NEW Company Page Design

[Mindy Jensen]

One of the most frequent posts in the forums is a recommendation request for an agent or hard money lender. While these requests are against our rules due to the self-promotional responses they generate, we realize that these are service providers our members need! Do you know that we have a company directory where BP members' own companies show up?

We recently redesigned the company profiles—we heard from BP members on what matters when it comes to looking for an agent and hard money lender. To make it easier for investors to connect with a vendor, we took that feedback and featured certain things more prominently on the company profile:

- forum posts (how active is the vendor in the forums?)
- references from past clients
- deals done with BP members
- blog posts (does the vendor offer good advice?)
- years of experience
- and other stats! 

If you click on a Premium profile, you can quickly see a vendor's past deals with BP members, references from other BP members, and click into the company owner's forum and blog posts. It's easier than ever to decide if you want to work with an agent or HML!

We will be adding more features to the directory & profile in the coming weeks (a better resources section, deals that the company owner has posted on the marketplace, events that the owner is hosting, and more), but please give @Connor Center and @Account Closed feedback in the comments below or email them at [email protected] for features you'd like to see or general questions, concerns, etc.

So check out our company directory and search for a vendor by area, and let us know what you like and what you want to see different. We're very open to changes that will help you reach your real estate investing goals faster.

Good luck assembling your all-star team!

[Chris Mason]

Originally posted by @Account Closed:

That is great feedback Chris! Thank you for thinking about how we could improve that. 

That definitely makes sense that there are cases in which the company owner bounces and the post count is not reflective of the team. I changed this for you (so now you should see your post and vote count reflected on the company). We've been thinking about how to incorporate all team members' posts. One thing we're running into is we don't want to penalize an agent with 1 team member on BP for having 5k posts when another agent might have 5 people on their team and 20k posts. 

Any thoughts?

 Do you believe in democracy?

Whoever has the most forum upvotes for a given quarter 'owns' the business page for the following quarter, and they can only be upset if another person at the same outfit beats them by 10% the next quarter. While that person 'owns' it, their post count, upvotes, etc, are what shows up, and they can change whatever they like (phone number, etc) on the listing. Other than that, if management at a company doesn't like it, etc, they can deal with it internally and it's not your (or BP management's) problem.

So if Realtor Jack Smith at Long & Foster doesn't like @Russell Brazil being dictator of L&F on BP, then Realtor Jack had better out-contribute and out-help Russel in the BP community, or too bad for Realtor Jack Smith. And if Russel stops actively participating, then the very next quarter whoever IS still contributing automatically gets the helm (this should trigger a notification and an email to both). Return on Investment.... Whoever invests the most in the BP community, gets the most from it. If that means Russel sells some houses that he otherwise wouldn't have sold, power to 'em, he earned the business by helping out on the forums, as evidenced by his upvotes. We don't see a lot of property managers participate, maybe this would help with that too.

You'd have to manually consolidate, so there aren't 500 different Keller Williams, etc. I can't think of anything to solve that part.

This is of course a highly self serving proposal as someone that contributes a lot, BUT it does put control in the hands of the BP membership at large, while encouraging useful (ie, not spam, since that never gets upvoted) forum participation. :)