BiggerPockets Founder's Blog

Some more updates to BiggerPockets for everyone to know about:

• Member Status Updates will now also appear at the bottom of your forum posts (below your signature).  Visit the following link for more on status updates.
• Your company's name will now appear more prominently on your profile, just below your occupation.  We've had requests from members to make their company more visible, and we hope this change satisfies.
• We're working on making it easier for members with a lot of colleagues to organize them all.  We should launch these updates in the next day or so.

We've been working on some important updates lately on BiggerPockets and I want to point them out to you:

Share Your Status on your Profile and for your Colleagues:

As the micro-blogging trend online continues to grow, we've added capabilities for our members to keep their colleagues up to speed on their activities. 

Members can now UPDATE their STATUS, by posting in 100 characters or less what's new with them.  These updates will show up at the top of your PROFILE, and in the FRIENDS ACTIVITY LOG of your colleagues in the DASHBOARD.

Here's how:

a) On all of our social networking pages below the BiggerPockets logo, you'll see "Logged in as: Your Name" with a little blue icon to the right of it.  Click that icon and you'll see a text box and Update Status button appear. Simply post your status and hit the button and you'll be redirected to your profile, where you'll see your new status update.

b) Click the UPDATE STATUS link at the left of the DASHBOARD (right above the Updates section).  Then, enter your update and click the Update Status button.  You'll be redirected to your profile, where you'll see your status below your name and occupation.

Below: An example of a status message on a profile:

We hope our members find this improvement to be a helpful way to communicate with their colleagues, and to share their ongoing real estate activities with one another.

Front Page Redirection to Dashboard:

Any member who is logged in to BiggerPockets will now be redirected to their DASHBOARD when they try to go to our homepage.  We're making the Dash into your own personal hub on the site, and have placed all of the links and resources that were on the homepage in the dash.

You'll also note that the three main tabs in the DASHBOARD are listed below.  Whenever you return to the dash, you'll see the most recent tab that you viewed open up.

- Friends Activity - Shows you what your colleagues on BiggerPockets are doing.  You can see when your colleagues: update their status, join a group, post a blog article or comment, post a property or comment, post a bulletin or comment, change their profile picture, upload a photo or gallery, etc.

- Latest Forum Activity - Shows you the last 15 posts in the forums.

- BiggerPockets Blog -  Shows you the last 5 articles on the BiggerPockets blog, written by our panel of experts in all areas of real estate.

We've Made it Easier to Invite Your Friends and Colleagues to BiggerPockets

There are two new ways to invite people to join the site. You'll now see an INVITE A FRIEND box on the left side of the forums, right below the FEATURED PROPERTIES box. Additionally, in the DASHBOARD, you'll see an invite link in the NETWORKING dropdown.

Part of what makes BiggerPockets special is the amount of shared knowledge on the site.  We hope that you'll all take some time to invite people you know to join you here on the site and help us expand the knowledge base even more!

Additional Changes and Fixes

- We've moved all site stats from the front page of the site to our official STATS PAGE. (Note: you'll find the link to the stats page at the bottom of all site pages)

- We've fixed the recent colleague request issue. If you got an error or blank page after following a link in a colleague request email, that link will now work.  Additionally, you'll see colleague requests in the notifications section of the top right of the dashboard.

BiggerPockets has undergone tremendous growth over the last year, and we're excited to let you know that the best is yet to come!  We've got many plans for the site, both large and small, for 2009. 

One of the big goals for BiggerPockets for this year is to reach the 100,000 member plateau.  I think we can easily achieve this number and more, if our current and future members help put the word out and let everyone know why BiggerPockets is the best real estate social network around.

We just want to thank everyone who has been been supportive of the site over the past few years, and we hope that you'll all stick by us as we introduce great new tools and features to help you all with your real estate investing and professional careers.

Coming This Week - Post Your Status to Your Profile and Friend's Activity in the Dashboard!

Micro-blogging through websites like Twitter has become incredibly popular recently and we've decided to make it possible for our members to share their latest activites with their colleagues and others with a new Status feature.  Members will be able to post in 100 characters or less, what they're up to at any given moment.

This minor improvement will hopefully allow our users to give others a small glimpse into their daily real estate lives.

Coming This Week - Dashboard Redirection

As our members have come to rely on their Dashboard to help them to create and navigate their profiles, and the rest of the site, we're planning on redirecting members who are logged in to the site from the current front page directly to the Dashboard.  We know that this will make the daily activities for our members easier to accomplish, but we didn't want to surprise you.  

Other New Features Coming Soon

You didn't think I'd let the rabbit out of the hat, did you?

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