Homefiniti & Beyond S2E5 Recap – Homefiniti Hidden Gem Highlights

Homefiniti has a lot of features that make it uniquely awesome for home builders as a web platform but I bet you didn’t know about all of the ones we cover on episode 5 of season two of Homefiniti and Beyond. Jenna joined me to go over some new features, some older features and some just plain cool features of Homefiniti. We broke it into three main categories: content, xml feeds, and analytics. Read on below or watch the episode above to learn about all the hidden gem highlights of Homefiniti.

Content

1. Lots management – You can now add lots to Homefiniti and manage them in a way that is similar to adding locations, plans and specs, allowing for real time updates, and a more user friendly experience for potential homebuyers. Add a Lot size, price, image and even associate the plans that can be built on the Lot. 
2. Lat Long Tool – This tool allows you to get the exact coordinates of your community locations without having to do a search and copy and paste. Copying and pasting from search usually results in lost info and can lead to communities appearing to be in the middle of the ocean. The Lat Long Tool prevents that. And a little tip – if you have three community listings in one location because you’re breaking out townhomes from villas from single family home styles, you can actually move the pin a hair and create separate latitudes and longitudes for each so that the pins don’t overlap on your map. However, don’t move them too far, as the latitude and longitude is how the get directions button finds the directions.
3. Super activating photos – if you load a bunch of photos into a master plan and want them to show up in all associated plans, you can use the super activate button to do so.
4. Photo resizing to reorder – If you have old lady eyes like me, this feature is very helpful. Once you upload the photos to a location, plan, or spec, they show up as thumbnails in a grid format on the back end. You can resize the thumbnails and make them larger to better see what the photo is, or make the thumbnails smaller to allow for quicker and easier drag-and-drop reordering.
5. Plan collections – Do you have your plans grouped into collections with like features? Then this is the tool for you! Now you can create plan collections and share their like features without having to repeatedly add them to each plan in the collection. It’s a big time saver!
6. Price edits from list – This is probably one of the features that garners the most oohs and ahhs when we demonstrate it. It simply allows you to see all available pricing in a list format and edit with ease. No more having to click into a page and edit each one separately. Another big time saver.
7. Socially – This newly launched proprietary app allows you to add your Facebook or Instagram feed to your website. This is a great way to add more content and photography to your site to allow a potential buyer get a fuller picture of your brand, your homes and the lifestyle that comes with them.
8. Join the FB group – Speaking of Facebook, we have a very exclusive group on Facebook for users of Homefiniti. All you need is a Homefiniti account and you can join. It’s a great place to connect with other builders, keep up to date with new Homefiniti features and submit feedback and requests for improvements. 
   1. Conversion API – this is a change we’ve discussed on the last episode of Homefiniti and Beyond, with regards to data privacy. We will be implementing it on Homefiniti but one of the caveats of this is that each site will only be allowed 8 events for Facebook to track. Our Facebook group is a great place to discuss with other builders which events are important for you to track on your website.
9. Content Quality Audits – Want to know where you might have missing information or why your listings aren’t showing up on Zillow? This tool will give you the answer. It grades the data quality of all information required by Zillow and BDX and rates your locations, plans, and specs accordingly.

XML Feeds

1. Facebook Real Estate and Product Catalog – This feed is part of another proprietary product that ONeil offers called Follow. It allows us to create individual listings of each of your locations, plans, and specs, to create dynamic retargeting ads that follow users around Facebook after they’ve visited your site. It’s just like those shoes I saw on Nordstrom that now follow me everywhere on Facebook and that I eventually cave and purchase, only it’s houses!
2. Google – This serves the same function as the real estate catalog for Facebook and allows us to create dynamically retargeted ads on Google’s display network.
3. Zillow / BDX – Homefiniti can generate the xml feeds for Zillow, BDX, and other Internet Listing Services allowing you one stop location, plan, and spec management so that you don’t have to keep track of a bunch of listings in multiple locations.
4. MLS Listing Connect – Zillow recently announced changes related to specs needing to have their MLS information connected so that there weren’t duplicates showing up on their site. We added the fields to specify the MLS and MLS ID for each spec, so that when Zillow pulls the data from Homefiniti’s xml feed, the MLS data is there too.
5. Zillow Open Houses – This is a great feature that lets you add open house data to Homefiniti that will be pulled into the Zillow feed. The trend here is all about limiting the duplication of efforts and data and creating one spot for all of your information to live.
6. Promotions – The final aspect we highlight from the xml feeds is the promotions field which allows you to enter promotions information as well as start and end dates for the promotions you are running. The information is automatically removed from the feed at the end date specified so you can be confident that outdated information isn’t being show to potential home buyers.

Analytics

1. Analytics – Like Google Analytics, only for home builders. Want to see which community is getting the post views? Or compare up to 5 communities to analyze activity and figure out why you’re getting more leads for one community than another? This is a great place to get that info at a glance, right from the Homefiniti dashboard! Combine this info with your content quality audits and you’ll be able to see a clearer picture of website performance.
2. Email report – This comes once a week on Mondays and gives at a glance information about the top performing locations, plans, and specs each week. 
3. Change report subscription – Need to let your marketing team know when prices changes occur or when specs sell out? This report can be emailed to whomever you request and let the recipient know what major changes took place each week so they can be kept up to date.

There you have it! A whole host of features that will save home builders time and help them see a clear picture about how a website is being used, what customers are looking for and simplify your daily tasks as well automate your marketing efforts. Homefiniti does it all! Which tools are your favorite?