Property Guru - Road Test

19 March 2007

Putting the new property information system through its paces

For Wainuiomata real estate agent Val Coulter property information is the lifeblood of her business. And when she wants information, she wants it quickly.

Which is why Val and her team of seven at Professionals Coulter Real Estate became one of the first group of users for a new online property information tool, Terralink International’s Property Guru.

Property Guru provides up-to-date, national property information including sales, valuation, aerial photographs, titles and ownership.

Functionality includes the ability to pan and zoom around aerial photographs, mail merge to create personalised DM communications and express one-touch legal document ordering.

Terralink has a team of 13 dedicated to ensuring the information for Property Guru is regularly updated.

The standard package includes five licenses meaning up to five users in an office can log on at the same time. Extra licenses are available.

Val says she and her team started working with Property Guru just before Christmas. She was attracted to the new system by the ease and speed of accessing accurate information.

“When it was demonstrated what impressed us was the simplicity of the system and there was a load of accurate, relevant information that was easy to access,” Val says.

“Everything was one click. For instance, with one click you could find out ten recent sales within a 1km radius of a property in the past 12 months.”

The simplicity of the system meant that all staff could get up to speed quickly. “It’s very user friendly, you don’t have to be computer literate, anybody can use it.”

Val’s office uses Property Guru as its primary information tool for providing property appraisals. “Everyone in the office uses it and we use it all the time, every time we do an appraisal.”

Because five staff can access Property Guru simultaneously Val says she and her sales team never have to be worried about having to wait to access information. “And you don’t get bumped off, which can be a real nuisance.”

The multiple licenses mean staff can log onto the system when they are out of the office, say if they are working from home, which means they can work much more efficiently.

“What we do is 24/7 really, so it’s important that the sales team can access information when there is no admin staff in the office. It means if you have to do an appraisal at 8 o’clock on a Saturday night, you can find out what you need to know.”

Property Guru’s search engine enables users to search property information with only some property details, Val says. ”You don’t have to have the exact address to find a property.

“And the information is easy to read on the screen. For instance, the names of streets are in upper and lower case making them much clearer than systems where they are all in upper case. When you are looking for a street name you can quickly run your eye down the list and the street name will just pop out.”

Property Guru features national property information as standard, a feature that Val says is likely to prove useful over time. “If someone who is looking at buying a house in our area but needs to sell their house somewhere else, you can go online and check the saleability of the other house.”

The system’s easy-to-use mail merge function simplifies creating targeted direct mail. “If you want to say target a street from a prospecting point of view, it’s easy to put together a personalised letter for every address.”

Val says she has received excellent after sales service with follow up calls to make sure there are no problems. “The contact we have had with Terralink has been very good.”

Val says she has one quibble with the new system, which is that in the sales history for a property only the previous owner is provided even though all other data for all previous sales is provided.

However, that one point aside, Val says she is very impressed with Property Guru. “I could recommend it to anyone,” she says.