The reason I say this isn't for everyone is that it doesn't do everything, and some real estate professionals want bells and whistles they can't get from Zoho Projects. I love the ability to be reminded from Google Calendar with text messages and emails about my transaction tasks, but I didn't like the spreadsheeting and importing to get each deal's tasks into the calendar. I tried Toodledo and RememberTheMilk, both with some great features, but both being enough of a hassle to use that the good features just weren't enough. I built a custom setup in an online Intranet, but it was also too much overhead and management stuff for the benefits received.
I really don't need a lot from a real estate transaction tasks management solution, only:
- It must be an online application.
- It must allow me to pre-build transaction templates.
- It doesn't need to remind me on my cell of what to do.
- It does need to somehow allow my clients access, or better yet, just let me print reports and email them to the client.
The first two items in the list are the deal-killers for other applications. Online is just the new way of the world, and I do very little anymore that isn't an online based application. As far as the second item, I do have spreadsheets of tasks by transaction type, land buyer, etc. However, I just don't like having to deal with the setup and import of the tasks for every deal. I wanted a solution that keeps the tasks by transaction type in templates and lets me just open up a new transaction with a template and enter the due dates. There are more custom apps out there that do this, but you're back in a situation where you're doing transaction management in one app, and everything else in others. I wanted some cross-functionality.
Because I was already using Zoho Mail inside Zoho CRM (Customer Relationship Management), I decided to give Zoho Projects a try. The paid version does allow me to have transaction project templates, and starting a new project is just a click on the right one to have those 50+ tasks and milestones all ready for due dates. Better for me is the fact that my purchase agreements are written with most all deliveries and deadlines set up for "x" number of days after the contract date, or "y" number of days before the closing date. In New Mexico, it's just workdays, so 5 days is really 7 when you don't count the weekend. So, there is a set of milestones in my contracts, out 5, 10, 15, 20 days after contract date, and 10, 5, 1 days before closing. There are multiple tasks and delivery dates in each milestone.
My desire for simplicity and not spending a lot of time in system management really makes this setup nice. Instead of dating every task or delivery, I only date the milestones under which they group. So, when I open my visual calendar, I'm seeing a half dozen milestones over the next month or so, instead of 50 tasks. I just click the milestone and see what I have to have done by that date. Zoho Projects also offers the ability to set up dependent tasks, meaning for example: you can't object to the title binder until it's delivered, so that task is set up to become due only after the delivery task is marked complete. But, I found the setup cumbersome, and really not that valuable to me. Once I have the binder, I set the date of the objections deadline.
You don't have to give up those great Google text and email alerts though. You can feed your Zoho milestones calendar into Google Calendar, and they'll be there when you pull it up. Though there are things about Zoho project I don't like, and plenty that are overkill for my uses, I do like the transaction templates.
