A survey of offices that have subscribed to SalesPartner/OfficePartner in the last few years has yielded some very positive responses. Heather Norrish of Norrish Property Consultants of Tauranga says that her company of 12 people was established three years ago and felt that, as a small company, they would benefit from the ability of SalesPartner to simply combine their whole office systems with the needs of the individual working consultants working with laptops and setting up their own databases. ‘To be able to have full access as an individual consultant to the listings is wonderful and databasing is very important. ‘ We are constantly getting updates, with SalesPartner adding features that real estate agents have been asking for – it is a growing business and they are always listening for improvements that could be made.’ Pam van der Velden of Cromwell First National Real Estate comments that they have been using SalesPartner for two years and ‘It has really streamlined the business and given us the tools to provide our customers with better service. I am thrilled with it’. ‘ SalesPartner is a complete package designed to manage your real estate office, listings, buyers, property management and office administration, while offering outstanding publications and communication between your firm and your customers.’ Kapiti First National (2005) Ltd uses both SalesPartner and OfficePartner and finds the main benefits are that the systems are very user-friendly and easy to pick up and that information is very easy to find. A partner in the business, Barbara Heald, says ‘I had been using another real estate software package, but found SalesPartner much easier to use for things like layouts, preparing reports, for marketing and for activities and tracking what you are doing. ‘ OfficePartner is also easy to use and is good for tracking commissions, preparing sales staff invoices and tracking vendor funded advertising and marketing campaigns. It has a good reporting feature for Trust Account auditing purposes.’ SalesPartner is ‘fantastic’ according to John Lamason of RE/MAX Property in Tauranga. The company was founded a year ago and now has 16 sales people. It will be opening a branch at Papamoa within the next 12 months and they are going to make it part of the system that everyone will have SalesPartner. Rae Beale of RE/MAX says that her company likes the fact that they can manage the listings extremely well with it and their sales people love it because its flexibility enables them to work anywhere with the program – in the car, at home or with a client, making both the office and the sales people independent. ‘The return on the investment in SalesPartner is magnificent.’ They find it the most cost-effective way of managing their listings and forwarding information to both vendors and purchasers. Coastal Realty Ltd of Levin have been using SalesPartner since they began 13 months ago and say ‘it is brilliant – and very user friendly’. Trish Tilbury of Coastal Realty says ‘We began searching online for a system that was easy to use and that had training and support available. It was important that the package supplied everything we required to run our office from Trust accounts through to follow up and support to our clients. Salespartner was the ideal choice for us. As our business grows Salespartner grows with us.’ Watson Real Estate of Palmerston North installed SalesPartner just over a year ago and since then have done ‘spectacularly well’. Ken Watson of Watson Real Estate says that this is partly because ‘We have an excellent team of very good people’ but also because ‘SalesPartner has helped us put systems in place that have enabled us to move forward’. The company celebrated its 10th anniversary at the end of July. When it was founded, it had no internet or email facilities and now all of the sales consultants have SalesPartner. The firm also runs OfficePartner to track offers, contracts and commissions. Ken comments that his company has moved forward in a big way since one of his agents Marie McGrath initiated the introduction of SalesPartner. ‘SalesPartner enables agents to sort, filter and provide the most relevant and up-to-the-minute sales information to vendors and purchasers. It sends out new listings to buyers every week and also automatically prints letters for listings, anniversaries, and many other regular activities.’ John Sisley runs a real estate company in Hamilton specialising in rural/lifestyle properties and attached to Lodge Country Ltd. He comments that they began looking for suitable software some time ago and discovered SalesPartner through Property Brokers. His company installed it about 18 months ago and all 14 members are ‘absolutely happy with it. He adds that John Duncan and his team were very helpful in getting them up and running, were more than happy to assist and always provided an immediate response ‘not that there were a lot of hassles’. ‘ SalesPartner is excellent – very, very good and, in my experience, it comes closest of any real estate software to providing what it says it will do – some software programs are less than satisfactory, but we are delighted with SalesPartner.’ Selig Real Estate in Lower Hutt consider that the greatest benefit they receive from SalesPartner is in time saving, especially from the admin side. Lorraine Girvan comments that they had very good support form Alister and Andrew in setting up the system and they have provided on-going training if needed. ‘ We really appreciate the ability to email out new listings. Two of us have 250 buyers that we email out new listings to immediately and we get a really good response from this. ‘We also use SalesPartner to produce very professional looking flyers and can tailor it to how we like it. The system has so many benefits, we don’t really want our opposition using it and catching up.’ Clearly one way to boost your business is to recruit someone who knows about SalesPartner. The quicker way is to contact us: Salespartner Software Contact info: phone 0-4-471 1849 email: support@salespartner.co.nz, web: www.salespartner.co.nz for a free assessment of how it could work for you.