Every day, more office and sales functions move to the internet and online services. Many are still also accomplished with resident software on computers and handhelds. Learn about software and services for the real estate industry sales and management functions.
I love Gmail, no bones about it. But, Gmail's contact management...well no bad words! I love Zoho for CRM, Customer Relationship Management. Well, Zoho has recognized a killer team when they see it. Learn here how to use Gmail for all of its power and features, and have your emails attach to your contacts and prospects in Zoho.
I use Zoho Projects for a great many things, and until recently, for transaction tasks management. But, once I saw how easy Zoho Planner made task management, I had to make the change. It also allows document uploads, notes and sharing with your client.
I've tried just about every free or low cost real estate transaction and listing management solution out there. I'm currently using Zoho Projects, and I just might stay with this one. Read this article for the high points.
Docusign has introduced a new feature called "In Person Signing" and I love it. Forget the extra cost of a tablet computer. Take your $250 netbook and get those signatures on the screen without a pen even.
Using Evernote to make your business life more productive is as easy as setting up some automated systems and getting into data saving habits. Never lose anything again, including notes you used to put on yellow stickies. Evernote is a very useful tool for real estate.
Using Print2Flash, you can embed all types of documents in your website or blog as either flash or HTML files.
If you don't want to lose Outlook, then don't. You can still use a great many of the features of Gmail to run your cloud brokerage. Gmail can coexist quite well with Outlook, though I don't know why you would need to keep both.
Evernote is one of, if not the most valuable technology services I use. Now I also send my most important Google Voice voicemails to Evernote for storage and location later. Because the voicemail shows who called, and a transcription, search for it later is easy in Evernote.
Using Evernote for a great many daily organization and management functions for the real estate agent or broker.
SugarSync is a great offsite backup solution that I love. All of My Documents are constantly monitored and a mirror copy of them is maintained at SugarSync. But, sharing transaction files is what I like just as much.
Twitter reached three years of age in March 2009, with a previous year growth in registered users of 1287%. This growth eclipsed Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.
You can email an image to your Flickr account, and send one from your cell phone. You can post to Twitter with a text message from your cell phone. Now do both at once.
Fast sharing of a document on your hard drive is easy with TweetCube. One step, and all of your readers on Twitter can get your document.
In the way it always does, Microsoft has created difficulty for its users by creating a new format for documents in MS 2007 that many cannot open with previous versions on their XP computers. Here's where you can convert a .docx to a .doc to open it.
Are you in total control of your contact/prospect management system or software? Is is accessible to you even if you don't have your personal computer with you? You should be saying "yes" to both.
Though many know about Google Docs, few know that one service offered there is Google Forms. You can create a form that can be embedded on a website or blog, and get your results in a Google Spreadsheet.
For blog copyright protection, it's as easy as setting up a free account and providing your RSS feed address. Learn how here.
With Gmail, you can set up Canned Responses to deliver special reports to your site visitors quickly and automatically. Using filters and canned responses will get you leads.
I have more than 50 separate tasks for a home buyer side transaction for everything from document deliveries to inspections and after-closing items. After trying everything out there, one free solution works best for me, and it is Google Calendar for transaction management.
Music, if done properly, can be a nice background for your real estate videos. This is especially true if you are not going to be doing a voice over and the option is just silence. Learn how to do it legally.
Are you protecting yourself against a hard drive failure, or worse, the theft of your computer? Technology has come a long way, and now there are online solutions that are inexpensive and easy for real estate files backup.
We take photos all the time of properties for clients who can't be there to see them. Sending the images, with today's technology isn't difficult. But, what if you want to comment on the photos as well? Or what if you want to show and comment about a web site?
I'm reviewing an online CRM, or Customer Relationship Management system as it applies to the real estate professional. It's very powerful, with drip email, and worthy of a trial.
When you just want to show a document as it is in your system, or you want to give others the ability to download it as an MS Word or PDF document, DocStoc provides a free solution.
Though not specifically conceived for real estate, Sandy is a useful tool for the real estate professional. Get organized using email and Sandy for your calendar, tasks and transactions.
Intersend.com is an independent online drip email service that will work with any website. I'll tell you about it, how it works, and how to use it to market your real estate business.
If you're sending out emails to announce new listings, just solds, or for any farming activity, you might want to combine the click to call services of Jaduka.com to make the phone ring.
Using Google's GrandCentral.com free service, you can place a button on your web site that allows a site visitor to enter their phone number and get connected to you via phone immediately.
All the marketing advantages of the Internet aren't worth much if you never get a personal contact going with that illusive visitor. Click-to-Call technology can help.
The Acrobat .pdf (portable document format) has become the worldwide standard for making documents portable across the Internet. A good real estate agent simply must have a way to make a .pdf document, not just the free reader.
When YouTube was acquired by Google, their traffic began to climb considerably, as videos now turn up in some searches. Besides that, your site link in area videos will bring you traffic.
Realtors are always searching for the next great opportunity in marketing themselves and their listings. See how an online service called Voxci.com will let you use your voice to annotate a web page.
Can you effectively use the free Gmail service for your real estate business email? Here's a review of its suitability for real estate agents and brokers.
If you want to free yourself from any one computer, and manage your real estate business online, look no further. All the free tools you need, with step-by-step instructions, are here.
I start up my browser with a dashboard display of virtually everything I need to know and do in my real estate business each day. Whether it's email, tasks, links to applications, news, or my calendar and appointments, it's all there.
It was a big step for me to put away Outlook, but I've never looked back. I manage all of my real estate business online now with Gmail and associated tools, almost all free.
The integration of Google's Calendar with Gmail makes it my choice for an online calendar for management of my events, meetings and appointments. See how to integrate it into our online real estate office suite.
The name is funny, but Remember the Milk is a great free online task management tool. The really good part is that it integrates with both Gmail and Google Calendar. Plus it takes voice input from Jott.
You're in the middle of a tutorial on building a real estate online office suite. Here you'll learn how to use Jott.com to enter tasks and meetings into your system from your voice on the cell phone.
We're building a suite of office applications online with mostly Google tools, such as Gmail and Google Calendar. On our igoogle business summary home page, we want a feed reader to keep up with news.
Once you have the free tools we recommend set up for your real estate practice, here's how you get a dashboard panel with all of your important information in front of you, updating in real time.
Using the free Jott service, you can have Gmail calendar events posted with your voice from anywhere. The next time you set up a meeting on the fly, just call and Jott it to your calendar.
This is a review of the Callwave service for voicemail to your cell phone. It takes the place of your cell provider's voicemail and provides some really great features.
We review the features of YouMail, a free cell phone voicemail service. Have personalized answering messages for each of your callers with YouMail. And there's more.
Getting a voicemail to your email inbox has never been easier. YouMail, a free service, offers voicemail that takes the place of your cell provider's service and some cool services.
Video tutorials to walk you through using Outlook and Word in your contact management and marketing for real estate.
Real estate agents and brokers have been using toll-free listing information hotlines for some time now. But with a huge percentage of the population carrying cell phones, and text messaging becoming the preferred method of communication, there is a new listing marketing tool out there. Learn how to get listing information and more into the cell phone of that buyer prospect with real estate text messaging.
Cell phone messages have become a staple in our business communication arsenal. Many have their regular phone calls forwarded to their cell when they're away from their desks. Thus, a great many important transaction-related messages are left on cell phones every day. Learn how to do more with your cell phone messages.
Profile of an online voice chat service from RealPing that allows a site visitor to initiate a phone call from their computer screen. It connects the two of you and you're able to push web pages to them during and after the conversation to help with the discussion.
Real estate text messaging to send instant information about your listings is not only possible, it can be FREE. By using the combination of a free blog for a listing and an online open text message service, you can get info onto the cell phone display of prospects instantly when they're in front of the property. Learn how to do it here.
Properly configured and customized, MS Outlook can do just about everything a real estate agent or broker needs in the areas of prospect management, contact management, listings and transactions management, tasking and more.
There's more than one way to keep up with new blog posts at the Real Estate site on About.com. You can subscribe to the weekly newsletter for email delivery, get rss feeds to your news reader or get the latest posts as text messages to your cell phone.
You can set up a system that will allow the fast import into Outlook of a list of tasks related to a particular transaction and closing. The sheet can even calculate the task due dates for you based on days from contract date and days before closing.
You can get Outlook to send your most important emails to your cell phone as a SMS text message. By using rules, certain senders or email types, such as urgent, can be automatically sent to your cell phone.
In Federal litigation, you can be required to produce emails in pre-trial discovery. It's important that we keep all transaction related emails. You can create an Outlook transaction folder and use "Rules" to automatically file all emails related to the transaction.
Sending an email to a cell phone as an SMS text message is quite simple for most of the cell services. Adding the cell phone number before the @ symbol and the appropriate domain after will get the job done.
A step by step instructional with images that will teach a real estate agent how to customize their contact view in MS Outlook 2003. Build fields to manage both buyer and seller prospects. Fields for property types, acreage, time frame and more.
This book gives examples and step-by-step instructions on how to improve your Outlook Calendar scheduling, make better use of your time, finish at a reasonable hour and never miss an appointment. On top of that, you'll learn a better way to file emails that will never get lost and task management that is more efficient than the default Outlook system.
In the growth of their business, nearly every real estate professional will face the decision as to whether to hire an employee or use a real estate virtual assistant. Use these decision points and information to help you in this process.
In the area of web site design and internet marketing, there aren't as many real estate virtual assistant choices. Most are more suited to traditional marketing, and you can usually fare better with more specialized internet marketing help. However, there are virtual assistant companies out there that specialize in this area.
One of the most popular services of a real estate virtual assistant is in providing help with traditional marketing functions. They can design brochures, flyers and postcards, as well as design, negotiate and place print ads.
If you're considering using a real estate virtual assistant, it's imperative that they save you time and increase your efficiency. If their systems aren't set up to allow you easy document and information exchange, you could find that you're spending almost as much time as before in just getting what they need into their system.
Perhaps the single most helpful service offered by a real estate virtual assistant is in the many coordination activities involved in a closing transaction. This process is stressful for the client and can be for the real estate agent as well. A VA can bring the closing transaction, its many documents, delivery deadlines and tasks under control.
A real estate virtual assistant can be quite effective in helping a busy real estate professional to manage all the tasks and documents associated with a listing. Though their remote location doesn't help with placing the sign or lockbox, the tasks involving document maintenance, marketing and client reporting are all excellent uses of a virtual assistant.
The benefits of using a real estate virtual assistant are easily explained. Let's compare the cost of a VA to a full-time employee for real estate administrative duties. We're assuming an un-licensed assistant and the duties they would be allowed to perform.
Review of the SettlementRoom.com real estate transaction management system online. This is a system for handling real estate transaction tasks and document processing and delivery. It is totally online and accessible from any internet computer.
I purchased and am now using RoboGeo Software to take my geotagged images and upload them to my Flickr account with links out to mapping. I have a camera that sets the GPS coordinates when the photo is taken, but this software will show you how to manually set the coordinates with Google Earth.
Once you're into uploading and geotagging images for a Flickr account, it's going to make your blogging life a lot easier as well. Inserting images into your blog posts from your Flickr account is as easy as a couple of clicks, and the geotagging comes with it.
You don't have to spend any money to geotag photos and create a map you can embed in a real estate website or blog. Using Google's free Picasa software, you can create some of the best mapping on the Web.
What I wanted was a good looking set of maps of my area, with restaurants, tourism destinations, free WiFi spots and more. This requires geotagged photos, with latitude and longitude as part of the photo data. I also wanted these photos to be on the Web with mapping from the photo sites to drive business to me in my vacation/resort area. And, I wanted an easy way to use my Flickr images in my …
