The Mobile Agents

INTRODUCTION TO THE PROPERTY JUNGLE

Prepared for The Mobile Agents On 21 st February 2018

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION

About The Property Jungle About this Project

OUR APPROACH

Customer Service Excellence Supporting Your Business Objectives The Project Process Ongoing Support & Maintenance Continuous Development & Improvement Why Responsive Web Design? Function & Form Database About Feeds Search Options SEO Content Management System (CMS) Static Pages Bespoke Features Add-Ons

YOUR RESPONSIVEWEBSITE

Legal Compliance for Agents Site Performance Reporting

TECHNICAL

Standards Usability & Compatibility Hosting Email

SPECIFICATION

Site Map Features & Add-ons COSTS Your Quote PAYMENT TERMS Cash or Finance

SITE FOR LIFE Automatically renew your site every 2 or 3 years

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INTRODUCTION

About The Property Jungle

The Property Jungle is the market leading provider of websites to the property industry in the UK and has successfully delivered over 1,700 sites for Estate and Lettings Agencies since 2003. The company was founded by Mike Smithson, a veteran of the property industry, with 36 years’ experience working in Estate Agency, Relocation, New Homes Development, as well as IT Project Management and Web Development. The 20 strong team at The Property Jungle includes many other agency veterans, an extremely talented group of designers, developers and programmers including a Doctor of Computer Science, a former university lecturer and an Oxford graduate. This mixture of agency expertise and technology know-how makes The Property Jungle your ideal partner because, unlike almost all local, or non-industry- specialist web developers, we understand your business, your jargon, your software, your objectives and the very specific legal requirements of websites for Estate & Lettings agents today. We are true specialists at building property websites. The Mobile Agents are a single branch sales and lettings agency based in Alderley Edge. The current is very dated and is not mobile friendly. It has embedded property details via Homesonview which takes a visitor away from the agent’s domain and does not help with Search Engine Optimisation. It also means that the search results and full details pages cannot be styled in accordance with the agents branding or additional features added. About this Project

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OUR APPROACH

Customer Service Excellence

From their very first day with The Property Jungle all our team mates learn that we are not just an IT company. We are a customer services company and it just happens that IT is what we do. The magic and voodoo that goes into making great websites is dif ficult and complex, requiring degree level skills inmany disciplines. But we believe that all of that should be invisible to you. It is our job to listen to what you want, to advise on what is possible and to deliver a little bit more.

That’s why, unlike so many other web development companies, we don’t talk in jargon or about millions of lines of code, or of methodologies and frameworks. We know you want to trust a partner that understands your business, has worked in your industry and with whom you can just speak your own language, without having to educate them on what you do and how you do it.

That’s The Property Jungle. We are the safe pair of hands that make the technically difficult seem invisible for you, and allows you to focus on generating income from the website.

Supporting Your Business Objectives

There are many purposes behind a property website, but the principle business objectives are usually to persuade anonymous surfers into making contact with you so that you can deploy your real world expertise for their benefit. That’s why a good property site will convert an applicant into a vendor or landlord. It will create requests for valuations, as well as viewings. It will be a moving resource that attracts repeat visitors and creates brand penetration and referrals. It will be your best negotiator working for you all day and all night, all year round. We understand the business needs that drive modern agencies and will work in partnership with you to make sure that your specific business objectives are met by your website.

The Project Process

Having built over 1,600 property sites has given us a great insight into the project processes that work best with today’s estate and lettings agencies.

With this experience we have developed an agile 7 step process that encourages your maximum input and knowledge of progress at all stages, whilst allowing us to build it as near right first time as can be achieved. A project always starts with a Specification Step (1) in which we work with you to understand the specific page and site structure requirements that you have, along with individual features that you want to see on each of those pages.

After the specification is known and fixed we are able to fix the price with you and start the Design Step (2). Once the design process is complete we can Plan (3) the build and delivery of the site. As we

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then collect or create Content (4) we iterate with you through the Build (5) process so that we can achieve a very quick turnaround, amending and signing off each element in a timely manner. Once the site is built we go through our own exhaustive QA Testing Process (6) checking for the technical excellence that we expect to deliver, and that the site has successfully created a customer journey which is capable of achieving the business objectives we agreed at the beginning. Testing is also a very active part of the process for you and we will look to you to test all outputs, such as forms on the site, to make sure you are correctly receiving them. We are both then able to confirm that the site build is complete. We then agree a live date with you and Launch (7) the site when you are happy to do so.

Ongoing Support & Maintenance

We appreciate that our clients don't come to work to demonstrate their IT skills. From time to time people just get "stuck", so we are here to help. We have a permanent full time Support Team always able and willing to assist you with things that sometimes just don’t work as you expected.

We also understand that all sorts of things happen that affect how up to date your site is and you need to be able to respond to these quickly.

A lot of minor content changes can be handled by you using our Content Management System (CMS) but many of your requirements are larger than that.

 Legislated changes (Cookies, Landlord Fees, Tenant Fees, EPC's, Redress Schemes, Companies Act etc.)  Response to competition  Changes to branches  Staff changes  Search engine algorithm changes  New divisions  Rebrands  Special events, offers or promotions  Changes of software

There are many reasons why you may need to make changes to your site and to make sure that these happen in a timely and affordable fashionwe have a dedicated Maintenance Team who, between them, have dozens of years’ experience of web development, agency and our systems.

Continuous Development & Improvement

We know we have no automatic right to stay as market leaders and so we invest in continuous development and improvement in the capabilities of our software in order to make sure that you get to benefit from them. Every site that we host is constantly being upgraded behind the scenes so that whenever you want a new feature, page or add-on adding to the site the code is already there to make it cost effective to implement.

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YOUR RESPONSIVE WEBSITE

Why Responsive Web Design?

As browsing habits have changed the way in which web developers have been required to support them has had to change too. At one stage it was common practice to build a fixed size desktop site and then build a second, companion, mobile site with some redirect code between the two sites. This allowed the visitor to be pushed to the size of site that was the best fit for the visitor’s screen. Unfortunately, whilst this immediately solved the device size problem it meant that the site owner had to both write and maintain two sets of content, two sets of images and two databases. This made life hard for site owners but also presented a problem for search engines because they now had to index two sites and determine which one to present in the search results list, depending on the device being used for the search. Responsive Web Design (RWD) solves all these problems by building websites using the latest coding techniques that allow websites to redesign and resize themselves based upon both the size and orientation of the device. So it now doesn’t matter if the visitor is on a pc, mac, laptop, tablet or phone, using it in landscape or portrait. The site will fit the screen perfectly and display the content in the order and manner that we have coded it for you. RWD gives you one site that fits all sizes - but behaves differently to create the perfect user experience on all devices.

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Function & Form

We care as much as you do that your site is beautiful and a great representation of your brand. We care just as passionately about function too. In fact the list of things that the visitor can do is the first thing that we will work with you to develop. This “specification” as we call it, is the cornerstone of a successful project. This defines the pages that will be in the site, the functions that the visitor can perform on any of those pages, the customer journey, what the end points of each journey are, so that something positive happens for your business. When we know exactly what the site will contain we can then turn to the design and create visual layouts that enable easy navigation of all the key touches that were envisioned in the specification, on all sizes of device. Form always follows Function in this way to make sure that we prepare designs that work.

Database

Inside every site we install a copy of our database application that has been refined through use over 10+ years and used in over 1,000 websites.

It is this database that contains all the property data, whether entered manually or automatically via a feed from a third party software supplier if required. This allows us to develop sophisticated but simple to use search methods which ensure that your visitors get to see the properties that they are looking for as quickly as possible. The same database system can send Email Alerts to registered applicants as soon as we know there is a listing that matches their requirements. It allows us to perform automated updates of the site several times a day, and on demand when you have an urgent need for a change.

About Feeds

We will be able to connect to your property data through any desktop software that you use and automatically pull data updates into the site several times a day. Alternatively you can manually add the properties and we can feed them to any portals you have an account with.

Search Options

We understand that every search could be being performed by a potential vendor or landlord and that you are competing for their business. So using our own agency backgrounds and many years and hundreds of sites’ worth of experience we have developed an array of powerful and user friendly search tools that go far beyond the minimum Min Price/Max Price, Location and Accommodation filters to give your users a great experience and the information they need.

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To help your site be like your best negotiator online 24/7 we can add: -

Draw on a Map – where users draw on a Google Map where they want to live and your site finds them properties inside their boundaries Travel Time Search – where users tell the site where they need to commute to, how they commute and how long they want to commute and the site finds them properties where they can live and not be late for work. Ajax Search – where users start to type a location and the site autocompletes it for them thus removing spelling errors and making sure they always get to see something.

Map Results – where all the results of the search are displayed on a Google Map.

List/Grid results – where the results are displayed in list or newspaper grid layout.

Shortlist – where only the properties that the user has selected are displayed without having to run the search again.

Sliders/Drop Downs – where different input methods are used to make life easy and the site attractive for users. Infinite Scroll – where the list of properties just keeps growing as the user swipes or scrolls down instead of having to navigate to the next page on the list. This is particularly mobile friendly.

Schools Data – where the information about any given property is enhanced with detailed local knowledge of schools, their OFSTED performance, and the acceptance areas used for the last academic year. Book a Viewing – where you receive an email from the applicant via the site letting you know which property they want to view and when, thus converting an anonymous surfer into someone you can do business with. Not only making a viewing arrangement but asking to value or list their own property. SEO Friendly URL’s – where URL’s are rewritten automatically to contain data that search engines can use to understand more about what the page contains. 360°/Virtual Reality Tours – We can supply the leading 360° Tour technology making it possible to create an entire tour in under 15 minutes . The tour can then be embedded in the site, shared on portals, shared by email, used in VR headsets and even remotely controlled, allowing you to perform Virtually Accompanied Viewings.

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SEO

Every site that we build uses “best practice” site design, content architecture and methods to ensure that every piece of content that you want to get a search engine ranking can be found and indexed. This includes:-

Optimisation of Page Titles

 

Optimisation of Meta Data / Descriptions /H1, H2, H3 Tags Alt Tag (image naming and description) & hyperlink optimisation 301 redirects to make sure all traffic from your old site is correctly transferred to your new site Canonical domain management so you can use multiple domains correctly robots.txt creation to make sure the spiders know how to index the site content

 404 error pages so that there are no dead ends which spiders dislike  Google friendly site maps in their preferred XML format SEO should never be considered as a one-time event and even though we do an excellent job at the time of build and launch this is day one of the lifetime of the site and the competitive environment changes regularly. We recommend the services of our SEO partners Vertical Leap to work with you on an ongoing basis. Dozens of our clients have enjoyed success with the services provided by Vertical Leap. Their content supply systems are integrated into our database systems to speed up and simplify content provision and changes. We are also very happy to cooperate and work with your own personally preferred SEO partners as we understand that quite often local relationships already exist and we make the sites that we build available to them to work on either with the CMS or via FTP at their preference. Every site comes complete with our specially constructed CMS. We’ve built this systemwith Estate and Lettings agents in mind knowing that there is a wide range of technical abilities from company to company, as well as different appetites for making changes to the site as some companies prefer us to do that for them. Our CMS allows any client to make changes to any piece of content they want and we can lock that down or open it up from as small as a paragraph on a page to every page throughout the site. Crucially the title, description and other Meta Data is also made available so that SEO companies can make tweaks to boost rankings. You can upload images, position them attractively in the text and add Alt Tags for SEO purposes. The biggest advantage and most used feature of the CMS is the ability to add News articles which then appear on the site in date order as a growing archive. Content Management System (CMS)

You can do all this without recourse to us and at no additional cost.

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Static Pages

Pages that are essentially brochure-ware pages and don’t contain any database driven functions are known as Static Pages. If you are not using a Content Writing Service we will need you to supply the content for these pages which we will style to match the site and ensure they add to the customer experience. All content, or just selected content, can be added to the CMS to allow you or your SEO partner to modify it going forward.

Bespoke Features

Our technical and development teams are all exceptionally skilled and experienced and whilst every property listing site contains common features we frequently find that clients want to push the frontiers of website functionality and presentation. Under these circumstances we are always very happy to work with you to do the business and process analysis to develop new features. Please ask for a separate quote on bespoke work.

Add-Ons

We have a huge collection of prebuilt Add-ons all designed to add to the visitor experience. We aim to make your site not just easy to use but a valuable resource for the visitor to use so that they come back time and again and are more likely to request you to list their own property.

Please see www.thepropertyjungle.com/addons to see more information and video examples of each one.

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Legal Compliance for Agents

This is a key part of our service that we find many local, or non-specialist property web site developers are not even aware of. Because we come from and work inside the industry we understand the very specific legal requirements that you have to fulfil on your web site and we simply take care of them for you free of charge. Some examples of the legislation that your site needs to help you comply with are: -

Consumer Rights Act 2015

  

Companies Act 2013

Data Protection Act 1998

 Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003  CAP (Committee of Advertising Practice) Compliance for Lettings agents  Cookie legislation 2012  EPC Regulations  Copyright Law Unfortunately we see a great many sites that have been built by web developers who are not property web site specialists and who leave their clients exposed to tens of thousands of pounds of fines.

We provide this valuable service free of charge as part of our site build process.

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Site Performance Reporting

You can only improve what you can measure and for this reason we have made it really simple to know how well your site is performing with our industry leading Site Performance Dashboard. We track all visitors to your site and report to you with clear, simple graphics, how many people visited it. We tell you what they did, how long they stayed, how they got there, how many valuations they asked for, what devices and browsers they were using and much more, even how many times each property has been viewed.

With this information you can make valid decisions on changes to make on an ongoing basis as we seek to get the best out of your site.

This is a free service to all Property Jungle clients and is unique in our industry.

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TECHNICAL

Standards

We use the following technologies in the sites we build: -

HTTPS HTTP/2

            

XHTML / HTML5

CSS PHP

Smarty

MySQL Database

JavaScript

JQuery NGINX

GOOGLE PAGE SPEED Apache Web Server

Linux Server

All of these technologies allow every site we build to work on every web capable device. We do not use Flash on any of the sites we build and thus every element will render correctly on Apple devices.

All HTML is tested to comply with W3C guidelines.

Usability & Compatibility

We ensure that sites we build look similar, albeit not identical, in all current browsers including: -

Internet Explorer 11

     

Firefox Chrome

Safari Opera

Edge

And all leading mobile versions of browsers such as Safari mobile, Chrome mobile, IE Mobile, Android Browser.

Hosting

We provide hosting of our sites on our Dedicated Private Cloud, hosted in London in a secure Data Centre managed by iOmart, one of the leading providers of Cloud hosting. The hosting environment that they provide us with comes with a 100% uptime SLA. We use high performance Dell servers connected to the internet through 2 firewalls with resilient unmetered bandwidth and Gigabit network connectivity. The Data Centre provides us with monitoring and management 24/7 and everything is backed up twice, on site in real time and off site every day. There is no single point of hardware failure and no interruption of service for hardware upgrades or maintenance.

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Email

The Property Jungle supplies a hosted email service that also brings you the very latest, fully licenced Microsoft Office software.

Office 365 brings you a massive 50Gb Mailbox per person as well as 1Tb of storage per person.

Business Premium users get Office 2016 with Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher and One Note included for installation and use on up to 5 devices per person and all synchronised in real time.

Business Essentials users get the same mailbox and storage space and can run the online versions of the Office suite of products.

Business Essentials costs £4.00 per month per account.

Business Premium costs £9.00 per month per account.

Both services include email backup and even email recovery to restore deleted emails within 30 days.

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SPECIFICATION

Site Map

The following is a site map based on your current website, which has been created entirely for illustrative purposes. This is in addition to the home page, search, thumbnail results, full details and does not include any additional features that you may choose.

1. ABOUT US

2. BUYING

3. SELLING

4. LETTING

5. RENTING

6. HOW MUCH IS YOUR PROPERTY WORTH

7. REGISTER

8. LOCAL AREA

9. REVIEWS

10. CONTACT US

Please note that this has been prepared in the absence of an actual specification and can therefore be changed howsoever you wish. It really doesn’t matter what any button is called. This is just to give you an idea of size/cost.

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COSTS

BESPOKE DESIGN

Based upon the above specification and functionality a bespoke designed site would work out as follows: -

Item Description

Cost

Create bespoke design to deliver a responsive website as per specification. Create HTML code to make the design function. Install database, connect feeds and customise. Build Home Page and master template files for the site. Build Search Form, Thumbnails results page and full details page. Build Legal Pages (Terms/Privacy/CAP/Cookies/Consumer Rights Act) Anti-spam Treatment for website forms Google Map Results Infinite Scroll

£2,750

10 x Static pages as per site map at £105 per page

£1,050 £3,800

TOTAL

I have listed below some websites that may be of interest to you from a design and functionality basis: http://wherewebelong.co.uk is a new site with integration with Dezrez. With a very distinctive design and most of the Add-ons that we provide this site cost just over £5,000. www.ralphjames.co.uk , has 9 pages of content, automatic email alerts, show results on a map, Property shortlist and would cost approximately £4,000 https://www.jdg.co.uk/ , has 7 pages of content with instant valuation and repair reporting tools integrated and a property shortlist and would be somewhere in the region of £3,600

You can see our full portfolio of websites here: http://www.thepropertyjungle.com/portfolio

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TEMPLATE SITES

Our selection of pre-designed sites can be customised in terms of colour, branding, text and imagery so that it is completely consistent with your brand identity. The structure can’t be changed and they are limited to 10 static pages maximum but they are extremely capable and attractive sites.

A template site costs £1,995 plus Vat.

Our full range of template sites can be seen here: http://www.thepropertyjungle.com/websites/templates/

You can of course add functionality to your template website, the cost of which will be added accordingly.

LICENCE AND HOSTING FEES

On an ongoing basis we charge a license fee of £70 per month per branch for the database and software that sits inside your site and makes the properties searchable.

This includes support, all data feeds and account management.

We charge an annual fee of £120 for hosting of the site.

We ask for no term longer than a 30 day notice period and are happiest knowing that we should do enough to make you want to stay, rather than locking you in to 1 or 2 year contracts

PAYMENT TERMS

Payment for the site build can be made either by invoice or by finance.

Invoice

If you choose the invoice route there will be two or three invoices raised depending on project timescale.

1. Deposit. We raise a deposit invoice of £500 at the start of the project. When received the project will commence.

2. When the project commences we will agree a target end date for construction of the site. We will invoice either the balance of the fee at that time if that date has been successfully hit. Alternatively, as sometimes happens, we may be waiting for you for example for the last content, sign off, images etc. and so we will invoice 90% of the balance of the fee on the target project completion date.

3. The remaining 10% of the balance of the fee will be invoiced when the site build is completed.

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Finance

This allows you to calculate the best way of managing your cash flow whilst still making the necessary investment in a stunning and effective web site. So taking the above example of a build cost of £3,800 you would have two options: - Deposit of £500 and monthly payments of £160 spread over 24 months or £115 spread over 36 months.

This option is subject to credit assessment.

SITE FOR LIFE

If you are happy with the monthly payment terms then when you come to the end of the term you can automatically renew your site simply by continuing making the payments and we will deliver a new site for you to the same specification with an all new design.

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