Elm Street Technology Poised for Growth, Launches Elevate for Real Estate
GREENSBORO, NC--(Oct 11, 2016) - Two best-in-class acquisitions, including one of the most established real estate marketing brands used by millions of consumers -- Listingbook, has catapulted Elm Street Technology into the real estate industry spotlight. Headed by a team of well-known real estate industry entrepreneurs, Prem Luthra and Randall Kaplan, Elm Street Technology today launches Elevate™, a new Digital Marketing System that uses advanced automation to move Elm Street Technology towards delivering "everything real estate agents and brokers need for new leads and client-for-life retention, all in one place." "Elevate offers brokers and agents a single digital marketing platform with all of the outstanding features that millions of consumers who've used Listingbook love," Luthra, President of Elm Street Technology says. "Elevate includes Listingbook's powerful client servicing platform with best-in-class MLS-powered listing search for home shoppers, access to public records, recent and past sales information, community and school details, taxes, loan calculator, shopping and recreation, and much more," he adds. Luthra notes Elevate also introduces advanced automation that delivers custom Blogs, automated listing postings to social media channels, automated YouTube property tour videos, and beautifully designed, mobile responsive agent and property IDX websites embedded with the best-in-class lead generation technology, all from a single vendor. "With Elevate, Elm Street Technology begins to solve one of the biggest challenges for real estate brokers and agents: The marketing technologies they use to promote listings and their businesses don't talk to each other. Elevate moves brokers and agents onto one digital marketing system, from one vendor, and that means only one phone call for support. Now that's an industry first," Luthra says. Luthra, who founded Elm Street Technology in February with a group of investors, added Randall Kaplan as its Chairman through its first acquisition, Listingbook, the real estate industry's proven lead nurturing and client servicing platform that allows consumers to "search like an agent." In September, Elm Street also acquired RLS2000, a top broker and agent website provider and marketing services firm based in New England. According to Luthra, Elm Street Technology is in the process of rolling up other successful technology and marketing services companies. "We will be able to deliver everything a broker or agent needs from lead generation, to customer for life retention solutions," he says. Prior to pursuing his vision of creating Elm Street Technology, Luthra served as Chief Marketing Officer at Xome. He also was the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer for Real Estate Digital, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of Xome. Luthra was also the Chief Strategy and Sales Officer for LPS Real Estate Group, and Senior Vice President of Consumer Media at Move Inc. Randall Kaplan has quietly established a daunting track record of innovatively creating, rapidly growing and skillfully selling a number of businesses that stretch across multiple industries. He started out running Kay Chemical Company, a leading supplier to McDonald's and other fast food franchises, which was merged into Ecolab, the world's largest institutional chemical company. As an entrepreneur, he started, grew and sold a number of businesses, including Sterling South Bank, now the Bank of North Carolina. He also bought most of Listingbook and became its President in 2006. Elevate is powered by Listingbook and fully integrates all of its features with RLS2000's powerful automated marketing services and best-in-class websites to deliver one source for new leads, client management and client-for-life retention. Product pricing information for agents, teams and brokerage licensing is available by calling Elm Street Technology toll-free at 1-866-353-3456 or visit www.elmstreettechnology.com. About Elm Street TechnologyElm Street Technology offers a portfolio of real estate technology and marketing services companies that provides one vendor, one point of contact, one solution fully fused into one platform to deliver a single source for new leads, client relationship management, and client retention tools for agents, teams and brokerages. Elevate from Elm Street Technologies is the single solution that real estate professionals need to handle the marketing while brokers and agents handle the business, including high end IDX websites, lead generation tools, powerful CRM and incubation tools, mobile app, social media management and blogging, and client retention tools. For more information, call 1-866-353-3456 or visit www.elmstreettechnology.com.

WordPress Blogs Come to Point2 Agent
We are very excited to announce the addition of WordPress blogs to our Point2 Agent Professional and Elite membership levels! This new blog solution is fully integrated with your existing Point2 Agent account and can contribute enormously to the SEO of your website. Here are some WordPress blog highlights: Host your blog on your domain (e.g. www.yourdomainname.com/blogs/customer#) Choose from 8 available themes Track performance with Google Analytics compatibility Enjoy built-in SEO optimization tools Create posts with a straightforward WYSIWYG editor Embed photos and videos to posts without a hassle Auto-post from listings and open house announcements How do you get started? Easy: log in to your Point2 Agent account and go to the Blogs section at the bottom of the page. Then just click the button to create your blog (if you already have a blog, you can still create a new WordPress one). Voila, you're now a real estate blogger! We've created a number of FAQs to help you out along the way. You can access those here. As always, if you have any questions or need help with this new feature, our world-class Customer Care team is just a phone call (or email!) away. They can be reached at 866-977-1777 or via email at customercare[at]point2.com. Need blog inspiration? Check out 7 Blogging Tips for Real Estate Agents and 5 Blog Post Ideas for Real Estate to kick start your creative process. Happy blogging! Have any questions about your new blog capabilities? Let us know in the comments below! To view the original post, visit the Point2Agent blog.

IDX Broker Announces Acquisition of Agent Evolution
EUGENE, OR, September 9, 2014 -- IDX, LLC (IDX Broker) today announced that it has acquired Agent Evolution, LLC, one of the leading WordPress theme developers for the real estate industry. Adding Agent Evolution to the IDX suite of services will create a larger opportunity for current IDX users to leverage their existing IDX websites and drive more transactions. "With over 40% of all current IDX Broker users also using WordPress in one way or another for their web marketing, the acquisition of Agent Evolution was a natural extension of our offerings as we continue to grow our core data business", says Chad Barczak, CEO at IDX. "Over the past few years we have seen a significant increase in the popularity of Agent Evolution's WordPress themes, specifically built on the IDX Broker Platinum platform." IDX Broker currently has over 42,000 active real estate agents using its IDX Broker and IDX Broker Platinum web based software, making it the largest privately held IDX specific SaaS provider in the real estate market. The combined company will allow IDX to offer its 650+ web developer partners even more flexibility when working with IDX and WordPress together. One major advantage to IDX's Web Development partners will be the introduction of a brand new WordPress Framework developed by Agent Evolution, with a heavy emphasis on mobile from the ground up. "The new Equity WordPress framework from Agent Evolution is going to change how real estate websites are built on WordPress." Says Chad Johnson, COO at Agent Evolution. "The industry specific features and IDX Broker optimization in Equity will produce better websites in less time." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Agent Evolution will continue to operate under the Agent Evolution brand along with the continuation of its signature WordPress themes. "Agent Evolution themes are easy to support, and our shared clients love them. This investment will set a new standard of value for the Realtor wanting to combine an IDX feed with a premium WordPress child theme." Says Luke Walsh, General Manager at IDX. About IDX, LLC Based in Eugene, Ore., IDX, LLC is nationally known as a leading provider of real estate search applications. IDX, LLC actively manages more than $1 trillion worth of active listing data from more than 600 individual Multiple Listings Services (MLS). IDX, LLC provides integrated IDX software, customizable listing search utilities and lead management tools for real estate based websites (IDX Broker). In addition to the primary web-based software, IDX also provides an integrated WordPress widget for use in WordPress based blogs and websites (IDX Broker Wordpress Plugin), as well as HTML Mobile Optimized Pages for all mobile devices. The entire suite of real estate software available from IDX is easy to manage and maintain and helps real estate professionals display real estate data from their Multiple Listing Service (MLS) regardless of their technical ability. For more information on all the services provided by IDX, LLC, please visit www.idxbroker.com. About Agent Evolution, LLC Agent Evolution, a division of IDX, LLC, is recognized as a leading WordPress theme developer. Focusing exclusively on the needs of the real estate professionals, Agent Evolution themes are used on thousands of websites worldwide. In addition to themes, Agent Evolution produces plugins that add real estate specific functionality to WordPress websites. For more information on all the services provided by Agent Evolution, please visit www.AgentEvolution.com.

Where Do I Start? A Facebook Page or Blog?
Guest Contributor Jimmy Mackin says: Where Do I Start? Many Realtors® who are new to Blogging and Social Media do not know where to begin. A common mistake many Realtors® make is they try to do everything at once. I want to share with you the strategy we used to build our brand. July 2nd, 2010 – we launched our Facebook Page. Over the next 6 month, we focused all of our attention on connecting and engaging with our community. As a result of our efforts, we were able to consistently grow our Facebook Page month after month. When we launched our blog (Jan 12, 2011), we immediately started seeing traffic flowing in from our Facebook Page. In our first 108 days, we have driven in over 16,000 visits and 35,642 pageviews. Our readership is growing by approx 30% per month. The important takeaway here is that only 8.84% of our traffic is coming from the Search Engines. We often think that the only way to drive in traffic is to rank well for relevant keyword phrases. We have found that there is an alternative marketing strategy that you can use that may help you get better results. Pre-Social Media Realtors® would launch their blog, hope that Google would crawl their site, index their webpages, and "hopefully" rank their pages for highly relevant keyword phrases. This is a push-and-pray marketing approach – push out your content and pray that Google ranks your pages well. The challenge many of us face with this approach is that we cannot control how well we rank for specific keyword phrases. We can optimize our sites until we are blue in the face. The fact remains that ranking well for highly competitive keyword phrases is very difficult. Post Social Media Facebook allows us to take more of a proactive approach to building a following. There are two very important distinction worth making Establishing yourself as a resource for valuable information is a great way to attract followers. This doesn't require you to create all of the content; you simply need to be a good curator. A perfect example of this is The Corcoran Group. People are the engine that drives growth – not bots. Great online marketers like Jonathan Rivera and Chris Smith used a similar strategy to drive traffic to their blog...well before we launched our blog. If you are struggling to grow your readership on your existing blog or you have started blogging at all, I would consider starting a Facebook page first... It worked for us. Are you struggling to get traffic to your blog? Please share with us. What do you blog about? Join in on the discussion...