Nov 20th Update: More customizable and no TourVista account required! Visit tourvista.com/craigslist
TourVista provides a free copy and paste Craigslist template to quickly post your property onto the world’s most popular real estate rental site. Your property will stand out with our 6 professionally designed templates, and you will save a ton of time when creating your post on Craigslist.
Here is a video tutorial for posting your TourVista virtual tour onto Craigslist:
Leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter and over 50 other social networks to help spread the word about your virtual tours. It is super easy to do and a great way to share & promote your real estate listings using the web’s hottest new technologies.
Instructions: Post your virtual tour on Facebook
Facebook will open in a new window and pre-populate a Profile post for your Wall that includes:
Add a personal note at the top if you’d like and click the Share button to update your Wall and your friend’s News Feeds.
Note: you have the option of “Send a Message” that will email your TourVista link to select friends directly from Facebook. We recommend using the Wall method described above because it allows visibility to all of your friends (present and future) and will generate more traffic for you. In this sense, the Wall post is less invasive on your friends and more permanent for your online marketing.
ps – speaking of Facebook, if you haven’t claimed your personal Facebook URL yet (e.g. www.facebook.com/mattcass) do it now – www.facebook.com/username. You can get one for your company page on Facebook but only if you have 25 fans. Of course, we’d love to have you become a fan of TourVista’s Facebook page!
update 12/21/09: link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts directly from your virtual tours!
TourVista creates a dedicated property website and link for each of your virtual tours. For example, www.tourvista.com/784. Link to this dedicated property website in your marketing materials to maximize your property views and increase your online brand.
Property sellers: be sure to include your TourVista link in your local MLS and get maximum exposure for your property. Most MLS’s will include this link in their data feed, meaning that your virtual tour link will show on many major real estate search portals.
Some MLS’s restrict the information that you can show online about your properties. TourVista allows you to customize which information is shown ensuring that you are in compliance with your MLS.
This short video gives a demonstration on how to create a non-branded, MLS-compliant link to your virtual tour website:
UPDATE: 06/29/2010 – we’ve improved the availability options. See this new blog post and short tutorial video.
A subtle but important addition is now showing on the Property Details page for your virtual tours, the availability date field:
Use this field to indicate if your property is not available until a certain calendar date. This is especially useful for rental properties that are currently occupied and becoming available in the near future.
If you have included an availability date for a virtual tour, your dedicated property website on TourVista and your widgets will automatically update to show the available date:
If you are using TourVista’s Community Website Templates, the availability for each of your properties is shown. Either the date will show, or “Available NOW” if you have left the availability date field empty. Here’s an example from a website currently powered by TourVista, www.UWStudentHouses.com:
Another frequently requested improvement to TourVista is to include on each virtual tour links to the other virtual tours in your account. You’ve asked, we have delivered!
If you have setup multiple virtual tours in your TourVista account, they will now show on the left column of your dedicated property website, like so:
This addition is a great way to cross-market your other properties and take advantage of the traffic to each of your virtual tours.
TourVista is pleased to announce this newest update. Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming!
Update March 2011: integrate Google Analytics with your virtual tours!
One of the most requested features from our users has been the ability to see a detail of each virtual tour’s traffic. While your tours have been tracking this information from the day you first created them, the only statistic available to users was the total number of views. Until now…
It is now possible to view information about every time your virtual tour has been viewed. The virtual tour viewing statistics are updated real-time, meaning you can know exactly when your tour is being viewed and which sites are sending that traffic. Use this data to make your marketing efforts more effective:
Note: stats are not counted when you are logged into TourVista and viewing your own tours. It’s easy to filter your viewing statistics by date. Filter by:
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Hope you like. Any suggestions? Let us know.
A few weeks ago I put the final touches on TourVista’s new and improved Free Virtual Tour. I’ve never seen a better or more simple interface for setting up a virtual tour (if you have, let me know!). Here’s a video demo of me creating a virtual tour in 2 minutes:
Give it a shot yourself: www.tourvista.com/free-virtual-tour
The highlights of our new Free Virtual Tour experience:
No account required to get started
Don’t you just hate websites that make you sign up before you can do anything? We do, too. TourVista allows users to setup and preview a free virtual tour before they create an account.
Save your virtual tour if you like it
Create a free account and your tour will be automatically saved and ready for you to make additional edits and start marketing it immediately.
Really cool preview
3 previews of your tour in the making are displayed on the upload page. Notice as you upload photos that the tour previews update showing thumbnails of your uploaded photos!
3 virtual tours in 1
Every virtual tour created on TourVista is actually 3 virtual tours:
The widgets are portable versions of your virtual tour that you can embed elsewhere on the Internet. Just copy/paste a single line of code to show your virtual tour on other websites.
Ready to hit the market
In less than 2 minutes, your virtual tour is ready to be marketed online. Craigslist, large & mini widgets, dedicated property website, and more. Of course, you can add tons of additional information about your property including more photos, descriptions, video, and interactive floor plans.
Anyone who uses the Internet is familiar with the simplicity of Google’s websites and graphic designs. Nothing fancy going on here, just the information you need laid out in an easy to digest format. Very little color, artistry or other graphic elements. Some may even knock Google for this. But in the age of information (and very limited attention spans) a lot of the time, less is truly more.
I put these on our blog as more of a reminder for the TourVista crew, but it also makes an interesting blog post. Here are The Googley Design Principles:
Hello Friends,
I just put the final touches on the new Craigslist Post Generator, making it the best that I’ve seen anywhere on the web. ** There are now has 6 colors to choose from. Take your pick from Blue, Gray, Green, Pink, Tan or Peach!
You can also select which aspects of your contact information to include in your Craigslist posts. This is helpful to protect your privacy (phone #, email, etc) from the spammers that scour Craigslist. Of course, your contact information will still show on your tour page on TourVista, like this one: www.tourvista.com/132
** If you can find an easier, better Craigslist post generator out there, let us know! We’ll be sure to give you some tour credits for your help =)
