Best Image Marketing (www.bestimage.com) has just released Homecaster 2.0 – a free upgrade for all existing NUMBER1EXPERTS. It lets clients organize and manage their members, their listings and their library of messages, as well as send listings and messages to groups of buyers they’ve created.

The opportunity Homecaster 2.0 affords to enable Realtors to send specific groups of listings to selected groups of buyers – without ever leaving their own Web site – is something most agents and brokers thought would remain on their wish lists for many years. The system even lets you send a saved message from your Personal Message Library to all buyers or to selected buyers. The personal message library is a tool the user can create, and add to, over time.

Further, the real estate professional using Homecaster 2.0 is able to manually choose which listings on the site should be considered new listings at any time. This way, the Realtor can decide which listings are fresh enough to send to any group of buyers – or to an individual buyer.

Realtors who have a NUMBER1EXPERT site are now able to add and delete buyer names and email addresses within their Homecaster database, organize their “members” into groups, keep detailed data on each member, and see all prior emails that have been sent to a particular member.

Every member in the Homecaster database should be considered an Internet lead. Too often, these are the kinds of leads that many Realtors – even those with good Web sites – fail to convert into clients and customers, because agents usually lack the ability to send messages and listings to these people efficiently.

The launch of Homecaster 2.0 coincides closely with Best Image’s launch three months ago of its newest generation of Web sites, Version 3.0 (www.diamond.bestimage.com). The first wave of Version 3 sites are online now, and one highlight is that every page on the site has an interactive email form, and every form filled out by a visitor to the site is automatically submitted to the Homecaster database and stored as a new lead that can then be managed by the Realtor.

In developing Homecaster 2.0, Best Image has tried to make its new lead management system very user-friendly, even for agents who aren’t technologically oriented. Instructions for using the improved program are built right into it.

Published: December 4, 2001

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