VivaReal Corporate Blog

Over the last three weeks I have been traveling between our office in Bogota and our new office in Sao Paulo. September was a good month. Here are a few highlights:

• The development team rolled out some really awesome new features (I’ll cover that below)
• VivaReal participated in SISP (Latin America’s largest real estate trade show).
• I made my first presentation in Portuguese (with help from Diego) to a group of 200 real estate agents and brokers at Brazil’s largest event focused on training real estate agents and brokers about new trends in the market, Corretor Show. I would compare it to Real Estate Connect, put on by Brad Inman in the United States. That is where part of the inspiration came from for the event.
• We redesigned this blog as well as our blog in Spanish and Portuguese.

New developments

The new developments mainly affected our sites in Brazil and Colombia. Some of the notable changes include:

• Map integration for searching zones and neighborhoods. This feature was something that our community of users told us they wanted. Over the last few months we have had success with UserVoice, a tool that gives our site visitors a voice to communicate what they want on VivaReal. As a result of a strong consensus that we should have better GEO information with regards to the neighborhoods and the location of the property, we integrated Google maps along with street view. Street view is available in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. The only challenge with street view is that there is not a lot of exclusivity in the market so most real estate companies don’t publish the exact address. In some cities like Curitiba, there is more exclusivity, but most of Brazil is still battling with this challenge.
  
• Email alerts - Home buyers can now specify what they are looking for by selecting the location, price range, type of property, etc and VivaReal sends email updates of properties that match the specified criteria. Instead of searching for real estate, the real estate finds you

• Enhanced speed – Our team of Ninja programmers have been working hard to make VivaReal even faster. We have shaved off significant response time to make it easier for property hunters to find what they are looking for.

SISP – Salao Imobiliaria Sao Paulo (Sao Paul Real Estate Trade Show) was a total success. It was a great opportunity to speak with new and existing clients. Overall, people were very receptive to the site, home searchers and advertisers alike.

At Corretor Show, Diego and I were able to speak with many agents about their online marketing efforts. I gave a 10 minute introduction in Portuguese. The crowd was very supportive. They actually gave me a nice round of applause even before I spoke! That has never happened to me before. I think they were just happy to see an American making attempts at speaking Portuguese. We plan on participating in Corretor Show in different cities and we support the idea of teaching the market about online trends as well as opening a dialogue with our clients at these types of events. We have a lot to learn from their experience as well. Congrats to Daniel Rosenthal for pulling off this event. I remember last year at SISP talking to him about this idea and he did an excellent job of putting it together.

We hope you enjoy the new look and feel of our company blog. Carlos Carrillo is keeping our new look fresh and clean.