New Changes at FillMyProperty.com

You will start seeing some changes here in the coming weeks and months at FillMyProperty.com.

The first change you will see is we are starting to roll out our full service and charging in a few states beyond Minnesota. These states will be Florida, Illinois, and Georgia.

Our fees are broken down in two ways. Either a single listing fee or a listing package.

A single listing is one fee for one property with a listing run of 30 days in our system.

A listing package allows you to have a certain number of active properties at any given time. So for instance, if you have a 5 property listing package, at any given time you can have 5 active properties. You can have more actual properties in our system but only those 5 can be active.

All feeds, our websites, and postings, such as craig's list will continue to be rolled out as usual.

If you require a listing package of more than 10 properties or have any questions please Contact Us

Interesting Take on Avoiding Pitfals of Lease Options

A great overview of what to look at when considering a lease option or rent to own:
Avoid the Pitfalls of Lease Options With the Equity Holding Trust

you really should have a trusts strategy in your toolbox, this is one of the best ways preserve your tax basis and get privacy, safety, and legal protection.

Rent to Own Article

Pretty good rent to own article, things to note:

In the current market, lease-option agreements can grow the pool of potential buyers by attracting purchasers who are not quite ready to qualify for a mortgage. They also can be attractive for would-be buyers who have relocated and are trying to sell homes in other parts of the country.

Also a great overview of how the lease to own process works:

Lease-option contracts are written for individual homes and situations, so there are few fixed rules. However, both parties usually agree on a few general criteria.

The contract usually states that the buyer has to close on the residence within certain time period, usually a year or two. Homeowners avoid longer contracts, because of the risk of losing too much on the upside should real estate values appreciate quickly.

Also, buyers are required to put down a hefty upfront payment, usually between $3,000 and $5,000 for a typical home. In some cases, that money is put toward the eventual down payment.

The buying party also pays rent, giving the owner a monthly income stream to pay or offset the mortgage. Typically, a portion of each payment is set aside for the down payment.

New Updates Being Released December 29th, 2008

We have been hard at work these last few months making tons of updates to FillMyProperty.com.



Here is a quick overview of the new releases being released:

New quick search for properties on control panel (great for users with 5 or more properties)

• A new frequently asked questions page
• Improved picture upload process
• New External marketing improvements that will ensure ads are released on time and stick longer.

We also have a major change happening in some markets as we begin to charge for our services. We wanted to remain a free service for as long as possible but the demands of keeping the quality of external marketing has forced us to add more personnel than we anticipated.

Our pricing will be broken down by State and will include two choices on how to list properties.


First is to post as a single listing for one fee with a listing time frame of 30 days depending on market. Your listing fee will include all feeds, external marketing, and all websites.


Your second option is to purchase a listing package. A listing package allows you to have a certain number of active properties at any given time. Listing packages will be billed every 30 days and will include all feeds, external marketing, all websites, and will include some enhanced features for power users with more than 10 properties.

We will have the price for both single listings and listing packages updated here in the next few days. You can view these on Our Fees page.

We do have some great new features in the coming weeks that we will be releasing that have been in development for a while now. We are hoping to get those released well before the spring market.

Latest Property View Page Now Up & Redesign

One of the things that surprised us recently in launching FillMyProperty.com is the amount of residents who find our sites via the search engines. Most of our pages are not targeted in this way so we are a beefing up some features for potential residents who find us this way.

Soon a potential resident will be able to search for available properties on FillMyProperty.com as well as set up a profile. These will be very scaled down versions and will most likely direct potential residents to the particular website based on the property listing type to find more information.

Our first minor roll out is a new page on our site that lists the latest 25 added properties from around the country. You can view our latest added properties. We are also adding a new page for the most viewed properties as well.

The last new item we have is we are working on a complete redesign of FillMyProperty.com. This redesign is still in the early stages and we hope to have this launched by Dec 15th, 2008. This will include a much cleaner look as well as some new features we have been testing these last few month. We should mention in this release to is a new picture upload process that will auto re-size your pictures.

Any other feature you would like added or that you see in other sites that you use please feel free to comment. We would appreciate any feedback you have and would work hard to implement any feature you recommend.

New Picture Upload Page and Weekend Updates

We made some modifications to our picture upload page. We are now limiting the size of images to 200K as well as checking for valid file types. We also added a loading indicator and are working on having this information relay the exact progress on your upload as well.

We are currently testing an automatic picture resizer that should solve 99% off all problems when uploading pictures to our site. Almost all problems when uploading forms is due to large file size. This causes the connection to time out on most uploads of files over 500K.

This weekend we are releasing a minor update but will have a drastic change on your external advertising. We are adding a new entery item for properties called 'search cities'. You can use this field to input cities that are close to your property.

On most of our external marketing we include these cities but this is system generated and not always as accurate as we would like. Some regional areas simply have too many cities located within and cause our ads to get flagged or frustrations with users searching for properties.

This new input will be on the property details section of the site and expect to see this live by this Sunday, November 2nd, 2008.

Property Views Now Live

You are now able to see the amount of times your property has been viewed on our websites. We have been tracking views for the past few weeks while we have been testing this feature.

Your individual property views can be found on the control panel after you log in. This is right after the marketing link. Currently this shows the current views from today, click this link to get even more detailed information.

Currently your views are combined into one number we are working on breaking this number into even more meaningful information. Data such as what listing type and website the view came from, also how the user found your property, such as via a feature, search, advanced search or other location on our sites.