Bia Creations :: News

Making it easier to assign permissions to users in Property Center

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:20:14 GMT

One of the goals with Property Center is that it is easy to use. To help meet this goal, we improved the process of assigning permissions to users, this week. Assigning roles/permissions to users was less than ideal, until now. To see the new screen, site administrators can click Actions -> Edit Permissions when viewing a user. While the new process caters to 95% of cases, there is a link that allows you to specifically add/remove roles for the more advanced scenarios. We hope you enjoy the new work flow for user permissions.

We want your feedback for Property Center

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:55:35 GMT

In an effort to always listen to our clients, we opened up a feedback site for Property Center. We're kicking the tires and if it's useful and popular, we'll keep it around. So if you use Property Center and wish it did something that it does not, please head over and submit your feedback.

Property Center adds over 47,000 widgets

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:59:57 GMT

We recently added a widget to Property Center that allows you to use any of the over 47,000 Google Gadgets on your Property Center landing pages. This gives you the ability to customize your landing pages with a wealth of existing gadgets like the Gmail gadget, YouTube gadget, Google Docs gadget, loan calculator, and many more...

Accounting with Property Center

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:20:04 GMT

Some of the recent upgrades to Property Center include:

All emails updated to HTML emails. This means that all emails from your Property Center site will have a similar look as your website. So if you have a custom logo or use a custom color scheme, emails from the site will reflect that as well.

Enhanced accounting functionality. We added a new Accounting menu that allows you to add bank account information, print checks, and easily add income/expenses. Along with recording income/expense information on a per property basis, you can now record income/expenses for holding companies and bank accounts.

Print checks directly from Property Center. This has been a requested feature and I'm happy to announce that it is now available to all pay accounts. We added the most popular check style for now, but you can expect additional check styles in the future.

The "Save & New" button saves time for repetitive tasks. The new button allows you to save an item and immediately create another new item. So if you're recording multiple expenses, you'll be able to save an expense, and immediately record another expense without having to navigate the menus.

Export to PDF option on most screens allows you to export your information as a PDF document. Just click the "Save as PDF..." option from the Actions menu you'll be prompted to save/open a PDF of whatever is shown on your screen. The PDF looks similar to the print version, but is in full color. So, for example, if you'd like to create a pdf of a rental agreement, it can easily be done. We'll continue adding this ability to other pages throughout the site.

Track analytics information related to your website. We've added the option for you to integrate analytics packages with your Property Center website. For example, you can sign up for a Google Analytics account and paste the tracking code (provided by Google) into your Property Center site settings.

The new Mortgage Rates widget allows you to stay on top of weekly mortgage rates. The new widget can be added to any dashboard page in Property Center. The new widget displays the primary mortgage market rates for the current week, via Freddy Mac. You can add the widget to any dashboard page by:

Clicking the Add Content button
Clicking the 3rd Party tab
Click the Add To Page button for the Mortgage Rates widget

Training: Adding property income and expenses

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:39 GMT

The training session for tonight has to do with adding income and expenses to properties. You can keep track of all of your property expenses with Property Center. This training video shows you how to add the income and expenses to properties. It also shows how to view income/expenses for a specified date range. Click here to watch the training video for adding property income and expenses. All other Property Center training videos are available here.

Training: Recurring property income and expenses

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:39 GMT

I posted a new training video demonstrating how to setup recurring property income and expense schedules. Recurring incomes/expenses are useful if, for example, you know that you'll be spending $50 each week on advertising for a property. Property Center can automatically add those expenses. Click here to watch the training video about adding recurring property income and expenses. All other Property Center training videos are available here.

Training: Adding mass payments/fees to leases

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:38 GMT

Tonight's training video is about adding mass amounts of payments and fees to leases. Property Center makes your life easier if you have to enter many payments/fees for your leases. We also make it easy to distribute payment across leases for individual tenants. Click here to watch the training video for adding mass payments/fees to leases. All other Property Center training videos are available here.

Property Center Training Videos

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:38 GMT

Just in time for the holidays, I've been busy adding training videos for Property Center. Over the weekend, I created a couple training videos that show how to create tenants and leases. I also created a training video, tonight, that shows how to add payments and fees to a lease. I have a goal to create at least one training video per day for the rest of this week. I'll keep adding posts to the blog to keep you updated.

Recurring income, expense, payments, and fees

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:38 GMT

Recurring property income and expenses You can now add recurring income and expenses for properties. This is useful if you know that you'll have the same payment on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. For example, you can now setup a schedule that automatically adds a mortgage expense on the first of each month. To setup a recurring income or expense for a specific property, follow these steps:

View the property that you would like to add the recurring income/expense to
Click the Actions menu and select "Add a New Income Schedule" or "Add a New Expense Schedule"
Fill out the required income/expense and scheduling information and click save

Recurring lease payments and fees On a similar note, you can now setup recurring payments and fees for leases. You can use the scheduling feature to add any type of recurring payment or fee to a lease. So, if you have a lease where you charge a flat monthly fee for water/sewer, you can do so automatically now. To setup a recurring payment or fee for a specific lease, follow these steps:

View the lease that you would like to add the payment/fee to
Click the Actions menu and select "Add a New Payment Schedule" or "Add a New Fee Schedule"
Fill out the required payment/fee and scheduling information and click save

New design for the Property Center website

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:38 GMT

Property Center was updated with a new website design this weekend. I think the new design looks great! Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Parlez-vous Français?

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:38 GMT

I'm happy to announce that Property Center has been translated to French. You can change the language on a per user basis or a site wide basis (used with people who are not logged in).� So now if your native language is French, you can feel more comfortable while working with your rental property information. To change your language:

Click the My Account link in the upper right corner of the screen.
Click the Edit button.
Select your language and click the Save button.

For sale listings on Trulia and Zillow

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:38 GMT

To compliment the automatic rental advertisements with Oodle, I'm happy to announce that we help to advertise your for sale listings as well. All properties/units that are marked for sale in Property Center, will automatically be included in Trulia 's web listings. Soon your listed properties/units will be included with Zillow's listings as well. According to Zillow, they receive around 4-5 million monthly visitors and 70% of their users are actively buying/selling a home (or plan to in the next year). According to Hitwise, Trulia is the 18th most visited real estate site on the internet. The Hitwise data is based off 10 million US computer users. That adds quite a bit of exposure to your listings, all for free.

Property Center update

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:37 GMT

After months of development and testing, I'm happy to announce that a new version of Property Center is available for immediate use. With this update, we tried to simplify things while adding additional features that we think you'll enjoy.

A new look and feel
- We hope you are as pleased with the new look and feel as we are. After you get familiar with the new navigation menu, we're confident you'll agree that it makes navigation much easier and quicker.
Enhanced reports
- Reports have been enhanced and additional reports have been added. The new income/expense report clearly shows the transaction details for each property now. You can also print an invoice that shows income/expenses for properties that you manage.
Custom forms
- All lease forms are fully editable now. You control the content of forms. So you can edit forms to cater to your business, delete unused forms, or create new forms. By default, your site is configured with the same forms as before: lease invoice, rental agreement, rules and regulations, and as various state specific forms.
Custom pages
- We made custom pages more flexible. You're no longer locked into fitting your content into modules. You can design the page content any way that you like now.
Widgets
- We have reorganized the menu structure and have created general "landing pages" for each major menu area. These landing pages can be fully customized, showing only the information that you're interested in. The information is organized as widgets and they can be dragged to the location on the page that works best for you. Widgets allow us to add additional functionality and views to the data without cluttering the primary site structure. Some widgets have additional options (for example: how many new items to show) that can be accessed by clicking the down arrow on widget. The landing pages are saved on a per user basis, so your layout does not affect the layout of other people in your organization. We'll be creating a short training video to help show off some of the things that can be accomplished with widgets and the landing pages.
Translation
- Property Center is in the process of being translated to French. We will be offering Spanish and German in the near future as well. If there is a specific language that you would like to see Property Center translated to, please let me know.
Global addresses
- To go along with translations, Property Center now supports property addresses and phone numbers for users outside of the US.
Email
- We've added two ways for you to send emails with Property Center. You can send emails to your tenants as well as other users of the system.

There are additional features that were added, but these cover the majority. I'm hoping to get the screenshots and training videos updated this weekend.

Property Center Gadgets

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:37 GMT

We've released some gadgets for your Google personalized homepage. Now you can view your Property Center information without leaving your homepage. We're currently looking into providing Yahoo! widgets and Microsoft gadgets as well.

Advertising rentals with Oodle

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:11:37 GMT

Tonight we released a small update to Property Center to advertise listed units with Oodle. This update is transparent to all Property Center accounts, so it works without any interaction from site owners/users.