If you are new to Expert Agent, this chapter will get you up to speed as quickly as possible.

Why Move to Expert Agent?

Whether you are a new business or an established business, Expert Agent will help you to improve your efficiency, presentation and compliance.

Estate Agents operate in an increasingly challenging environment where online and virtual "assisted private sales services" are giving the impression to consumers that they offer a route to cheap home moving fees. These businesses understand social media and use technology to interact with their clients in new and interesting ways. Expert Agent gives every estate agent access to tools that redress the balance.

Letting you work from anywhere, allowing clients to log into their own areas to monitor and review progress, making your website a fully integrated interactive part of your offering rather than just a few random pages, making the most of all enquiries even when you are closed... these are all things that Expert Agent does so well. 

Expert Agent is one system for sales, lettings and hard-hitting lettings financial management. Bosses enjoy the lowest cost of ownership and the highest rate of return. Negotiators and Administrators enjoy our unrivalled feature set, configurability and workflow that's been designed by estate agents not geeks

Everyone can get to do free, unlimited amounts of training and we're constantly praised for the quality and speed of our support.

However, there's no getting away from the fact that there's a lot of work inherent in implementing a new software system - particularly into an existing business. The best tip we can give you is to talk to us at all stages, take advantage of all the training and hand holding that is on offer and test everything with dummy end-to-end transactions before you go live!

How do we start?

1: Watch the 11-minute quick start video below:

2: Get some Initial Free Training - see the Training chapter

3: Get your own account configured for the way you work - see Personalising your EA - set up dashboards, grids, toolbars and Quicklinks

4: Make sure the boss has got everything configured properly - see the Configuration chapter

When creating a brochure through Expert Agent, you may find that the price still has the code displaying as {prop_price_text}. This isn't because you have done anything wrong, this is just due to the nature of the merge code being used. The price text code is a dynamic code, meaning that it will pull through new information (such as a price change) automatically, without you having to update it. Due to this, when opening up a brochure in a Word document, the price text code will display the code instead of the actual price. What you will find is that when you save the brochure back into expert agent and the system creates a PDF document of this file, the price will display accordingly.

Below is displaying how the word document will look. 

When the Word document has been uploaded into the system then the PDF will be automatically created and look like this: 

If your brochure has gone through this process, the price should update accordingly, however, if there is a problem with the price producing properly this may be down to two key factors: 

1. The current brochure has deleted the price text merge code (it may have been replaced with the price manually in Word, please see Why is my brochure not uploading?).

2. The brochure has not uploaded properly. To double check this, please click here.

Ravensworth is a third party company that can design and create property particulars such as brochures and window cards. Once the documents are created for you, you can integrate them into expert agent and receive high quality prints of the brochures from Ravensworth.

Firstly you will need to make contact with Ravensworth to let them know what you have in mind for your brochure and/or window cards from Ravensworth (please click here for their details). Please bare in mind however, if you are not sure what you want before making contact, they will be able to send you some examples. Once you have made this contact they will send you the word documents of the brochure templates for you to use in expert agent.

When the template document is received, you will need to apply the relevant merge codes into the template to replace the existing ones. 

The document may be sent to you looking similar to the image below: 

From here, you will simply need to enter in the relevant codes by opening up the merge code table in expert agent. To access this, go to the template grid in expert agent, click 'edit' on any word document and select the tab for 'open merge code table' 

You will need to update the codes according to the layout of the template and insert image codes (as pictured) as well as any text codes. Once you have inserted the relevant codes, it should look a bit more like this: 

Now that the codes have been updated, you will need to upload this word document into expert agent as a new template (once the file is saved in your documents/desktop, in expert agent, go to tools > configuration > templates > add new template and then upload the saved word document).

Now this is saved as a template in Expert Agent, you can apply it to any property by following the usual process for creating a brochure. However, you will have the option to send the completed PDF to ravensworth for them to print.

In order to do this, go into the brochures tab in the property that you would like the brochures for, select Brochure export and then select 'send to Ravensworth'

Once you click on this option, you will then see a pop up asking you which brochure you would like to upload (website or office), your Ravensworth Customer Code, the quantity of which you would like to be printed and brochure format. 

Click on 'send' when the details have been entered and this will send the order directly to Ravensworth.