The Qube Exchange

Do you have listings that feed into Google Base? Well here’s your chance to claim them with only three simple steps!

Step One: Log in!

Step Two: Search for your listings here using the criteria box in the left hand side bar

Step Three: Click “Claim your listing”

That’s it! It really is that simple. So what happens after you claim your listings?

We add your profile pic, a small blurb about your expertise and a link to your profile for the world to see!

Check out a listing Debbie Garrigan claimed!

We also feed the listings you claim right into your profile!

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Featured Blog

Phoenix Real Estate | Phoenix Homes for Sale | All Phoenix Real Estate

Written by: Jonathan Dalton

Previous Entries
Friday Afternoon Theme Music - August 15
Two Quick Links …
Getting a Seller to Contribute to Buyer Closing Costs
Canadian Buyers: Sitting on the Fence is Getting More Expensive

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Featured Agent

Mitchell Hall - New York, NY

Expertise
A native New Yorker, I gained appreciation and knowledge of Manhattan’s different neighborhoods, buildings, architecture, culture and diversity at an early age. My knowledge of each neighborhood’s unique personality is what makes me adept at matching people with properties.

Learn more about Mitchell:

* Check out his profile
* See Mitchell in the local New York PropertyLife network

Do you know Mitchell? Log in and give him a recommendation for consumers to ohh and ahh over!

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Connect and converse with active buyers and sellers!

Check out some recent conversations taking place on Propertyqube. More and more active buyers and sellers are joining Propertyqube every week. Now’s your chance to stand out from the crowd by giving advice!

Question: When buying a new home, what upgrades should I go for? What holds the most value?

Answered by Steve Belt and Mitchell Hall

First Answer: View, square footage, room count, outdoor space and a fireplace add value. High floor without a view doesn’t add value. Appliances can be replaced.

Many of the luxury new construction projects in Manhattan are selling a lifestyle. Unique designs and high end finishes is what distinguishes one building from another in their marketing. [read more]

Question: I made an offer on a house lower than what they were asking my agent said there was no counter offer but i know there was

Answered by Steve Belt and Gene Dexter

First Answer: I would call your agent and tell him/her what you found out. Perhaps the fax was lost, or didn’t make it through. Request your agent to call the listing agent and have the counter offer refaxed over so you can see it. Should be a simple thing if everyone is on the up and up. [read more]

Check out some of the recent conversations going on in the Propertyqube community! Thanks to all those who have participated and offered such great advice!

Question: When purchasing land (rural) with the intent of building a home, what do I look for and what steps do I follow?

Answered by Steve Belt and Mke Lefebvre
Latest Answer: A priority needs to be your utilities. Power, water, sewer all must be well determined. Also, any building restrictions, which are unlikely in a rural setting, but if there are any, they may be deal breakers. [read more]

Question: If I put my home on short sale, and it go’s on sale for 6 months and doesn’t sell, can I change my mind and keep it?

Answered by Michael Wolff:
If you are still the owner, you can cancel the listing with your Agent and keep the property. If you are behind on payments or cannot afford payments you may want to consider a loan Modification to change the terms. [read more]

Question: How do I get rid of my house ASAP?

Answered by Gene Dexter, Bob and Lisa Hammerstein, Chris & Maria Jeantet and Michael Ganda
Latest Answer: As everyone says, unfortunately you have to decide what you can afford to let the house go for, as you may take a loss, and price it accordingly. Be honest with your agent… which you must have. Family and friends will try to talk you into selling it yourself, but the average time on the market is much higher for a non-represented home. [read more]

I am writing this blog post today because I continually get the question “What makes Propertyqube so different from others?” I love this question because I can talk about it forever.

So what makes us different? Well for one, there are only four members of the Propertyqube team(that’s a shock to most)! We’re all in this for the dream of truly providing a great experience for consumers while helping professionals reach them in a quality way. No, we were not agents in our past life (which we view as an advantage to building what we are building). We are simply four individuals who want to contribute to society in a big way while having lots of fun at the same time. We believe that is difference number one.

Difference number two:
Blogging has opened up a whole new universe for us. We’re able to express our opinions in front of a huge audience and start a conversation that otherwise wouldnt have happened. Real Estate agents blog not only to have this conversation, but equally as important, you blog to reach consumers and generate business. More and more real estate professionals, like Teresa Boardman and Noah Rosenblatt, are getting more leads for new business than ever before, right from their blog. This is all thanks to the countless hours and hard work spent online writing content and to the brand they have been able to build over time.

With all of this hard work, shouldn’t you own and be able to control this content while at the same time promoting YOUR BRAND?

Propertyqube enables you to own your content and we promote your own brand. In fact, we encourage you to start a blog on WordPress or Typepad, or any other general blog platform that allows you to take hold of YOU. You deserve to control exactly where your content and brand are displayed, how it’s displayed and you deserve to pull it back or delete it when you wish.

So how does Propertyqube help you? After creating your blog, we give you the ability to enter in your RSS URL to feed it into our blog platform. When you do that, we import your blog entries and distribute them to local places throughout our platform. When members click on your blog entry title, we send them to your blog off of Propertyqube so they can continue to read your content and experience your brand. You realize the increased traffic while using Propertyqube to promote your brand and content. Think of this as an automatic Digg. Rather than submitting every post manually, we do it for you.

Here are some of the places throughout our platform where your blog content will be distributed:

In your profile:

Right near the listings on the market in your respective location:

On your local PropertyLife page:

and on the User Home Pages of the people in your geographic location:

We distribute YOUR content to the locations and people who want to see it. Want to delete your content in three days or three years? Simply delete it. Want to limit the entries being imported to the first 100 characters? You can do that to! We give you full control.

Difference #3:
We are a CONSUMER portal.

There is no ifs, ands or buts about that. Consumers come to Propertyque to get advice, find homes or apartments, discover local content. We’re not just about blogs, we’re not just about listings. We’re about creating a 360 experience for home buyers, home sellers, home owners not in a transaction, renters and the property obsessed. You have a lot to gain from being on our platform. The more you get involved, the more your name is distributed throughout our platform, the more people make it over to your profile, leading to more and more people clicking over to YOUR blog with YOUR content so they can experience YOUR brand.

We hope you’ll join us on our mission and help us spread the word! We look forward to it!

Check out some of this weeks great conversations taking place on Propertyqube!

I have a listing agent who’s time is coming to an end very shortly. I will give to new agent.
What happens if old agent has a buyer that decides to make offer after time runs out. But party was in the mill while old agent had property.

First answered by Judi Bryan of Bloomingdale, IL: The regulations on that may vary from state to state, but certainly in Illinois…and likely elsewhere…once a property has been listed by another broker, the NEW broker is your agent and the entire process (regardless of when it began) would be theirs. [Read more]

What are the most important upgrades a seller can make in this market before listing their home for sale?

Answered by Steve Belt of Scottsdale, AZ: Paint should always be #1. Paint your home real estate beige, with white trim. After that, make sure the entry way is inviting and clean. If your front yard isn’t up to shape, make it so. After that, it’s the kitchen. And finally, the backyard. [Read more]

What happens if the city puts a lien on your house? Does it collect interest and do I worry about it only when I sell?

Answered by Kathleen Ploch of Torrance, CA: Hello Sonja, Not knowing exactly what would be causing you to have a lien on your home, I am going to answer in more of generalities. As with many cities, they all have a process of citing and recording liens if necessary. The City of Compton Building and Safety division starts by sending out a corrections notice or citation of the violation. [Read more]

Check out these and other conversations in your Local PropertyLife Community!

It is with much excitement that we unveil several new features and products that we’ve been working on over the past couple of months. We’ve been building up to this point since our initial test site launch back in September and we are finally at the point where we are ready for the world to take a peek.

When we first took the wrapper off of Propertyqube, we took it off knowing that our initial release was just the first stepping stone to showing you what we would ultimately want to deliver. We strongly believe in helping professionals build their own brand and wanted to create a community that was truly local, not just one that touts to be local. Along with that, the phrase “PropertyLife” (in our tag line) was released back in September but until now, it didn’t really mean anything. Well next week, PropertyLife will become more clear!

Stay tuned for more details! If you are not part of our blog network, you should become part of it. It will come into play for this launch.

Over the past couple of months we have been working tirelessly on several new features/products based on all the great feedback we constantly get from you! We are excited to announce the big day is coming soon and we will launch them all next week. These features will change Propertyqube as we know it and will start to show our longer term strategy of who we want to become!

Stay tuned….

We talk to lots of people throughout the industry and we always get the question, “What’s Propertyqube working on next?” I think when we first launched Propertyqube, we took a very hush hush strategy but lately, we’ve been taking a lot more of an anti-stealth kind of approach. At the end of the day, success is achieved based on execution of your plans and ideas. So with that, you’ll be hearing more and more about the products and features we’re working on a lot earlier in the development cycle.

So what IS Propertyqube working on? Well over the past month, we’ve been focused on the launch of User Home Pages and refining a bunch of other pages throughout our platform to get the message about who we are across more effectively. The User Home Pages are in early beta and so you can expect some tweaks in the coming months as we learn more about what you want to see when first logging in.

As we try to create some of the most comprehensive profiles in the industry to set you apart from the crowd, we are now working on a way for Realtors to link their profile up to their listings flowing through Google Base. We have ideas on how we want to show these listings in your profile (think widget or a dedicated page) but we want to hear from you! Feel free to drop a comment or email us with your thoughts on how to most effectively show your listings off!

Here at Propertyqube, we love when we get feedback from our members and when we do, we work furiously to incorporate it into our network. Based on some of the feedback we received in talking with all of you, we thought it was necessary to spruce up a couple of pages in our network, most notably, user profiles!

We are happy to say we just released new profiles along with a new join now page! You’ll see lots of other changes here and there but these are the two most notable changes. Go check em out! of course, let us know what you think.

Profile shot:

Join page: