Did you know that besides being a great place for buyers to find properties, Google also offers a full suite of tools to help real estate professionals reach these potential home buyers?

Some of these tools include:

• AdWords
• Google Places
• Maps
• Google Profile
• YouTube
• Google Sketchup
• Google Apps
• Google Earth

Read the complete list of Google’s tools for real estate professionals and learn about how they can help you maximize your reach.

Are you a Loan Officer or Lender looking to connect with Realtors and FSBOs? Click here to learn how to dominate your LENDING market.

Are you a Real Estate Agent looking to impress sellers and maximize the exposure of your listings to potential buyers? Click here to dominate your LISTING market.

Jing helps you to create a screenshot that is stored on the web. This means its easy to share images of anything – property, contracts, a Google MAP – anything!

Jing can be very useful in a variety of situations – but especially when trying to report problems and issues to web services or software providers because you can now just embed a link to to a screenshot that shows the issue, rather than trying to create a screenshot image to  send as an attachment!

Here’s how to get it – and use it.

Go to http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/
(or just go to http://www.techsmith.com/jing )

Download and install.

Installation can take a few minutes and you may be promoted to also download Microsoft.NET framework – go ahead and allow that to happen. If you are promoted to install Microsoft.NET this can take 4-5 minutes!
Once that’s completed, the Jing install will then complete.

At the end of Installation, Jing will start automatically and ask you to create an account.

Then Jing is ready to go.

Jing can then be used to capture an image of your screen which is then stored on the web and you are given a special URL which shows that image!
So no downloads, files or attachments – just a simple web link!

Here’s how to do this:

The use CTRL+F10 on your keyboard to start a screen capture
Then drag the area with your mouse.

Click the disk icon to save the area as an image.

On the next panel, choose to share via Screencast.

Once it’s saved, the image’s web address is already in your clipboard.

So I just create my email or ticket and then PASTE or CTRL+V which inserts the image URL.

If you want to, you can even add annotations and arrows etc.

Jing is a great tool which will save you a lot of time and effort!
I can’t believe how many times a day I use Jing.

Its a great tool to help you with your real estate marketing!

But first – I was prompted to write this blog post because of an article I just read that explained that so-called ‘strong’ passwords can now be hacked in matter of seconds using appropriate math algorithms and very fast computer processor chips. So, the example stated shows that a password “like ‘fjR8n’ can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds“. Yikes!

The conclusion is that its the length of a password that stops it being hacked. Anything less than 14 characters long is considered risky!

Certainly worrying! You can read the whole article here.

So, what to do!?

Well here’s the approach I use

Use PASS PHRASES.

Here’s an example of a pass phrase: “I love to have cake and tea with my aunt Dotty every Sunday at 11!“

The idea here is that you make a pass phrase thats very easy for you to remember and then take the letters and create your password from them. So the above pass phrase might lead to this 17 character password:

IlthcatwmaDeSa11!

Easy! And because this is 17 characters its basically going to be impossible for anyone to break it.

I like to use rules that help mix things up – like adding in numbers (11) and also capitalizing proper nouns (I, Dotty, Sunday).

And of course, its OK to have several different pass phrases – e.g. for your various online general services and then you might have others for more sensitive accounts.

So, password problem is now solved.

Lastpass Password manager

The other problem I had was trying to overcome the inconvenience and time taken to continually type in passwords and having to remember what password was used with any particular service.

But Lastpass came to my rescue!

This is a great web service that is currently free and has received many rave reviews. Lastpass works well because it’s a free plug-in for most browsers that automatically remembers all your passwords and do do really clever things like auto-log you in etc. to your commonly used services like EMAIL.

With a master password (mine is many characters long!), you turn on the Lastpass service each time start up my PC, or launch my browser, and then it starts remembering and recording for you. When I go to my email account, my credentials and password are automatically filled in and I can even auto-login too. It is saving me a lot of time and frustration!

All your password data is kept on their secure servers and is encrypted at every step.

You can even change the way it works on a mobile device like a laptop, to use a special encryption key that you need to print out and refer to. In other words if my laptop is stolen, then its still impossible to access my Lastpass account without my unique key.

I feel secure using Lastpass because it has great security features that I have been able to customize to meet my needs.

In conclusion, I would strongly recommend that you update all your passwords and start using PASS PHRASES. You will be amazed at how easy it is to do this.

If your work environment allows it then you might like to try Laspass too!

Stay safe!

ActiveRain
Real Estate online Community,  forum, blogs, and so much more. For Agents and others in the Real Estate Industry. Lots of idea sharing.
www.realtychat.com

Realty Chat
Real estate forum, blogs, and directories.
www.realtychat.com

RealTalk
Real estate discussion forum.
realtalk.internetcrusade.com

Broker Agent Social
Networking and community for Real Estate professionals
www.BrokerAgentSocial.com

Real Estate News Sources

Realtor and Agent News
Real Estate news for agents and brokers from Realty Times.
realtytimes.com/agentnews.htm

Realtor Magazine Online
Online magazine for Realtors.
www.realtor.org/rmodaily.nsf?OpenDatabase

National Real Estate Investor Magazine
Online magazine for commercial real estate professionals.
www.nreionline.com

Realty Times
Real Estate news updated daily.
realtytimes.com

Real Estate Journal
Articles on Real Estate related topics from the Wall Street Journal.
www.realestatejournal.com

The Real Estate Professional
Online magazine for Real Estate professionals.
www.therealestatepro.com

Mortgage Information Sources

Inside Mortgage Finance Publications
Mortgage news and statistics.
www.imfpubs.com

Mortgage Daily
Daily news updates for mortgage professionals.
www.mortgagedaily.com

Mortgage Market Information Services, Inc.
Introduction to mortgages, rates and lenders by state, daily news and links.
www.mmis.com

National Mortgage News
Information on the mortgage markets.
www.nationalmortgagenews.com

Real Estate Industry Directories

AppraiserDatabase.com
A directory of appraisers by county.
www.appraiserdatabase.com

Environmental Professionals
A directory of environmental issue experts.
www.expertpages.com/experts/hazardous.htm

Escrow and Title Service
A directory of escrow and title service companies.
www.escrowandtitleservice.com

AMO Property Managers Database
AMO Directory of Property Managers
www.us-management.com/Vendor.nsf/AMO1