This article is designed to introduce the concept of Contacts in Alto and to explain the difference between People and Contacts in Vebra/Encore Live and Contacts in Alto.
Put simply, everyone that you deal with will be a contact in Alto.
In Vebra/Encore Live, applicants, vendors, landlords and tenants were classed as ‘People’ and 'Contacts' were other businesses that you dealt with such and solicitors, other estate agencies, mortgage advisors and so on. All of these people in ‘Alto world’ will be Contacts.
- In Alto, every contact has a ‘Type’ selection. The default for this is ‘Client’ and this would be used for anyone who is either an applicant, vendor, landlord or tenant. Therefore, a contact in Alto that is set to Client would be the same as a ‘person’ in VebraLive
- Alto has an ‘Intention’ field which has the same options as Vebra/Encore Live (Buy, Rent, Buy or rent, Not looking). This works in much the same way as it did in Vebra/Encore Live so a contact in Alto that is set as looking to Buy would be classed as a sales applicant, a contact set as looking to Rent would be classed as a rental applicant
- A contact in Alto will be labelled as a vendor if they become the owner of a sales property (via booking an appraisal or entering a property) and they would become a landlord if it was a rental property. This behaviour is the same as Vebra/Encore Live.
It's possible for a contact to be a landlord, vendor and applicant at the same time without any need for re-registering their details
If you change the ‘Type’ selection to other selections, some of the irrelevant fields will be hidden from the screen. For example, if you set a contact as a Solicitor, the 'Intention' field is removed.
Even though everyone is now a contact in Alto, it's still possible to search via the contact type, and groups can be set up to find certain contacts, for example all solicitors.
Related articles:
Introduction to Contact records