What is PenPal?

Designed specifically for the property industry, PenPal is an entirely new innovation that enables you to bring properties to market in minutes, help you to win new instructions and create significant cost savings.

Easy to set up and easy to use, PenPal integrates with your existing back office software and requires only minimal training.

You don’t need to learn how to use a new piece of software or change your existing notation style - PenPal is literally a pen and a piece of paper, specially designed for recording and transmitting your property detail information electronically. There’s no PDA, electronic tablet or laptop required.

To find out more use the links opposite or contact us now.

Win new instructions

Imagine being able to tell potential clients that you can bring their property to market in minutes, not days. Imagine then being able to back that up by showing them their property details – with a photograph – while you’re still at your first visit to the property.

Penpal allows you to email property details to a client’s computer while you’re at the property so you can have fully signed off details, ready to market, before you’re even back at the office. Penpal can also produce an instant valuation letter AND populate your database with the newly acquired details.

With only a minimal investment, PenPal can significantly speed up the process of creating new property details – that kind of response rate will give an immediate advantage over your competitors.

Create significant time and money savings

Just think of all that time you (or your staff) spend entering property details into your database – PenPal does all that for you while you’re still at the property. No more dictating and no additional typing - in fact you may never need to type another word again.

Not only that but you can use PenPal to automatically instruct your printer to print your details, inform your board and floor plan companies, as well as automate the process of getting quotations from the IFA and solicitors.

Cost-effective and easy to use

PenPal is easy to set up and easy to use. In fact it’s easier than sending a text, requires no complex equipment or additional software. Just a mobile phone and the PenPal digital pen and paper.

You won’t need a laptop, PDA or digital tablet – neither will you need new back office software.

The whole system can be live within a few days of you returning your order, requires minimal training and integrates seamlessly with your existing back office software.

Improve your brand identity

PenPal allows you to keep all the same style, descriptions and expressions that give your company its unique personality. The system is fully customisable so rather than you having to learn how to use it, PenPal will learn how to recognise your abbreviations and notation - every box on the paper can be tailored to your requirements.

In fact PenPal can help you express your brand identity more clearly by improving the consistency and accuracy of the data captured and used by individual agents while sophisticated handwriting recognition software can significantly reduce spelling or grammar mistakes.

For information or for a free demonstration contact us now.

How It Works

PenPal uses a special pen and paper in conjunction with your mobile phone. It’s just like writing with a normal pen and paper - it looks the same and feels the same. But this groundbreaking technology converts your hand-written property notes into a properly formatted sales brochure in seconds.

The paper itself is just that – paper. You don’t need a PDA, a laptop or any other piece of cumbersome technology. The secret lies in the design of the paper.

Each page is printed with a pattern of dots, barely visible to the naked eye, which is unique in every place – this uniqueness of pattern allows the pen to recognise its location on the page and thus record the information as it writes.

Printed over the dot-pattern are ready-to-use tick boxes that can be customised to your requirements and description boxes where you can write using your normal notation - the system can be tailored to recognise all of the abbreviations you currently use. Once you’ve filled in all the information simply click the send box on the bottom of the page and all the data is transferred via Bluetooth to your mobile phone.

At this stage you assign a property reference number and before transmitting your details your mobile will give the option of selecting photographs of the property from your mobile’s memory.

Now just click send and the information is converted instantly into ready-to-use property details and simultaneously sends them direct to your client’s computer for their immediate approval as well as populating your database.

The Technology

Digital pen and paper technology is a new and exciting innovation that has incredible potential. Using a digital pen, paper and mobile phone, you can store and transmit anything you write or draw from anywhere in the world to anyone with a mobile phone or personal computer. Sonoma have created a brand new service from this pioneering technology for specific use by estate agencies.

The pen

The digital pen looks and feels just like an ordinary ballpoint pen and you use it in the same way. There are no keys to press and no display. You activate the pen simply by removing the cap and deactivate it by replacing the cap.

The main parts of the digital pen are a digital camera and a communication unit. It also contains an ink cartridge so that you can actually see what you have written. As you write, the built-in digital camera in the pen continuously takes pictures of the patterned paper, recording your handwriting as the pen moves across the page.

The paper

While the pen itself is impressive, the truly amazing thing about this new technology is the paper. The PenPal paper is created by printing a pattern of very small dots on ordinary paper that is only visible to the eye as a slightly off-white colour.

The dots are roughly 0.3 mm (0.01 inch) apart; the pattern they are printed in is unique – and every location on the page is totally unique. The displacement of the dots from the each other enables them to be programmed to tell the pen the exact location on the page – or series of pages.

To give you an idea of the scale of the pattern, when you look at a piece of paper printed with these dots, you’re actually looking at a fraction of a map that is equivalent to that of Europe and Asia combined.

Essentially when the pen comes into contact with the paper, it knows exactly where it is on the page, enabling it to record what it writes or draws on the page. A tiny camera in the pen registers the pen's movement across the grid surface on the paper and stores it as a series of map coordinates which represent your handwriting.

These coordinates correspond to the exact location of the page you’re writing on. When you make a mark in the SEND box with your digital pen, the pen is instructed to send the stored sequence of map coordinates to your mobile via Bluetooth.

The pen uses 128-Bit encryption to ensure the data you’re recording and sending is totally secure. In the event that you are in a poor mobile phone coverage area, you can send the information and it will transmit as soon as the phone passes into a good coverage area. Once sent, the phone will display a message indicating that your form has been sent successfully.

Creating the property details

Once sent the information is sent to our server where the dots get translated back into handwriting mapped onto the form, converted into text and then the text, tick boxes and abbreviations are converted into a full set of property details and other information regarding the vendor details, property information and admin information (i.e. viewing arrangements).

This calculation, created by Sonoma, allows the new details to be merged with generic information that previously you would have had to enter manually for each property.

For example, location information based on paragraphs written once by the agent can be populated automatically from the postcode; statements such as “accommodation in brief comprises three bedrooms, two receptions and an ensuite etc” is calculated by PenPal from the actual room descriptions while a further sentence is calculated from the additional bullet points to write the sentence “the property also benefits from being 0.5 miles from station and shops etc and has double glazing and central heating”.

This leaves you free to create the unique part of the sales notes that allow you to express the individuality of your agency.

For more information or for a free demonstration contact us now.

Pricing

Our pricing structure varies according to your specific requirements but in general we charge a modest monthly service fee and a one-off implementation fee per branch. One agent told us we only have to win one more instruction per year and it will pay for itself!

We work with you to assess the number of pens and forms your agency will require and calculate our fee based on this.

The implementation fee includes all training, tailoring the system to your requirements, integration with your existing software provider and the pen hardware.

It does not include any mobile phones or mobile phone charges, however we can provide phones for £15 a month for businesses who sign a two-year contract with us.