Bulletins – Hawaii Information Service

In the past week, we’ve pushed over 30 bug fixes and enhancements to REsearch 5.0, including improvements to maps, prospects, and sending email. This comes on the heels of earlier updates to Realtor lists, contacts, and fractional and timeshare Days On Market calculations.

We’d again like to thank some of the member agents whose feedback and suggestions went into the updates in this latest round, including Sean Ahearn, Saul Brecher, Gary Davis, Virginia Dixon, Mealoha Kraus, Ron Margolis, Dennis Nakahara, Paul Pacuilla, Trevella Williams, and Shannon and Eddie Underwood.

But I’m especially excited to let you know about three new features that our hardworking development team has delivered: live counts, customer formats from the action menu, and additional price information on the REsearch dashboard. These are improvements that should help you save valuable time as you work.

1. Introducing ‘Live Counts’

Previously, if you wanted to narrow your searches down and limit the matches displayed or used in formats or other functions, you would click the ‘Count’ button. This would essentially run your search, but only to display the number of listings that would be returned, as a way to test your search settings before clicking the ‘Search’ button.

With the new ‘Live Counts’ feature, the number of matching listings will be calculated on the fly, and displayed right on the search page as you add, remove, or change your criteria.

With ‘Live Counts,’ we hope to save you a few extra mouse clicks, and thus save you a little more time as you use REsearch.

How To Enable ‘Live Counts’

As this will be a change in REsearch behavior, you will have to set your account to use ‘Live Counts’ instead of the default. To do so, click ‘Settings’ from the menu in the top right corner of REsearch.

Then, select ‘Count’ from the list of REsearch settings displayed on the left side of the ‘Settings’ screen.

Finally, select ‘Yes, I want REsearch to automatically count records as I enter or change search parameters.’ Then click ‘OK.’ You should then see ‘Live Counts’ displayed in the lower left of your search screen that update as you add, remove, or change criteria.

As this is a new feature, we’d appreciate your feedback on how well it’s working, or if you encounter any unexpected behavior. In the unlikely event that using ‘Live Counts’ slows the overall performance of REsearch, you can follow the steps above to switch back to the original configuration.

2. Quick Customer Formats

Many of you have asked for the ability to convert your search results into Customer Format without having to run an entirely new search. Now, you can do this right in the Action Menu.

Selecting ‘Customer Format’ will present the items on screen (the results page, checked items, or unchecked items) into Customer Format, ready to provide to your client.

3. Clearer Price Updates

Finally, you may have already noticed a small visual update to the REsearch dashboard.

We’ve added the sold price next to the status of ‘Sold’ listings under ‘Latest Listing Activity.’ We are also now displaying the amount of price changes along with a simple visual cue so that you can see at a glance whether the numbers are rising or falling.

Mahalo!

Although these are minor interface changes, some elements were quite a challenge on the back end, and another notable accomplishment of our programming team. Following other recent improvements to prospect email notifications and login session management, I hope this enhancement further demonstrates our commitment to improve REsearch and ensure it remains the best tool to help you grow your business.

If something isn’t working for you or if you see a way that REsearch can be improved, please get in touch. Call (808) 599-4224 and select option one, or email support@hawaiiinformation.com.

As always, if you do encounter any problems while using REsearch, try clearing your cache to make sure you’re seeing and using the latest code. Instructions on how to do this can be found here.Please say tuned for more improvements, and please don’t hesitate to share your own ideas and suggestions on ways to make REsearch better.

Bob Schoenthal
Product Manager