Note: 50% discount time period on CMS 2.0 has now expired - Please do not use this post as a pricing guide for CMS 2.0 upgrades - instead visit the work orders forum to request an estimate.

On Wednesday, February 6th 2008 we will be launching our new backend for customer use as a beta.

We are very excited about the new funtionality that this system provides to our customers and with this upgrade this should make 2008 the best year ever for client closings from their REW websites.

This very affordable upgrade represents a complete overhaul of our backend including new CMS (With new wysiwyg editor) new featured listings management, and most importantly new lead management. Some of the more significant changes I will list below:

REW CMS: (Content management system) - Our system still includes all of the great features our customers are used to such as adding unlimited pages and sub pages. Creating custom titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords and footers as well as being able to give each page a search engine friendly filename.

Added to this CMS is a new version of the editor (Wysiwyg) that has some exciting features such as the ability to create and edit tables, an undo redo function, find and replace, custom / special character selector, strikethrough, dropdown secondary CSS styles, new html viewer, new image manager (With the ability to have folders) new text alignment options - I could go on, but you get the idea.

Featured listings: Once again a complete overhaul - features include the ability to create your own custom suite of property features, management of locations database, built in Google mapping of featured properties, drag and drop photo organization, advanced settings such as longitute and latitude, elementary, middle and high school, driving directions.

Lead management: This is the big one! REW Customers have long been awaiting an upgrade to the REW lead management platform, the new REW Leads system is a complete change from anything you might be used to. Drip email management, campaign management, groups, leads and agent functionality have all been completely revamped and we have packed it full of new features such as our document management system which allows you to create, store and organize documents and emails into easy to access categories which can be recalled for single or group emailing or drip email campaigns.

Pricing: This is probably the most asked question I have been asked during the development of this platform and hopefully you will all be pleasantly surprised. The pricing is broken into 2 parts, an installation cost and a monthly fee.

Installation is based on labor required for upgrade. I have authorized a 50% discount on all hours required to upgrade your systems so instead of our normal $100 USD rate, you get $50 a hour. For the most standard non IDX systems the average install time is 1-2 hours so that translates into a total cost range of $50-$100 USD for the upgrade. Those with complex custom IDX systems will naturally take a bit longer thus why we have chosen the hourly route so that we are compensated for the time it takes for the upgrade, while keeping the upgrade cost fair and equitable for all.

Monthly: The monthly increase to uprade to the new system is only $10 USD per month. That's right, all new technology, and support for only $10 per month. As all REW customers know, our platform is billed yearly so upon upgrading you will be billed $10 per month times the amount of months left until your platform / hosting renewal. Platform / Hosting renewal invoices will then be going out at $480 USD instead of $360 USD.

This upgrade is completely optional - I want to stress how much of an improvement these technology upgrades are and for the cost of $10 per month, we feel they have the ability to save considerable time for our customers who manage their own sites, and use them as a lead generation source. However, this upgrade is completely optional - if you prefer to keep using the version 1.0 REW CMS that you currently have, that is completely your choice and you will not be forced to upgrade or be hit with the increased $10 per month fee for the new platform.

First come first serve - As with our christmas promo, we will be handling the upgrades on a first come first serve basis. REW has a very large development staff, but the fact of the matter is, there is an upper limit to hours available, thus we will be handling upgrades on a first come first serve basis based on the order in which we receive payment.