Metropix Goes West

Metropix floor plans have been popular in the Republic of Ireland since launch, with many offices of the leading estate agents finding them the quickest and most cost effective solution. The success of the product has been all the more remarkable given that it has occurred almost entirely by word of mouth. Today we're pleased to cement that success by announcing our first major contract in Ireland.

Sherry FitzGerald, Ireland's largest estate agent with over 100 offices, has signed a company-wide deal with Metropix. The rollout within their network of branches will be facilitated by tight software integration, enabling staff to draw floor plans from within their existing property database software.

We're looking forward to continuing our work with Sherry FitzGerald (and maybe some more trips to the Emerald Isle too!).

Every little helps

Here's a very brief roundup of some of the more recent improvements made to the service in response to customer feedback:

• We discovered some customers were repeatedly adjusting room measurements to get the estimated floor area to match the floor area they had obtained from another source, such as the property developer. Rather than having to go back and forth, we changed the system so that users can just enter the desired floor area directly. Naturally, it's still possible to use our automatic estimate, or omit the floor area completely.

• We've adjusted the system to renew your monthly subscription automatically if there is credit already on your account, from a standing order for example. (It won't automatically take funds from your credit card, even if you've saved the card details in your account.) This makes life easier for customers on monthly standing orders as they no longer need to worry about renewing at all.

• You can now provide your own custom, full length disclaimer over several lines at the bottom of each floor plan. The option to use the 'full' or 'minimal' pre-designed disclaimers is still avaliable.

• We've made numerous enhancements to the 3D Walkthroughs, most noticably making the walls more colourful and improving furniture arrangement. This remains a key focus for our development team however, so you can expect to see much more over the coming weeks.

Parkers really motoring with 3D Walkthroughs

Is it a bus? Is it a plane? No, it's the quite remarkable Parkers 3D taxi now taking fares all over Reading:


(Click the picture for a larger view.)

The taxi is part of Parkers' 3D Walkthrough marketing campaign and designed to help win new business generally. The combination of the Walkthroughs and the taxi makes a compelling story and has helped gain them publicity in the local papers. Don't forget, if we can help out with your own publicity in any way just get in touch.

We're back!

In fact, as many of you will know, we haven't been away, but it's been a good few months since the blog has been updated. It's been a busy time as the company's growth has accelerated rapidly -- we now produce many hundreds of floor plans every day, more than one a minute in fact, and have become the world's largest supplier of 3D Walkthroughs (even if we do say so ourselves!).

To cope with this demand we've expanded our customer service team and are continuing to recruit. And in the last month alone we have invested tens of thousounds of pounds in new equipment, shortening 3D Walkthrough delivery times. We're now delivering Walkthroughs substantially faster, even at busy times -- often on the day of order and sometimes within just a few hours!

We'll be announcing a major new customer later today, but before that we have a story about an estate agent and a taxi... more from us in just a few minutes!