Setting up your scout pages
How to create the perfect landing page for recruiting bird dogs.
The 'welcome' and 'details' pages in PropertyScout are your best way to communicate with your bird dogs/scouts. This is where you can introduce yourself, explain what you are looking for or how you personally operate. From the dashboard, you can easily change these pages with whatever message you want to convey to new drivers. On top of that, you can edit the HTML directly, meaning that you can embed widgets, videos, and maps as you please.
A strong, attractive landing page will increase the likelihood of recruiting new bird dogs. Please be mindful of the local laws for your county and state. PropertyScout does not condone or encourage unlicensed real estate brokering or paying unlicensed commissions on real estate sales.
How to edit your scout pages
PropertyScout uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor called Summernote that allows you to customize the welcome page. It offers most of the conventional text format options, like bold, italics, underline, colors, paragraph centering, and more.
From your dashboard, open up the welcome page editor by clicking 'Change welcome page', and use this editor to write your message.
Save your edits as you work, and make sure it looks good on both phone screens and desktops!
A template for you to use
If you don't want to bother with setting up your own page, here is a generic template you can copy. All you have to do is copy the text below, click 'Code View' on your page editor, paste it into the editor's body, and save. Turn off 'Code View' to see it normally.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<h5>Hi, we're a local real estate investment company. We'd like to invite you to make money driving for dollars with us. All you have to do is send us houses that look like they haven't been cared for, and you can do it right from this site.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> For each good house that you send us, we'll pay you $0.75 cents.</span></h5><h3 style="text-align: center; "><br></h3><h3 style="text-align: center; "><br></h3><h3 style="text-align: center; ">Start with this video if you want to learn what driving for dollars is and how to do it:</h3><h3 style="text-align: center; "><iframe frameborder="0" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_8LjzUwPIxk" width="70%" height="360" class="note-video-clip" style="font-size: 1rem;"></iframe></h3><p><br></p><h3></h3><h4 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here are some examples of houses that we are looking for: </span></h4><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://media.graytvinc.com/images/690*388/VACANT+HOUSE5.JPG" class="responsive" style="font-family: inherit; width: 381.297px; height: 214.409px;"></div><h6 style="text-align: center;">(Boarded windows)</h6><p style="text-align: center;"><br></p><p style="text-align: center; "><img src="https://nccde.org/ImageRepository/Document?documentID=26956" class="responsive" style="width: 375.531px; height: 246.523px;"></p><p style="text-align: center; "><br></p><p style="text-align: center; "><img src="https://nccde.org/ImageRepository/Document?documentID=26948" style="width: 354.422px; height: 264.978px;"></p><p style="text-align: center; "><b>(Tall grass and weeds)</b></p><div style="text-align: center;"><br></div><h6 style="text-align: left;"><br></h6><h6 style="text-align: left;">We're looking forward to working with you! If you need to contact us, feel free to reach out. Thank you!<br>Your name<br>Your number<br>Your email</h6><p></p>
Advanced inspiration
You can add a lot to your welcome page, like maps and videos. This is our welcome page, which has embedded pictures, videos, and formatting.
Adding a picture
Adding a picture is easy. If it's already on the internet, you just need to copy the url. If you want to include a picture of your own, you need to upload it to a hosting service like imgur, then copy the url from your uploaded image.
Once you have your URL, you can easily insert it into the page. Click the picture button, paste the link, and click 'Insert Image'.
Adding a video
The process of adding a video is essentially the same as adding a picture, but instead of clicking the picture icon, you click the video button. Paste the link to your video from YouTube or Vimeo.
We've made a video explaining how to drive for dollars, specifically designed for recruiting and training new bird dogs.
Here's the link so you can insert it into your own page if you want to use it:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_8LjzUwPIxk
Adding a map
You can show your bird dogs a map of the area you want them to drive in, like this:
This is an interactive map, with a familiar zoom and pan interaface. You've probably noticed that there are colored borders and shapes, and we use these to give our bird dogs a sense of direction. You can make a map just like this one and put it on your welcome page.
Start by going to Google My Maps (Not Google Maps!) and log into your Google account. Click 'Create a new map', and you can build a map similar to the one above for your area. Here's a helpful article if you're having trouble.
Once you're happy with your map, you can add it to your welcome page by embedding it with HTML. Click the three dots on the map, then 'Embed map'
Copy this, and you'll need to paste it into the 'Code View' of your scout page. Go back to your PropertyScout dashboard, and open the welcome page editor by clicking 'Change welome page'. Click the 'Code View' button, and paste the code into the editor's body. Turn off code view, and see how it looks.