BiggerPockets Founder's Blog

Happy Holidays everyone!  We launched a few changes to the BiggerPockets site this afternoon that I thought worth sharing.

• Members can now share their real estate wants and needs on their profiles in the Currently Seeking section.  Whether you're looking for properties, partners, money, clients, etc. you can share these so others on the site can more easily connect and work with you.
• We've drastically sped up the Dashboard and other areas of the site!  Regular members will see a big change!
• We've upgraded the recent forum posts section of the Dashboard to make it easier to navigate.
• Corrected several problems in the BiggerPockets Blogging platform.  Users will no longer see blank trackbacks on their articles;  we've also fixed a few bugs in the comments.
• Improved pagination issues throughout the site.
• Fixed several bugs in the member password reset system.  

We've got more great BiggerPockets upgrades for you today!

 We've launched an upgrade to the PM Conversation system, including the following features:

• New styling - we've cleaned up the design of the system
• Increased speed - We've sped up the system considerably and are working onother speed improvements.
• Message archive - members can archive old posts that they want to save. 
• Address Book - Members now have an address book that they can use to locate their colleagues with when sending a new message.  The address book link can be found on the send a message page.
• The ability to report a message - you can report SPAM messages that have been sent to you to an administrator.  This will help us to kick out people who abuse the site.
• The ability to mark multiple messages as read or unread.

• The ability to opt-out of a conversation that you don't want to be a part of.  If you're a part of a conversation with multiple people, you can use the "Remove Entire Conversation" link to stop being a part of it.

In addition to the changes in our PM conversation system, we've also made a change to the Dashboard.  Members can now see the latest informative news articles from the BiggerPockets blog right in their Dash!

In the very near future, we're planning on redirecting all logged in members to the Dashboard instead of the front page of the site.  Please be prepared for this change soon.

 Got questions, comments, etc, post a comment!

One of the core components of BiggerPockets is the dealmaking that happens on the site.  These deals take place through our Property Directory and on our forums.

Making it Easier to Make Deals

We've gone ahead and created a new area in the forums called Real Estate Dealmaking, and included in it the following forums:

• Make Deals, Find Partners, Mentors & BirdDogs, etc.
• Property Wanted 
• Seeking Financing, Money, or Loans
• Bulk REO Discussion and REO Dealmaking Forum
• Tax Liens, Notes, Paper, & Cash Flows Dealmaking
• Dealmaking Success Stories

In an effort to further stimulate dealmaking, we've removed all minimum post restrictions on posting in these forums (except Bulk REO).

We hope that you'll continue to use BiggerPockets to share your deals and we want to thank all of you for continuing to make suggestions that lead to an improved BiggerPockets community.

Share Your Success with Us

As you can see from the list of forums above, the last one it called Dealmaking Success Stories.  We created this forum so our members can share all of their successes with one another. We feel that this is an important forum, because by seeing the successes we all have, we can further inspire one another. 

Please do take some time and share your recent success stories with the rest of us

BTW - We also want to hear any successes you've had thanks to BiggerPockets.  Whether you just met an important contact, or you closed on a HUGE deal, we want to know.

Best, 

Joshua Dorkin, Founder/CEO

Speed, Style, and Incentives

You may have noticed that we just rebuilt the front page of BiggerPockets. This redesign came about for several reasons.

 Here's a few things of note:

1 - The old front page took almost 6 seconds to load on a broadband connection -- that was not acceptable! The new front is much faster!
2 - The old front page had little information for possible new members. The current front page is designed to get possible new members excited about signing up!  It is important to focus on recruitment, and we believe the new page will greatly help.
3 - Instead of just showing random members on the front, we're now showing members, others who live in their area. If you log in from Los Angeles, you'll see members in LA, while New Yorkers will see their fellow New York City residents. If your city doesn't have a lot of BP members, you'll see others in your state.
4 - We're still showing the latest 6 forum posts and have added the most recent 4 articles from our blog. After polling a group of current members, we determined that these were the two things that they used the most on the old front.
5 - We updated our registration page to include more info why members should sign up.

We hope that these moves help to drive new signups to the site, while satisfying the needs of our current membership.

Thanks for listening . . . we've got more great improvements coming to other parts of the site soon.

BiggerPockets is Hoping You'll Help Get Us Nominated for a Prestigious Tech Award! 

Hey folks!  Like the Oscars and Emmys, there is an award for companies in Technology, and I'm hoping that you'll nominate BiggerPockets! The 2008 Crunchies are put on by some of the top tech companies, and we'd love to be considered (If you really want to get in my good graces, you could nominate me, Joshua Dorkin, for Best Startup CEO or Startup Founder)