At Rex we're really passionate about making everyone's lives easier. We also try to keep our technology at the same level as what is available in the broader market. Most software companies that focus on particular industries tend to lag by 2-4 years behind leading technology, if not longer. Not Rex. Allow us to introduce drag and drop uploading, and electronic document storage.
New drag and drop uploading for images
One of the most irritating, time consuming and vital parts of marketing a property is getting photos onto realestate websites. Welcome to drag and drop.With Rex's new drag and drop uploader, adding new images to a realestate listing is literally as simple as dragging it from a folder on your computer. Eat your heart out realestate.com.We're sorry to keep gloating, but this is a feature that even Google only released 8 months ago.The reason images take so long to upload is because often, uncompressed images are 2-4mb a piece (multiply that by 20 images per property and you get a mind numbingly boring wait). Our new uploader includes a 'client side resize' feature that works in the background - images are resized and optimised for web viewing in a matter of seconds on your own computer - we expect performance for Rex uploads to improve by a factor of 10 - that means you'll be uploading 10 times faster before on Rex and up to 20 times faster than on most traditional Real Estate sites.More to come with cropping and rotating etc. in the next few months.
Document Storage Facility
Those that deal with sale agreements on a day to day basis know that archiving and storing sale and sales related documents can be a real hassle. Copies of sale documents, authorities, plans and so on need to be kept for periods long after they cease to be useful. Based on user feedback, we're implementing a new documents tab for the listings module. The documents tab will allow storage of scanned and PDF'd documents, word files, excel files and even zipped or rarred folders (upto a maximum of 10MB per attachment). Storage is secure, only accessible to users within your own agency and hosted some of the most reliable server infrastructure in the world. Put it this way - we'll still have your data, even if the continental US mysteriously vanishes.Electronic storage in this way is not a substitute for archiving physical copies of documents. What this feature does is allow hard copies of sale related documentation to be archived off site. Electronic copies with all the detail you need will be accessible with a couple of clicks away on the documents tab in Rex's Listing, Sold and Withdrawn modules.Some ideas of what can be stored here include:- Sale Agreements (Obvious!)- Building Inspection Reports- Conveyancing Letters- Sustainability Declarations / Certificates- Pest Inspection Certificates- Section 32'setc. Some of the expansions we're looking at for this section include the ability to zip and send packages of documents (e.g. to conveyancers, vendors, purchasers), document tagging with information (e.g. archive references), document searchability etc. This is still a while off, but we like to keep our users in the loop.Agencies will be able upload up to 1GB of data as part of their monthly subscription. We'll announce pricing for large data sizes in the coming weeks - we don't expect this to represent a major cost increase (and certainly an order of magnitude less than maintaining similar infrastructure at your office).More to come in the next few weeks. In the mean time, Happy Real-Estating.
