All Forum Posts by: William Huston

I just signed up with a Broker today and they supplied me an organized list of things i need to order, acquire, or have before i start truly working as an Agent. I asked the broker and he recommended 24x30 aluminum, but those seem very expensive and i just want to make sure im not going overboard on this from the start, because there is a house in my neighborhood that is for sale, so i walked down and looked at the sign and it was just the corrugated plastic with metal eyelets at the top in the holes... 

My question is how many signs should i go with from the start as a new agent, as well what size is recommended for the post?

Also what type of material would all of y'all recommend? i was looking at one of the sites listed to purchase from and it defaulted to hard board as the recommended material for signs, then corrugated heavy pvc as most popular and then lists other materials like steel and aluminum. 

OK, so i had more than one person on here private message me to inform me that they tried to use google voice/hangout and they couldn't get the phone number to ring on their phone... Just thought id share my input on this issue since i ran into this about 2 years ago myself when i first switched all my text and such through google hangout over the factory messaging service. 

First you need to download google hangout if you dont have it as well google dialer, the google dialer is to add the tab in google hangout to allow you to call any number easier instead of using the built in app dialer as well gives you a better dialer option that shows which number your calling from and allowing you to switch on the fly via one button.. 

Then you need to go to https://www.google.com/voice#phones and check the left side if it says "your number" over a phone number, because if your number is from before google hangout came out it may still be stuck in limbo between a google voice or google messaging number which both can't receive phone calls over google hangout. 

Then on the right side or kinda middle, there is a list of phones that are verified to ring your hangout calls to, you can have your hangouts ring on a ton of different numbers if you want your business "google hangout number" to ring on multiple lines, this is very useful trick if you have family overseas, but ill explain that later in the post...

Once you select the numbers you want to verify with, then you have it call you, enter the pin code and its done, all you have to do is select receive calls on that number and now go to your google hangouts app and make sure under settings that "allow incoming calls to ring" is toggled on and you will be able to answer phone calls via that verified cell phone.

Bonus:

As mentioned if you have family in other countries, a free way of getting around international fees is to setup a google account with a local number to the person you talk with on a regular basis, it has to be an additional gmail account, then verify that number with your in states cell phone and in google hangout you can add that additional gmail account to the hangout app and toggle for incoming calls, Then when that person calls the local number to their country using a normal cell phone service, it will ring back here in the states on your verified phone so you can answer the phone and talk as if it was a local phone call within that country. 

The only thing tho is i have never used the service for a business line, so i thought i ask to see if there was maybe a better option out there or if just having a 2nd line is beneficial... because i know a lot of stuff like that are business write-offs

may i ask why you would vote sideline over google voice/hangout? just curious

@Account Closed, but i have my google number setup to ring at home on my Voip phones as well to ring on my cell phone.. 

What exactly do you mean by "it goes to a voice mail"

I am learning the ropes still as i scout out brokers to work for and was curious what others do, do you use your personal number for your contact number for the business or do you have a second phone? I have also contemplated just adding google voice to my phone since i already own a local google voice number and using that for the business side, it would make it easier to contact people when your at the computer, you could use a mic and make your calls as well have google hangout open to text or call people when needed.. 

Just wanted to see how others do it?

to be honest, i would just not tell them what your after.. i have been scouting out brokers since i just passed my state exam here in Florida and i have found that many agents in the office are only part time or still have their license at the office, but after a few months found no success and had to get another job in hopes of coming back and never did.. so many agents according to the brokers ive talked to had many agents with 0 sales for the entire year.. your an independent contractor to them, they cant force you to bring them business.. they make money no matter what way you find houses using their office...

I am a newly licensed agent and i have been told i need to log my miles for deduction on my taxes so i have been researching all of the different options out there. I have installed a few and played around with their features and so far MilesIQ seems to be the easiest to use out of the handful i have been testing out, Triplog works fine when i have it setup on fully automatic, but boy does it drain the battery and when i tried to set it up to use a OBD2 dongle i purchased to save power it has not been able to reliably log miles, it seems to miss any trips i sit to long in the car before taking off after it initially detects the obd2 device.. hurdlr seems to be just as accurate as MilesIQ in the fact of logging miles driven and its completely free to use, but the whole selecting which is business and which is personal feature of the app is a bit odd and slow, when you mistakenly swipe one as a business trip and it was suppose to be personal, for the life of me i have not figured out how to correct this in the app and there is no login website to try and correct it either, i am waiting for reply from help request on that step... 

So, i was thinking i was going to just leave MilesIQ on my phone and upgrade it to a payed plan when i realized i was kinda upset with how much it task my phone.. out of all the apps i have tested, according to android battery task manager, driving the exact same trip to test each app out.. i noticed that MilesIQ just barely, but pulls ahead in using the most battery power while its in use and when you're just walking around and not logging miles, the constant checking of the phone's sensors to detect if another ride is in progress really makes my cell phone battery drop much quicker than it does without the app installed, so i started looking into other options that were not app related and a few popped up with the most accurate and favored one being the Miles Ace, but some have stated the device died between 1-2yrs after purchase and many people complain about how hard it is to setup the wifi feature on the device and if you dont drive for week or so, the device can sometimes loose its settings or just act weird and fail to log rides.. so i dug further and found some people use the OBD2 dongles, which cuts the battery usage of many tracking apps down to a fraction, because the device is no longer checking its built in accelerometer sensors and such 24/7, now only doing it once the OBD2 dongle is detected, but still many claim that some car charges struggle to keep up on some model phones or the rate of offsetting the discharge on the phone is very slow, causing your phone to recharge at very very slow rate compared to without the app running.. 

So, today i had this bright idea pop into my head while talking with a friend about it, because i was going to get all nerdy with it and build a raspberry pi with andriod so i could run the apps and just install a GPS addon to the pi, when i realized i have a few old cell phones in the drawer i no longer use that are basically paper weights at this stage in their life, so i pulled them out and picked out an old samsung s4 i replaced with my current samsung note 4 and booted it up after charging it for a few minutes and wiped it completely clean, the only app i installed for my test today was MilesIQ on the phone and set it up to my home wifi... i drove to the mall today to take the girlfriend shopping and to test the idea out, i turned off drive detection on the app on my Personal cell phone so it wouldn't log the miles and all i did was plug the old Samsung S4 into my charge cord in the car and layed the phone in my cup holder for the entire trip there and back... on my personal cell phone the notification that a trip was in progress never showed up, but the S4 it did.. and when i arrived at the mall i checked the app and it never showed any new trips added... When i got home from the mall this evening i checked it again shortly after arrival and all the miles from the trip to the mall and back were listed on the app and online once i logged in.. so test 1 was a complete success and it is able to keep track of the miles completely separate from my personal cell phone without draining its battery and uses an old cell phone i had no use for to operate it and track via gps.. 

I am going to continue to test the idea out with a few more trips using the old cell phone as the miles tracker... i am unsure if all apps are available to do this method of tracking, but so far MilesIQ seems to be functioning in this fashion.. BONUS!, you can swipe which are personal and business from your personal cell phone after the 2nd cell phone has uploaded the data via wifi.....

Another option i would love to figure out how to export correctly is Google Maps Timeline, its extremely accurate.. i was comparing the data to my week of trying out MileIQ and it said i drove 22.6miles less in MileIQ for the week letting it log all my trips automatic compared to google timeline and google timeline is already running in the background if you have google maps activated with your gps setting turned on.. so it would be one less app to worry about draining battery on my phone.. gonna have to look into this more and see how hard it is to export the timeline to an actual spreadsheet...

Has anyone tried Handlr? was checking it out, seems completely free from what i can tell... does automatic logging of miles once you set it up to sync to a google drive, i have no experience with it yet, but i did see an option to type in an MLS number to log miles under specific properties..

I was curious which method you go about using to track your miles for tax purposes