Homesnap

It can be nerve-wracking and a little embarrassing to be out with a client, spot a house for sale sign but not have any data on it. Perhaps the lawn sign just went out after you prepared for your showing appointment.

Do you risk looking unprepared? Homesnap can help you maintain your composure and professional image by giving you data on homes that are and are not in the MLS with just a photo snap.

“Homesnap is fun because with this app, not only are you able to see what’s on the market around you, but also what’s off market and the estimated value,” said Bernadette Coates of Coldwell Banker in Maryland.

Coates continued, “When I was having coffee downtown Annapolis one morning, I got into a conversation about Annapolis and shared the [Homesnap] app with the tourist. They thought it was awesome that they could walk past any home and get the price or estimated value, especially the historic homes.

“I constantly receive notices that I have a new client on Homesnap.

“If you want details on a home, there is no logging in. Just pull up the address through Homesnap, and there it is.”

Save face and gain leads with Homesnap. Those are definitely irresistible qualities every real estate agent wants.

Hiver

Here is another one for Gmail users.

If you have ever been burned by giving a team member or an assistant your login information to only have them quit, leave or just be tech-challenged, then Hiver is especially for you.

In Gmail, you can easily manage and make assignments for your team.

Boomerang

Boomerang allows you to finally clean out your inbox.

Write emails now that will be sent later. Archive emails today that can pop back up in the future at a point when you are able to deal with them.

Get instant help on what words should be removed or added to your email to convert sales leads with the feature called Respondable.

And if you are a Salesforce CRM aficionado, Boomerang integrates with it.

Boomerang has price points for everyone, ranging from free to $50 per month.

Matterport

For the past several years, Matterport has brought the look, feel and comfort of using Google Street View to the inside of your listings.

In the rapidly changing world of technology, this might be considered by some an “oldie,” but it is still a mainstay goodie.

“I use 3-D virtual tours for both domestic and global millennials. I find the tours give a better feel than just photos and for buyers in other countries — sometimes it can drastically reduce the number of properties they visit when they arrive,” explained Rich Dun a NYS Associate Real Estate broker working at the American Homes Group.

WP3DModels

If you have a WordPress site, then another tantalizing technology is WP3DModels, which helps give your Matterport tour a personalized and information-packed look.

Combine that with being MLS-compliant and throw in lead capturing call-to-actions, and this is a tech tool that has Matterport-lovers salivating.

Realync

This is truly the year of live video. There is nothing worse than broadcasting live to the world a listing or open house and seeing comments that undermine your client’s negotiations.

Realync takes the live video feature that you love with YouTube, Google Hangout, Facebook Live, Snapchat and Instagram and keeps your clients’ comments confidential.

“Realync has enabled us to host live virtual showings or create and share video tours for our prospects. This has greatly increased our conversion rates and touring efficiency.

“In many ways, Realync has changed the way we connect and interact with prospects,” said Matt Mehon, regional marketing manager of Waterton Associates (Chicago).

SpeakingPhoto.com

If 3-D tours are currently out of your marketing budget, do not feel relegated to the same basic slide shows. SpeakingPhoto.com allows you to tell a story with each room and photo of your listings and marketing.

Prospective homebuyers might not yet feel comfortable calling you, but SpeakingPhoto.com is a great way to remove their walls of discomfort and help them establish a connection. Stories help turn a house into a home, so start narrating with this handy mobile app.

Realtyzam

“I can’t run my business without Realtyzam,” said Nikolas Allen, a Realtor in Mt. Shasta, California.

He further expressed, “Realtyzam is a financial tracker that allows you to enter listings, buyers, expenses and income.

“It’s easy and fun to use — not overly complicated like some apps — and it has a one-click P&L statement [profit and loss] that you can print and hand over to your accountant. At $8 per month, it’s a tiny investment for a great reward.”

Facebook’s Business Page and TARGETED Ads

Why would I include Facebook, which is such a well-known tech tool?

Well, have you yet to see a lead for your business from Facebook?

If your answer is no, I want to encourage you to tweak your Facebook lead generation methods. Facebook is currently one of the most inexpensive ad platforms that can generate bona fide sales leads.

Want those results in your business? First, be sure to have a Facebook personal page (that’s standard and free when you create an account) so that you can stay in touch with everyone you know from the various walks of your life.

Liane Jamason, a Smith & Associates Real Estate agent in the top 1 percent of Tampa pros, affirmed that she received a listing just from connecting to a contact on Facebook:

“There was a guy who I put in my CRM two years ago when he had two of his investment properties expire on the MLS. I called him and emailed him — no answer. Then I found him on Facebook and sent him a friend request and a message.

“He didn’t respond to my message but friended me.

“Two years later, last week, he sends me a message on Facebook and says, ‘Please call me.’ I did, and he explained he’d had a falling out with his prior long-time Realtor, and he wanted to use me because he loved everything I was posting on Facebook and said the quality of my listings’ marketing was superb. I got a $550,000 listing from Facebook!”

Second, having a Facebook business page for your real estate business will allow you to find your ideal clients, whether buyers or sellers, among strangers and friends alike.

If you want to work with a specific price-point and neighborhood, or just want to know those who are “most likely to move” (this is tracked by Facebook), Facebook can help you target each demographic (because it tracks everything everyone posts).

You cannot do this detailed level of targeting by just clicking the “boost post” button while you are creating a routine post.

Instead, become a guru (or hire a guru) at using the Facebook Ads Manager and Power Editor (you must have a business page to use these features).

Leads from those whom you do not know are very much attainable from Facebook, so do not give up.

Vidcaboodle

SmallPDF

 

Trello

 

Waze

Virtual Staging

For continuous learning:

Blinkist

Being a successful entrepreneur means being a lifelong learner. To keep up with the ever-evolving real estate industry—and the business world in general—you need to read. A lot.

Blinkist is an app that allows you to digest content faster. With a library of 2000+ nonfiction books to choose from, it condenses a single book into a summary that you can read or listen to in 15 minutes.

With the free version, you get access to one pre-selected “book blink” each day. The Premium plan gives you access to any of the titles.

How To Be A Lifelong Learner: Ben Franklin’s 5-Hour Rule

For visual content creation:

Canva

You no longer have to be a trained graphic designer to create stunning images for your Facebook page, blog posts, or enewsletter. Canva provides beautiful templates for everything from email headers and Facebook ads to business cards and gift tags. You can have as much creative freedom as you’d like—upload your own photos, change fonts and colors, etc.—or stick with one of Canva’s pre-designed images.

For a healthy, productive mindset:

Calm

Here at Realvolve, we’re big on meditation and mindfulness, so I couldn’t resist including this app. The Calm app provides a lot of great free features, such as a “breathing bubble” for breathing exercises, the 7 Days of Calm guided meditation program, relaxing Sleep Stories (soothing fiction read by the likes of Stephen Fry), music for meditation, and your choice of calming scenes to display. Additional sounds, scenes, and meditations can be unlocked with a paid subscription of $4.99 per month.

How Meditation Will Make You A Better Real Estate Agent (No, Really!)

For video emails:

BombBomb

If you haven’t heard of BombBomb yet, it’s time to become acquainted. This tool allows you to record and send videos via email. When the recipient receives your email, they’ll see a muted, animated preview of your video (way more engaging than text or a static image!) and a link to view the full video with audio. This is a great tool for real estate agents because it allows you to be more face-to-face with your contacts—through what was once a fairly impersonal communication channel, email recipients can now see your smile and hear the warmth in your voice.

(Psst…just FYI, there’s a BombBomb integration with Realvolve!)

How To Use Video Marketing To Earn More Real Estate Clients

For ultra-convenient

Voxer

Voxer does so many things, it’s hard to define it as anything more specific than a really incredible communication tool. One of the coolest features allows you to transmit live voice messages to other users, essentially turning your phone into a walkie talkie. But people can also choose to listen to your voice messages later (and they can even listen to them at 2x, 3x, or 4x the normal speed). Other features include group messaging (great for communicating with your entire real estate team) and setting up broadcast groups (where you talk but others can’t reply).

For creating PDFs:

Smallpdf

Everyone could use this handy little tool. Smallpdf.com is a free tool for creating and manipulating PDFs—you can compress PDFs, convert different file types to PDF, edit PDFs, merge or split PDFs, and eSign PDFs. It’s super simple to use!

For file backup & sharing:

Sync.com

This tool might replace Dropbox as your favorite cloud storage service. Not only is it more secure than Dropbox, it also makes sharing files with clients way easier because they don’t have to create a Sync account to open the file.

For note-taking:

OneNote

For years, Evernote has been the collaborative note-taking tool of choice. But I’ve recently started to hear things about OneNote—things like, “It’s Evernote on steroids.”

OneNote allows you to be ultra-organized about taking notes. You create notebooks, and within each notebook, you can create section groups. Within each section, you can create individual pages of notes. Your notes can consist of text, images, video, and audio. The one area where Evernote still comes out stronger is in clipping from the Web (in OneNote, it only clips a screenshot of a web page, so you don’t get the URLs or the ability to copy/paste text).

Other features of OneNote: You and your team can collaborate on notes and view each other’s revisions in the History tab. Notes can by synced across all of your devices and accessed on the Web.

To learn more about the differences between OneNote and Evernote, check out this review on Computerworld.

For adopting a new habit:

Coach.me

Coach.me is a favorite of Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Work Week). To use this app, just choose a habit to adopt, set a weekly target, get reminded to do it, and check in every time you do the habit. Each goal has a forum for you to get support from a community of other users working on the same habit, plus you can receive step-by-step plans from coaches (1 week free, additional weeks must be purchased).

For avoiding distracting websites: StayFocusd

It happens to all of us…you sit down at the computer, and you swear you’ll be productive. Next thing you know, it’s twelve hours later. You’ve checked your email, updated your Facebook status, read every article in your Twitter feed, and vanity googled yourself.

Enter StayFocusd! This productivity extension for Google Chrome helps you stay focused on work by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites. Once your allotted time has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day.

LenderLetter

LenderLetter is a convenient way to access pre-approval letters for your buyers. Lenders who have an account can post an editable letter, allowing you—the real estate agent—to customize it with your client’s offer price and terms of the purchase agreement. This is particularly handy when you’re making an offer over the weekend or after typical working hours.

If your favorite lender isn’t already using this tool, encourage them to check it out!

Asana

This project management tool is great for planning and organizing your various marketing initiatives. You can create categories for each of your projects (e.g., Listings, Online Ads, Social Media, Blog, Direct Mail, Events) and invite members of your team to collaborate. Within each project, you can create a list of tasks, assign them to different people on your team, set deadlines, add comments, create subtasks, and more. We use Asana to plan out our blog posts—each task is a blog topic and it is assigned to the person who will write it.

If you’re not using Realvolve’s workflows to manage your lead generation campaigns, Asana will do the trick.

Scribe

As a successful real estate agent, coach, or real estate trainer, you might be thinking about writing a book to share your knowledge. But the thought of sitting down in front of a blank computer screen for hours on end, pounding away on the keyboard, trying to capture your real estate wisdom—that probably isn’t the best way for you to produce a book.

Now there is a different way! Enter Scribe (formerly Book In A Box). Scribe has created a new, nontraditional process for writing a book. There are 7 steps, but in short, it all boils down to you (the author) doing a series of phone-based interviews to outline and structure your book.

First, a professional outliner helps you create a structure for your new book. Next, an editor uses the outline as a guide and conducts a series of interviews with you. These conversations are then transcribed and edited into the final manuscript. The whole process requires 50 hours on the phone over 7 months, and the final result is a book full of YOUR ideas, in YOUR words and voice.

Rescue Time

We’re big on time management, so we had to include this cool app. Rescue Time runs in the background on your computer and mobile devices to track your online activity. It sends you weekly reports on how you’re spending your time, allows you to set productivity goals, and even lets you block distracting websites. So if you suspect you’re wasting precious hours mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, this app can help you add back some time to your day!

The free version allows you to set goals, receive a weekly email report, and view 3 months worth of report history. With the premium version ($72/year) you can also track offline activity like phone calls and meetings, as well as block distracting websites.

Otter Voice Notes

If you use a transcription service like Rev.com to convert audio recordings to text, you might want to also check out Otter Voice Notes. Moz staffer Stan Schroeder vouches for its ability to create pretty accurate transcripts, though he points out that it works best in a quiet environment. Additionally, the app can recognize your voice and distinguish between speakers within a conversation. The free version of the app allows you to transcribe up to 600 minutes per month.

Dark Sky

Some clients want a lot of hand-holding. What better way to show them you have everything under control by adding the ability to predict the weather to your repertoire?

Dark Sky is a superior weather app that predicts exactly when it will rain or snow exactly where you’re standing. So you can choose the perfect time of day for a client’s open house, or know whether or not to bring extra umbrellas to a showing, or give your client a heads up to drive carefully on their way to meeting you. It’s the little things, right?

Fiverr

Our good friend Krista Mashore just shared this service with us. Whether you need to put together a client testimonial video or spruce up your PDF of First Time Homebuying Tips, Fiverr is the app for you! Fiverr connects users with freelance designers, writers, video editors, web developers, and more. And pricing is often as little as $5 or $10.

Breakthrough Broker

Krista also told us about BreakthroughBroker.com, an amazing free resource for real estate agents that covers everything from marketing to lead generation. This is a goldmine for marketing templates (postcards, brochures, prospecting letters, etc.), business plans, technology reviews, content to share on social media, and more!

Realvolve Workflows

Yep, this is ours. Pardon the not-so-humble brag, but we can’t end this list without including the tool we genuinely believe will be your biggest game changer. Realvolve is a customer relationship management software, but it’s not your typical CRM. A feature called Workflows allows you to automate your entire real estate process so you can provide a consistently excellent client experience every time.

 

 

1. Matterport

Matterport is hands down the coolest 3D tour option for homes. Think of it like Google’s Street View feature touring a property. We’re pretty thrilled about it, because we’ve provided it at no cost for a few of our sellers at UpNest.

2. Periscope

Periscope is a free live streaming app. You could use this to broadcast a virtual open house of a listing to remote buyers. Or just use it to stream video to buying clients of yours.

3. HelloSign

The days of mailing and driving documents to clients are almost over thanks to services like HelloSign. HelloSign makes it easy to collect legally binding e-signatures from clients remotely. Pricing depends on the amount of documents you want to send. A free version is available for signing 3 documents.

4. Docusign

Another e-signature service like Hellosign, Docusign actually has a pricing plan specific for real estate agents and brokerages. For $20 a month, you can send an unlimited amount of documents, and have your own branding on the documents as well.

5. Free e-signature options

If you don’t want to pay for cloud based e-signature services like Docusign and HelloSign, you may not know about the free versions for Mac or PC. It’s not as easy to figure out, but you can import your signature into Preview on Mac or Adobe Reader on PC and sign documents that way.

6. Doorsteps

Doorsteps allows you to nurture a buyer for months, answering their questions and more, since buyers take about 18 months to decide to buy a home or not.

7. Speaking Photo

Many real estate agents love using this app for presentations. You can easily take photo, then record audio on top of it. The possibilities are endless, but one application is to use it for a comparative marketing analysis. Use a photo from each comp, and talk about why a new listing will be slightly more or less than the comp.

8. Google Drive

My personal favorite app for file storage, Google Drive seems to do it all. Use it to store and share photos of properties in the cloud. Since every Gmail user has a Google Drive account, it’s easy to share files with users since a lot of people have Gmail. You can also create documents, spreadsheets, and slides with it.

9. Dropbox

Use Dropbox’s convenient cloud storage to create shared folders between clients or other agents, send pictures, and more. You get 2GB of free storage and can pay $9.99 a month for 100GB of storage.

10. Box

Similar to Dropbox and Google Drive, Box is another cloud storage option. 100GB of storage costs only $5 on Box, compared to $9.99 with Dropbox.

11. Evernote

Busy agent’s MUST stay organized in order to keep up with all of their client’s needs. Keep your tasks out of your mind and in endless amounts of notebooks. You could do one just for buyers, one just for sellers, and make a note for each client for example. Evernote syncs between all of your devices that you have it installed on, so you’ll never leave a note behind.

12. Skitch

A free tool created by Evernote, Skitch allows you to mark up photos easily. For example, snap a quick photo of the sink you need fixed for a seller, draw circles and arrows to the problem areas, and shoot it over to a contractor.

13. Yesware

Use Yesware to track your emails. Instead of wondering if your client has received an email of yours or not, Yesware will let you know if they’ve opened it or clicked on a link you send. You can track 100 emails a month for free. Use the paid version for sending mass marketing emails, so you can track open rates and tweak your subject lines.

14. Curb Call

Get a notification from a buyer wanting to see a place right away. Agents can select that they’re available to show nearby homes, and if a buyer wants to see something near you right away, you’ll receive a notification. Curb Call has great safety benefits as well. Your brokerage will always know where you are, and you can hit a big red “Panic” button if you ever feel threatened to notify your broker and emergency contact.

15. My Maps by Google

There’s no such thing as over-communicating with clients, and you can use custom Google Maps to communicate various locations to clients. For example, the day before you head out on a showing spree with buyers, do a good job at setting expectations and drop a pin at all the addresses you plan on visiting.

16. Slydial

When you don’t have time for chit chat, but need to explain something to a client in detail, skip straight to voicemail by using Slydial.

17. CamScanner

 

CamScanner is a free app that converts photos of documents from your smartphone to PDF’s. There is a free version that most people believe fits their needs, as well as paid versions. Of course the paid versions of $4.99 a month come with more features like creating docs with password protection, auto uploading straight to services like Dropbox, and setting expiration dates for doc links.

18. Placester

Create custom real estate websites for yourself or your team for as low as just $10 a month. Placester’s websites are very modern looking, responsive, allow you to blog easily, and help you capture leads.

19. Virtual Staging Solutions

 

An empty room isn’t attractive to buyers. Fill up a room with virtual objects like couches, tables, chairs, and decor to let buyers imagine what a property would really be like when they move in. Virtual Staging Solutions costs a decent amount of money, at $225 for 3 photos. But it could be a better solution than paying a lot for a staging company.

20. Vidcaboodle

If you’re an agent that loves to put videos on YouTube, whether it be listings, testimonials, or selling tips, Vidcaboodle helps you organize all of those videos into categories on a nice looking channel page.

21. Truplace

 

A few good photos of a home is not always enough to give buyers a feel for the layout. Give buyers a better perspective of your listing by providing a floor plan. Truplace provides a layout/virtual tour setup that lets users flip through photos as they go through rooms.

22. Floor Plan Visuals

Another floor plan creation company, Floor Plan Visuals creates illustrated floor plans instead of a virtual tour like Truplace.

23. Mortgage Calculator

The buyers you’re working with should already have a grasp on their price range and monthly mortgage payments they can afford. But having a mortgage calculator pulled up on your phone is still a great idea if the homes you look at fluctuate by a few thousand dollars so you can show your clients an approximate payment while at the property.

 

 

A new year means it’s time to examine new real estate technology that could benefit your brand in 2017 and beyond. From helpful time and finance management software to customer satisfaction and review platforms, there are plenty of mobile and desktop options at your disposal that can simplify and enhance not just your day-to-day, but also your long-term business goals.

Discover many of the cream-of-the-crop real estate tech tools and apps you ought to use for your online marketing and sales efforts in the year ahead — some of which are dedicated entirely for agents and brokers, others that are helpful for professionals at large, and all of which can provide some much-needed organization and assistance for your various real estate business needs and objectives.

(NOTE: You already know the most popular tech tools. These options, in comparison, are ones many Realtors may not be aware of, but can be just as resourceful — or even more so — than some of the most well-known choices out there. Having said that, don’t expect to see Dropbox, Evernote, or the like listed below. We hope you find these apps, tools, and software helpful for your real estate marketing plans!)

Slack

Instant messaging apps are definitely “in,” as of us writing this — and not just for teens and Millennials. Numerous industries have shown they need a communication system for their employees to conduct meetings, share ideas, and have a myriad of other essential business discussions. Whereas most chat-based software offers only the ability to talk one-on-one with others in a text-based format, Slack has broken all of the rules, so to speak, by offering a multimedia-focused, multi-room communication platform.

Within the feature-rich tool, you can chat with single individuals, specific groups of people (you can add and remove members to the conversations, as you see fit), and channels (e.g. departments within your company, like agents only) via text, phone calls, and video streams. What’s more is there are countless apps that can be integrated into your Slack account, all of which can improve your communications and team productivity in one facet or another.

So, if you need to constantly be in touch with fellow colleagues to monitor ongoing conversations — everything from sharing leads with agents at your firm to setting up meetings with your assistant — this is the ideal instant messaging software for you.

OmniFocus

Ask dozens of other real estate agents and brokers how they organize their schedules, and general business priorities, and you’re likely to get a different answer from each and every one of them. That’s because no two professionals work alike. Everyone has their own particular organizational systems that keep them focused on the tasks at hand.

Having said that, there are certain software programs out there many of these pros use that provide a visual framework that helps them ensure they are able to distinguish various marketing and sales activities, prioritize which ones to handle first, and essentially categorize all of the daily and weekly duties associated with their real estate business. One such program — and a very handy one, at that — is OmniFocus.

This software affords you the chance to see every element of your job at a glance: projects you’re working on (like revising your listing presentation), high-priority emails (like those from prospective clients), and long-term marketing and sales agenda items you need to handle over time (like building your real estate blogging strategy). With apps available for iOS on top of the desktop version, OmniFocus is the premier solution for the modern agent.

Adobe Spark

Not every industry pro is willing to shell out $50 for content marketing tools like Adobe’s Creative Cloud solution (Photoshop, InDesign, etc.). The good news is there are plenty of free and more affordable options available to agents and brokers that provide just as helpful design resources as that software suite — one of which also happens to belong to the Adobe family: Spark.

With Adobe Spark, you can create unique graphics, animated videos, and pages, each of which can become brand new — and high-performing — real estate marketing collateral for your business: an explainer video for your agency, a lengthy infographic about your local market, buying and selling stats you can plaster on images and post to Facebook.

The design possibilities are literally endless with Spark — which, did we mention, is free! That’s right: Simply create an Adobe account, and you have access to this top-of-the-line program at no cost. Think of the innovative platform as a means to develop creative collateral that can tell your brand story and even generate and nurture new leads (just be sure to promote the heck out of any assets you create to maximize their effectiveness!).

Quik

Video editing tools like iMovie, Adobe Premiere, and Final Cut Pro can cost you a pretty penny, if they don’t already come with your computer or your broker hasn’t already purchased them for your agent team. But this is 2017: Look through the App Store and Google Play Store, and you’ll find hundreds of apps for your real estate video marketing strategy.

The problem with many of these resources, though, is they require a hefty amount of your time so you can organize, edit, and optimize your recordings. There is one app, however, that does all of the nitty-gritty work for you. All you have to do is upload the photos and videos you want featured in video montage, select some background music and a scene transition style, and boom — just like that, you have a marketing video you can share on your site. The app in question? Quik, by GoPro.

In addition to creating one of the most unique cameras in the marketplace today, GoPro has also crafted a few bonus video production tools for consumers and brands alike. Quik is one such solution. Simply play around with the types of videos you can create and customizations the app provides, and, in a matter of minutes, you can have an amazing-looking real estate video that shows off your latest buyer client’s new home, a celebration of a closed deal with a seller client, or even a tour of your latest listing or the local neighborhood.

Hours

Whether you’re a solo agent looking to discover where you are and aren’t spending your time wisely or the head of an agent team aiming to ensure your sales squad is aptly making the most of their meetings with leads and clients, chances are the Hours time-tracking app is something that can improve your efficiency as a real estate pro.

There are a handful of distinct features Hours offers users. For starters, you can track every activity you perform on a daily basis to see how long it tends to take you to complete certain tasks. After monitoring this time usage over … well … time, you can run reports that explain to you in detail where you tend to allocate most of your minutes and hours and, in turn, how you can modify your schedule to become a more orderly and adept agent.

Moreover, you can use this time-tracking method with your fellow team members, each of whom can figure out where they can afford to cut back on certain duties, like catch-ups with the managing broker or open houses. Once each agent has an idea as to how they should be spending their time at work, they can use the timeline feature to plan out their revised schedules.

In other words, you can save a day or two’s worth of time over the course of a year using Hours.

Placester Mobile

In the market for comprehensive and intuitive real estate CRM software that makes lead management a cinch? Look no further than our very own real estate marketing solution for agents and teams … and our dedicated iPhone app that makes organizing, prioritizing, and contacting prospects and clients on the go easy.

With Placester Mobile, you can collect all of your leads’ information in one place. Create lead profiles that feature your prospects’ primary contact information and housing preferences in a matter of minutes, then use that information to dictate the notes, tasks, and reminders you can set using the app as well.

What’s more is Placester Mobile allows you to email your contacts right from the app, so you don’t have to worry about going back and forth between the app and your iPhone email client just to send a message to your top leads or current clients.

The features and functionality of Placester Mobile continue to grow each month, so download the app today to access these essential lead management features — or sign up for a Placester real estate marketing subscription, so you can sync the lead and client details in your app with your desktop account.

Bitly

Once you create custom content for your real estate website, one of your next moves — in this case, before your start promoting the pages in question — you should set up UTM parameters that will allow you to track all of the content you craft in Google Analytics. The downside of these parameters is they make your site links super-long and, in turn, look a little suspect in the eyes of anyone who clicks them.

The solution to prevent any click-through issues from occurring with these links is to use a link shortener, like Bitly, that can transform your 250-character URL into a brief, 40-character version. These link shorteners essentially act as a 301 redirect for your site links, meaning they still direct clickers right to the appropriate page.

While this is the main functionality of Bitly, the link-shortening platform now offers a wealth of analytical data associated with all of the links you create. So, if you produce an area page for a local neighborhood in your market and create different UTM links (for example, one for Twitter and one for Facebook, so you can see which source generates the most traction) and Bitly them (yup, it’s a verb as well as a noun), you can see which link “wins” — that is, which source earned you the most traffic.

There are plenty of other data-based use cases for Bitly as well, so it’s highly recommended you give the service a try so you can more easily ascertain what types of content (e.g. buyer and seller resources), sources (social media channels, email), and mediums (blog posts vs. pages) garner the most traffic to your IDX site.

Gboard

Clients who want to know about the best nightlife options around town, coffee shops that are open 24/7, music festivals that tend to tour the area annually: These are just some of the requests your buyer clients may ask of you anytime. To ensure you’re able to be the one to provide the answers and info they need before anyone else, use Gboard: a fantastic smartphone keyboard from Google.

Instead of having to open up a browser on your phone, enter in your search terms, and try to find the most applicable link to share with your clients, Gboard makes it easy to search within your texting app on your iPhone or Android, meaning you can find the details you need to share with clients and send them their way, all in the matter of a minute.

While you may not save tons of time with Gboard, the convenient app can definitely help position yourself as a local thought leader and authority who can fill in clients and leads about the best stores, venues, entertainment options, and other locales around the community — something that can distinguish you from other agents in your market.

DesignBold

Canva and Piktochart have long dominated the DIY design space. Other options, with just-as-simple functionality and a plethora of pre-made templates, though, are certainly optimal options for agents looking to take on their own visual branding efforts and create some original content pieces to share in their digital outlets — and that includes DesignBold.

Whether you want to fashion some fancy images to use on Instagram and Pinterest, construct a direct mailer that can double as an infographic, or craft the imagery for a long-form asset, like an ebook or guide, DesignBold offers the resources you need to get the job done right (a.k.a. build some bold and beautiful marketing materials).

You can even create your own event invitations, postcards, and print ads using the design service — content that will resonate with clients of months and years past and help you earn new business in the future — so spend some time getting to know this polished platform and start crafting some amazing graphics you can leverage online and offline in not time.

RealSatisfied

“The detailed insight required to ensure consistent, long-term success.” That’s what RealSatisfied states it offers real estate professionals on its homepage, and that’s exactly what it delivers: the optimal medium for collecting customer satisfaction data from buyer and seller clients that can be leveraged as social proof for their real estate marketing plans.

Sending surveys to clients using the real estate software is beyond simple, and the reporting capabilities featuring the survey findings are comprehensive and can give you the requisite information you need to both understand what you did well for clients and to inform (and impress) your audience online by publishing said feedback data.

Sharing your real estate success stories with your audience through your IDX site and other digital channels is what will help you ultimately generate high-quality real estate leads for the foreseeable future and build your brand to the heights you want to reach. Creating and promoting a wealth of valuable content is needed too, but the feedback you secure via RealSatisfied is what can put your real estate business over the top, so to speak, with visitors considering hiring an agent soon.

Facebook Ads Manager

Once you’ve mastered your organic real estate marketing on Facebook, you can afford to spend some time, energy, and money with advertising. There are few better ad options for Realtors today than Facebook, thanks in large part to its hyper-targeted audience options, which can get your ads in front of only the right individuals: those who are likely to convert into leads.

But you’re out of the office much of the day, so how you can efficiently oversee your ads’ performance and, when needed, edit them before they go live? With Facebook Ads Manager for iPhone and Android, creating, adjusting, and analyzing your ads on the social network is a cinch (just make sure you only link to your highest-converting real estate website pages to maximize ad success — your lead gen).

KWFinder

Without a doubt, Google Keyword Planner is the premier SEO keyword research tool today. Having said that, there are dozens of lesser-known options that can also give you a glimpse into what kinds of locally focused terms and phrases you should be incorporating in your content, based on their relevance and popularity (that is, their monthly search volume), and KWFinder is one such tool.

This keyword research solution can instantly give you hundreds of similar terms to main keywords along with their monthly search volumes so you can build or enhance your real estate SEO strategy in no time at all. The paid option definitely provides a much clearer view of what keywords will likely work best with your online content, but the free insights the site provides can still deliver the keyword details you need to build a strong SEO plan.

Bananatag

Knowing who’s opening your emails and when they do so may seem impossible, but in actuality, there are several tools that can give you email marketing insights just like these, including Bananatag.

The funky- (and fruity-) named email software tells you when your recipients open and engage with your messages and provides other key resources to help you boost your campaigns, such as email scheduling, so you don’t have to send each one manually.

What’s more is you can even determine which members of your email list open attachments in your messages, meaning you can easily discern which leads and clients check out your home buying best practices guides, home seller resources, homeowner checklists, and other nurturing content you share with your audience regularly.

Wistia

Don’t get us wrong: Having a real estate YouTube channel is essential, nowadays — but that doesn’t mean every video you create needs to be published to the most popular video marketing outlet. Video hosting services, like Wistia, also afford you the chance to post recordings you can later embed to your site and share on social media and via email. Where Wistia and YouTube differentiate, though, is in the analytics.

Yes, YouTube offers its own brand of proprietary analytics that can give you key insights into how your videos perform. With Wistia, however, you get even more granular data you can use to enhance your video strategy: average engagement (e.g. how much of a video viewers watch), play rate (e.g. how many people watched a video who loaded it on a page), and heatmaps (where in the world your videos were viewed).

This tool is optimal for large teams and brokerages at large, given Wistia’s relatively pricy plans, but that’s not to say it’s not potentially the right video marketing solution for your real estate brand. For instance, you and fellow agents at your firm who also produce videos routinely for their personal brands could use a single account to organize your videos and measure your clips’ performance.

What other relatively new apps, tools, and software do you use for your real estate marketing? Share your suggestions with us below!

 

Geo Fencing of Neighborhoods

• Geo-Fence Neighborhoods

Latest Real Estate Technologies Geo-Fencing of neighborhoods Free tools and resources are under this column.  AgentFreebies’ contribution  Resource Page for Real Estate Students Florida Real Estate Students International Real Estate and the CIPS designation. International Real Estate Resources The following form was developped to calculate real estate closing costs for buyers in Florida. It only take 2 minutes to fill out and get accurate results. Buyers Closing Fees – FL This form is similar to the form above except that it is used to generate the closing costs estimates for Sellers at closing in Florida. Sellers Closing Fees – FL This tutorial shows how to post a Real Estate Ad on Craigslist. Real Estate Ad on Craigslist – Tutorial This easy to use tutorial shows you how to use the free financial calculator that comes with the Treo smart phone PDA. Used by many real estate agents in the industry. Treo smartphone Financial Calculator – Tutorial If you would like to carry Google maps with you on the road the next tutorial is for you. Google Maps on the Treo smartphone – Tutorial If you would like to access your Emails with you on the road the next tutorial is for you. Email on the Treo with Versamail – Tutorial  Real Estate Calculators  This tutorial will teach you how to use a Financial calculator on the Treo Smartphone PDA. Treo smartphone Financial Calculator – Tutorial For the best mortgage calculators on the web make sure to visit this website. dinkytown.net More loan calculators can be found on this site. realestateabc.com  No costs Training  Visit this website for a quick course on how to use a popular program to edit your pictures. Photoshop tutorial Training for Real Estate professional is available from HP for Free. Real Estate Technology classes This large brokerage firm makes their triaining availabe on the web for you to read. REMAX listing Presentations You want to teach your kids about money and don’t know where to start, visit this place to learn more. TeachingChildren   andTeensaboutMoney  Places to advertize your listings  Great places to adverise your listings in addition to the MLS. Listing syndication Websites: NLS point2 Postlets.com Classifieds style on Craigs List Visit this site to create a map with a flag and info bubble identifing where your properties for sale are located. Put your listings on a Google Map  Comps, Home Value  Get home values as estimated by Bank of America. Pricing tool at Bank of America This following sites can be used to obtained prices on properties sold in a certain area. Zillow.com – Comps and bird eye view  Free Computer Software  Free Email – Eudora Free office software suiteSpreadsheet, Database, Word Processor, Slide Show program, Math pckg. Free Computer Programming ResourcesFree tutorials and code scripts  Website design  Resize pictures from your digital camera in a snap. This tool is great give it a try and it’s free!. Free Picture resizing tool More than 150,000 free images and sounds from Microsoft Tips from Realtor.com Search Engine Promotion Free Clip Art Free Internet Browsers  Online Communities – Social Networks  ActiveRain realestateconnections.tv twitter brokeragentsocial.com RealEestateWebmasters Agent Online RealTownBlogs.com boomersabroad.com thecreativeinvestor.com realestatediscuss.com homeseekers.com homesalez.com Linkedin.com myspace.com facebook.com bebo.com Hi5.com Blog Syndication – rss Creative Real Estate Online Creative Investor Real Estate Investment clubs Cameron Direct Real Estate Course Reviews  Free Real Estate Forms  RE and Business Forms Free Sample Forms Free Real Estate Forms More Real Estate Forms Free Real Estate Contracts Free Forms – Colorado Free Forms – Texas Free Legal Docs  Miscellaneous  Spell Checker – multi languages Go Nannies For those interested in setting a free blog, the following site is great and very popular among all real estate professionals. Free Blog and Networking Site

Useful information and resources are under this column.  Latest Cool Find  Learn to use Photoshop gratuit! Learn Photoshop for free Take advantage of many free tools from NAR to help you in your business. Free info and Tools from Realtor.com See how your visitors spent time on your website. Stats for your website – Google Analytics Neighborhood info, School info, home prices, household income, etc. Easy to use. Neighborhood info in the US Get your annual credit report from an approved source on this website. Annual Credit Report Resize pictures from your digital camera in a snap. This application is great give it a try and it’s free!. Free Picture resizing tool Same idea but with an online tool: online Picture resizing – snipshot.com online Picture resizing – resizr.com This mapping website can show you where the closest coffee shop is located in the area. Find your Coffee A list of life expectancies for many home appliances is published on this website: Appliances Life Expectancy Components Life Expectancy Study Web site that provides step-by-step information on how to do just about everything. Also has help for most common home fix-it-yourself projects: How to do things around the house  Gas Price  Find the best prices for gas in your area by entering your zip code on the following webpages. Gas Price Finder on MSN Gas Buddy  Maps  If you need to get the facts about an area within a zip code. Zipskinny If you need to highlight an area on a map. Maps and radius If you need to find the zip codes close to a certain location. Zip codes within area If you need to locate any addresses use one of these popular mapping services. Google Maps Yahoo Directions MapQuest  Tracking Packages  To track any packages from the major carriers visit their place on the Internet. UPS Fedex DHL USPS  “DO NOT CALL” lists info  from FCC from NAR from NAR (bis) Do not call quick check  Phone / Mail  800 numbers dial a human free conference calling free conference calls Zip Code Look Up National White Pages National Yellow Pages  Public Records  Records in any States and Counties Keep our children Safe – Offender registries in most states  Business info  Better Business Bureau  Statistics  Stats from NAR World Population Database  Designations / Certifications  (ABR)Accredited Buyer’s Representative (ABRM)Accredited Buyer Representative Manager (ACRE)Accredited Consultant in Real Estate (ALC)Accredited Land Consultant (ARM)Accredited Residential Manager (ASP)Accredited Staging Professional (ASR)Accredited Seller Representative At Home with Diversity Certification (CBR)Certified Buyer Representative (CCIM)Certified Commercial Investment Member (CIPS)Certified International Property Specialist (CLHMS)Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist (CPM)Certified Property Manager (CRB)Certified Real Estate Brokerage Manager (CRE)Counselor of Real Estate (CRIA)Certified Realty Investment Associate (CRS)Certified Residential Specialist (CSP)Certified New Home Sales Professional Ecobroker Certified (e-PRO)e-PRO Certification (GRI)Graduate REALTOR® Institute Quality Service Certified (PMN)Performance Management Network (REEA)Real Estate Educators Association (REPA)Real Estate Professional Assistants (RSPS)Resort and Second-Home Property Specialist (SIOR)Society of Industrial and Office REALTORS® (SRES)Seniors Real Estate Specialist  Real Estate News / Portals  Realty Times Inman Rismedia RealtorMag.com Broker Agent News NAR News Real Estate ABC  Home Inspections  American Society of Home Inspectors National Association of Home Inspectors National Association of Certified Home Inspectors

Find Products for your Real Estate Business under this column  Complimentary Office Supplies  If you are looking for graphic images for your webpage or presentations, Microsoft has some bonus stuff for you. More than 150,000 images and sounds from Microsoft at no charge! If you are starting a new business for you or your kids and need a few cards, this company will give them to you for free. Free Business Card Magnets FREE Rubber Stamps Business Logo Design This website has some bonus material with a minimum order. free biz cards with $300 order Visit the following website for more information on how to generate Adobe PDF files from any of computer programs with no charge. CutePDF.com PDF print driver  Office Products  Compare products here before you make a purchase: TopTenReviews.com Find the latest deals, coupons and bargains on these websites. slickdeals.net fatwallet.com techbargains.com woot.com Software for you business:  Get 15 % Off QuickBooks Pro + Free Shipping Download award-winning internet security and anti-spyware software from Trend Micro Web hosting services: GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans Checks, Stamps or cards: Checks online Try Stamps.com today! Winter Clearance! Save up to 90%! Faxes on the web or from your email account: Buy 2 months get the 3rd FREE at MyFax Get a CallWave Fax Number  Gifts Ideas  Personalized Housewarming Gifts from PersonalizationMall.com Find unique gifts ideas for all your occasions at Things Remembered. A priceless gift doesn’t have to be expensive Flowers Amazon.com Home & Garden, Books, Gift Certificates, … etc The Good Cook Free Business Magazines  Legal Information  Visit this website to get a course and learn about Probabte, Trusts, Estate Planning, company formation, and more legal subjects realted to real estate. Asset Protection and Estate Planning  Financials  FREE 3-in-1 Credit Report with trial! Click here! AIG Auto Insurance Need a Real Estate Lawyer?