Spark Updates May 2019
Imports, reporting, commissions upgrades, and more. Learn more about the most recent updates to the Spark real estate sales platform, including importer, reporting and commission upgrades.
Imports, reporting, commissions upgrades, and more
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New Importer
New clients migrating to Spark will be pleased to learn that our data importing tool has received a significant upgrade.
Thanks to these changes, our customer success team is now able to help you import associated data from a single spreadsheet. For example, you can import contracts with purchasers, agents, brokerages, inventory, and floorplans, regardless of how that data may have been linked in your previous system. This improvement to the base structure will lead to even more flexibility for the types of data you can import down the road, and will help you hit the ground running on your new project faster than ever before!
Custom Report Widget Updates
There are several new additions to custom reports, and more on the way.
“is not empty” filter
You can now filter your records by the presence of an attribute, regardless of what the contained value is. For example, if you wanted to create a widget that grouped contacts by their marketing source, you might want to filter by first finding all the contacts with any sort of marketing source listed; i.e., “marketing source is not empty”.
Contact/Agent widget scopes
In addition to normal filtering, you can now narrow down your selection of contacts or agents using a scope — for contacts, the current options are whether or not they have one or more assigned agents; and for agents, whether or not they have one or more assigned clients.
More options may be added in the future.
Traffic Statistics
The traffic statistics widget is the first “predefined” widget in the Spark custom reports library — predefined widgets will have limited customization options, but they will be configured to display information commonly requested by users. Some of them may look familiar from our legacy reports.
The traffic summary above shows new and returning leads, agent traffic, and web registrants.
Contract Summary
The contract summary is somewhat of an exception as far as customization for predefined widgets goes — it can be customized in nearly all the same ways as the Contracts widget.
The main difference is the addition of value and average calculations. This is the equivalent of the “Unit Breakdown” in our legacy sales report, but for contract information rather than inventory. You’re also now able to set date ranges (on both the default Contracts and Contract Summary widgets) based on status changed date, not just a specific contract date.
Project Revenue
On the other end of the spectrum, the project revenue widget offers no customization at all — this widget displays all-time statistics about the progress of the project’s sales, and average prices per area.
Search for Agents on a Contract
We had a number of ways to search for firm and potential buyers on contracts, but we were lacking the same flexibility for agents. This has now been rectified and should make grouping and building email lists much easier and faster.
Sales Centre Activity
We have added a new toggle-able column to the contact list that contains the number of sales centre and tour interactions that a contact or agent has been assigned to. Used in combination with search, this can be a powerful way to determine the most or least active people at a glance.
Commissions Upgrade
Our commissions feature has gotten a complete overhaul, which we will describe in detail in another post. In short, our former commissions have been migrated to a new Conveyancing section, which is fully accessible by admin and conveyancing users from the main and settings menus, with limited permissions currently available to assigned team members on contracts.
Important changes:
- Commissions are no longer applied by editing the contract. Permitted user roles may add them from the contract profile.
- Deposits have been moved into the conveyancing section as well.
- Commission structures can contain one or many commissions, and a single commission can have one or many amounts.
- Commission structures can also be applied automatically. For external commissions, these will be applied when one or more agents are added to a contract. Internal commission structures will only be applied automatically if a default payee is assigned.
- Commissions can also be marked as splittable, which will divide the total value between the agents assigned to the contract, or the specified payees.
- We also now track commission payments, similarly to how we handle deposit payments.
This is the first step in the ongoing development of this feature and we look forward to sharing more with you as additional updates are released!
Feel free to email us at hello@spark.re with any questions regarding the new features! Visit us at Spark to learn more about the platform.
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