ProAPOD® has plans to release a series of short informative videos about the features it provides in it real estate investment software solutions. The idea is to alert ProAPOD® users that the features exist, and in some cases to instruct the users how the features work.

In this video I cover the Flash-form. If you don’t know, the Flash-form is a dynamic and time-saving feature that enables you to quickly determine the bottom line on investment property with minimum data entries. It is only provided in ProAPOD® 10.0.

You can watch this short video presentation (about 3 min) on our real estate investment software website at http://www.proapod.com/Videos/flash/flash.html. After viewing, be sure to hit your browser’s back button to return to our blog.

Please feel free to submit suggestions on other portions of the real estate software you would like to see covered in a video tutorial. Just shoot me an email.

Real estate agents typically miss opportunities to sell rental income property because aren’t prepared to work with real estate investment property. They lack enough rental property knowledge to talk with investors, and they don’t possess adequate tools to service investors on the spot during their first encounter with the investor.

I’ve seen it a thousand times. Real estate colleagues rush around the office just after receiving an up call or walk-in asking how to calculate capitalization rate. They wanted to make a sale, but were totally lost.

By that time, however, it was generally too late for my colleague. In most cases, at least from my experience, when an agent fails to adequately impress the real estate investor in the first encounter, leaving the investor with the impression that the agent knows or cares little about income property, the investor moves on to another agent.

It’s perplexing to me why most real estate agents don’t get it. That working with rental income property is just a matter of preparation. But rather then preparing with Armani and Mercedes, what most impresses a real estate investor is a real estate agent who understands investment property, is able to provide timely numbers, and generally displays a concern how the investor spends his or her money.

This is not difficult to do. There are plenty of resources on the web where agents can learn real estate investment terms and formulas. There is real estate investment software that enables agents to quickly run the numbers, and make quality presentations for investors. With even a slight initiative, any real estate agent can easily prepare to capture investment property opportunities and gain investor loyalty when they arise.

Best of all, the effort is worth it. Here’s a secret. Real estate investors (unlike homebuyers) often purchase multiple properties, and tend to exchange up to larger properties over time. In other words, whenever you get the opportunity to work with one investor on one transaction, you potentially get multiple transactions.

There’s no need to risk losing the opportunity. Set aside time to learn about real estate investing and budget for quality real estate investing software. Moreover, have it at your disposal beforehand, in preparation for your chance encounter with an investor. Bear in mind that you may get just one shot to work with the next income property opportunity; it will cost you not to take advantage of it.

Microsoft Vista has implemented stricter security settings that change the way users access folders and files on their computers and in the process did make things more complicated for ProAPOD Real Estate Investment Software users.

Primarily, Vista’s default security setting prevents our real estate software users from saving their work, and in turn prompts an error message when attempting to Save As. This issue, of course, has been extremely frustrating, but not just for users of our software. Do a search for “Vista Read Only” and witness for yourself the countless inquiries and complaints made by Vista users on the web.

Why this problem with Vista? Microsoft attempted to make it more difficult for malware to access your folders and files but in this process (whether by design or oversight) also makes it more difficult for owners of those folders and files to access them.

After much research and some trial and error I discovered that the issue lies with the “permission” settings Vista applies to the folders by default, and the resolution is for the user to manually change those “permissions” in order to gain back the rightful control of those folders.

If you are currently using ProAPOD® Real Estate Investment Software on Windows Vista please read the following instructions to resolve the issue.

1. From your desktop right-click My Computer and then click Explore.
2. Click the plus (+) symbol on your C: drive to open the list of folders.
3. Scroll down to Program Files and click the plus (+) symbol to open the list of folders.
4. Locate and right-click the ProAPOD folder and then click Share…
5. Open the Security tab.
6. Under Group or user names click on Users. (Note in the Permssions for Users panel below that there are limited permissions; we want to achieve “Full control” for each group).
7. Double-click Edit.
8. Under Permissions for Users click Full control.
9. Click Apply and then click OK.

Result: ProAPOD will open normally (not as “Read Only”) and you can properly Save and Save As your files. If not, repeat these steps for each other group of names.

If you would like to read this article with screen shots please go to http://www.proapod.com/Articles/vista-perm.html