The meters and meter readings transcend individual tenancies. So, you can edit utilities in the property form or the tenancy for. We think the only time you'd use the property's utilities page tab is when you have a void. All the main functionality relating to utilities is in the tenancy form.

The utilities page tab in a tenancy is just a mirror of the utilities page tab in a property.

However, a tenancy has record meter readings tab in the tenancy's right-click action menu

That displays the same form that is displayed if you edit a Utility via the property or tenancy's page tab but with one big difference - the Create a letter option which as with all such options in Expert Agent permits a letter and/or email to be sent.

If you change the meter readings, previous meter readings will get logged in the property's events (so therefore show in tenancy events) with the event type set to meter reading. This gives you an ongoing snapshot record.

If you tick the Create a Letter option you will be presented with the usual tenancy letters form. Choose a suitable output - probably an HTML one these days, suitable for emailing. If you need to set it up, you'll find a meter reading section in the merge fields list. Generate your output, click email - make sure you choose the correct recipient - the required utility company - and send it. It will be logged in events in the usual way.

It used to be very simple. We had 2 prices on each property - a numeric price that was hidden from the public but was used for matching and ordering data in lists plus a "price text" field that showed everywhere.

If only Rightmove had adopted this approach, life would be easy.

Sadly, they didn't. They (and therefore all the portals that followed suit) used a numeric field. Once they started working with lots of agents, they realised they needed a prefix and/or a suffix. So, the complicated process that now exists was born.

Here's the Price Change form in Expert Agent - right click in a Property Record and you'll see it

To make it as easy as possible, leave the Prefix dropdown (1) set to Asking Price, put a numeric price in (2) and Expert Agent will complete the Price Text field (3). That's the field that shows on your website, in correspondence, brochures etc. The Lowest Acceptable Offer field (4) is filled in automatically. That's the price that gets used in matching - nobody sees it. So, if in this case your vendor would take £145,000, put that in the Lowest Acceptable Offer and, when you match, it will include applicants with a maximum price or perhaps £150,000 who would otherwise miss out.

Rightmove and other portals will show Price Prefix + ' £'+ numeric price - in this example Offers in the region of £155,000

There's a dropdown list of Price Prefix optiions (shown 1 above). A couple do special things that you need to be aware of.

Here are the options:

 Most just add a prefix in front of the numeric price on Rightmove (and because everyone started off using Rightmove's feed format, the other sites work in the same way) but there are two exceptions:

Price on Application: this is SUPPOSED to remove the numeric price from view on Rightmove and the other portals but you should check. That's particularly easy with the Rightmove live feed - harder with others that still do an overnight feed. We're aware of support tickets where Price on Application has still shown the price. There's nothing we can do here - we still have to send a numeric price so that the portals can stick the property into the right place in a list. We send the prefix and they are supposed to have the logic worked out to hide the numbers. We're worried about this one and that's why we've not fixed a bug that puts the numeric price after the words "Price On Application" in our price text field (3) - just to make you stop and think

Guide Price: If you choose this, the form changes as below. It shows 2 extra fields - upper guide price and lower guide price (5) below. Don't get them the wrong way round!  You'll see that we manually set up the price text field (3) to match in this example - Expert Agent doesn't do this for you.

Did you know that Expert Agent's price change form can automatically generate a price change letter or email? See Event Template Triggers