New Features!

Hi Everyone,

We have released some great new feature for you this week.

2 new fields have been added to the Contacts section: Website and Probability. Simply enter in your customers URL into the Website field to store it in the contact. The probability drop down contains a set of percentage values that allowing you evaluate prospects and their chances of closing.

For all of you who manage property, we now give you the ability to enter in Policy Information. Navigate to the Hold tab and open up a detailed view of your property. Next to "Maintenance" you'll find a "Policies" tab. In the tab you'll find a Policy Type drop down list. This list is fully configurable from thy System Config section. This list will contain all the different policies that you define. It can be anything from Insurance, Warranty, etc...

Thank you all for using MyPropFolio. If you have any question, please email us at info@mypropfolio.com

There's Good News, and Better News

Is this us making better decisions?

Here is a brief recap of what we've seen in this week's news--and let me just say that I am pleased to report only certain news (kind of like Fox, except mine is positive) this week that actually points to the fact that we, as a society, might actually be making better decisions as far as where we're putting our money right now. Some newsbreaks and heartbreaks (Ford) are both indicating that perhaps America is moving toward better long-term decisions and infrastructure.

Big Companies Posting Losses I could spend the rest of this post listing the stated losses for large Wall Street firms, but the upshot is that these losses are currently resulting from large companies that dealt in action-rate-securities, who are now literally taking back their debts. CitiGroup, UBS, and HSBC have all agreed (perhaps under the judgmental eye of the New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, to literally give back huge portions to securities. This means that some municipalities could see a bolster in their values, and is a good sign that the firms will be held, at least to some degree, accountable for this mess.

Citizens Accidentally More Green Also this week, as reported by BusinessWeek and WSJ, even thoug gas prices dropped a few cents, Amtrack ridership increased by 13.9% in July, which means that more Americans are using this as a commuting-solution, and probably as a cheaper way to vacation around the US. Similarly, Honda posted a Q2 rise in profits due to its sale of hybrid and gas-efficient vehicles. I hate that Ford is having difficulties, but I do like to see that we're placing our expendable dollars in a car company that not only manufactires but also exports from the US, and which has a toehold in truly new technology that could change the face of modern transportation. Says last week's WSJ, in the "What's News" section: "BMW's and Daimler's latest sales figures reflect the shift among consumers to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars."

Fannie and Freddie are Put on a Lobbying Leash
While the jury is still out on whether Fannie and Freddie will be allowed to continue lobbying to US legislators, the press is now acknowledging that there is a serious incongruity between what Fannie and Freddie do (buy mortgages on behalf of the government) and who gets stuck with the bill (the US people). Thank goodness. I highlighted a sketchy solution a few weeks ago in this post as was noted by a unanimous Economist article. But I did not think that they might ever be cut off from the lobbyists...It may be a new day yet!

Stay tuned for next week's developments which are sure to be as complicated as this week's!

Weekly Release

Hi Everyone,

We don't have any new to release this week. We've been working on our Outlook sync feature and building the Community. We're all very excited to show you the Community section once it's ready. It's going to be a great way for you to network with others in the industry and help grow your business.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback. If you have any suggestions that you would like to see in MyPropFolio, feel free to send us an email at info@mypropfolio.com.

Have a great Weekend

United We Lend, Divided We Fall

Raw Deal...Can We Get a Neo-New Deal, Please?
This is a picture of FDR giving a radio speech from the White House on March 12, 1933. The reason he is giving a radio speech is because he is trying to communicate to the general public--those that don't do more than use a bank to cash a check and store savings--why the banks have failed, and what will happen next. He looks worried, doesn't he?

Flash forward to 2008 and I am reading the August 2nd Edition of The Economist, a magazine I sometimes let go by the boards due to its definitive Euro slant, which sometimes seems particularly critical of the US....(Never mind the other article about the Beijing Olympics, "Welcome to a (rather dour) party," with a half-page picture of a Chinese Cop whose hand is up, both in protest of our journalist and to block his face.)...But here is a looming consideration brought on by one little article, that resonates with my previous concern about the current bank woes (see this previous post) which is: if the government intervenes, when will they stop?

Fan, Fred, Fed: Who Invited these guys?
The article--more of a brief--is called "Hair of the Dog," and raises an excellent point about the dire need to change the system--no just bail it out. This quick article recognizes what no taxpayer wants to admit:

"If Fannie and Freddie are too important to be allowed to collapse, and the American government is really responsible for their debts, then they should be nationalised. The current arrangement allows managers and shareholders to take all the profits and leave the losses to the taxpayer."


Amazing. Hindsight is always 20-20, especially about all the bad decisions we collectively made about those pesky SIVs (structured investment vehicles) that helped trigger the lending crunch. But now, we're looking directly at a system, Fannie and Freddie and how it buys mortgages, that has a self-destructive unit built into itself. Leaving the already underpaid and stressed taxpayer to foot those bills is problematic if the government technically owns them.

So then, what if we took the articles suggestion and nationalized the system? Wouldn't it be inevitable that people may complain about a nationalized mortgage clearinghouse because it begins to look, um, sort of collective and communal and, well, when the government is in charge, this is called communism.

Being that the average age of a Congress member is 60 years (according to msnbc.com), I can only hope that they have had enough history lessons (or lived through enough) to make our current economy, in its new age and with its new challenges, a functioning free-enterprise system once again. --Even if it means adopting and evolving what might, at first blush, look like a communist idea, we need to consider new approaches to old problems, regardless of any previous label those approaches have had.

New Features!

We just released some new feature for you. Check them out below.

New Address Fields for Vendors and Contacts

If you've ever had the need to store physical address and mailing address, MyPropFolio supports it. We've added additional fields to the Vendor and Contacts that allow you to enter a mailing address.

Print Media
Create customized print outs for you Contacts. In the Group Overview, we give you the ability to print out the description of any one of your steps. This new features is designed for Print Media.

Thank you for using MyPropFolio