Gadget Guru Sean Moore of Re/Max Boone Realty in Columbia, MO shares his top 5 gadgets to keep your real estate business running smooth. Sean is a Missouri YPN Chapter Advisory Board member and does a great job of cluing us in on some key gadgets in a post that he originally shared on his personal blog.
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I read an article the other day about the 6 Realities of Doing Business on the Social Web that caught my attention. I really didn’t find the article itself all that interesting as it was written for the newcomer to online media and social networking. What I really found interesting was the authors’ first statement that “You have to be a great agent first“! So many times I see people trying new things and looking for that magic tool that is gonna generate them lots of new business and I ask myself have they thought about showing up to work each day and doing “the basics”. Well the basics are boring and nobody wants to hear about them. So I guess I will focus on the “cool” stuff. See, I’m a gadget guy and in real estate there are lots of gadgets!
Let’s call this my Top Five list of must haves for the current Real Estate Agent:
1) CRM (Customer Relations Management) Software
Once you get to a level of hundreds or thousands of contacts and dozens of listings the “catch all” database systems cannot keep up with the detailed functionality of a specifically designed software program for real estate. I definitely had my trial and tribulations with this one. I started out using a program that is no longer available called Howard & Friends. This DOS based program was awesome. It had everything but due to the costs it was not kept up to date and was hard to use in this tech savvy world. So I then invested in Agent Office. It was more up to date but lacked many of the features I loved about H&F. In less than a year I dumped it and decided to go back to Microsoft Outlook. This time however, I bought and addin to Outlook called Respond by Pat Zaby. Man was this puppy robust! It did it all…. problem was it was only functional on one computer (I use about a dozen) and it caused lots of system crashes that required hours of re-installs. So this left me with the decision to focus the majority of my time at the Annual NAR Convention checking out everything on the trade show floor that there was. One program that I had heard lots of back press from fellow agents stood out above the rest, Top Producer. I quickly learned from the sales staff that the agents that dogged their product were not tech savvy and wouldn’t take the time to learn it. Well, I knew that wasn’t me and years later all I can say is it’s like the human brain. I know I am only using about 10% of all that it offers! Nothing else out there compares.
2) SMART Phone (PDA)
These should be the norm today for any agent yet I see agents in my community walking around with dinosaurs for phones. With a smart phone you are mobile. There is not much you can’t do with these things. I can read and forward contracts, unlock lock-boxes, edit my calendar, surf the web, check all my email accounts and even, yes, talk to people. Though I try very hard to not use it for phone conversations 
. I am more of a text or email kinda guy. Both give me a record of what has been done and not. I currently use a Palm Treo 755p for many reasons. First, it is a solid well built phone that has withstood hundreds of drops. Second, I love Palm software. It is fast and does not bog down like the Windows based phone. I know what you are about to say… what about an iPhone. Well, my service is with Sprint who does not offer the iPhone and if I were to give up the IR port on my Palm I would have to carry a key fob to bluetooth to with the iPhone to then beam to the lock-box to open the dozens of homes I enter each day. So pick one, learn all there is to know about it, and use it!
3) D-SLR (Digital Single-lens Reflex) Camera
I have yet to find a point-n-shoot digital camera that takes great indoor photos of objects. See these camera are designed for 2 things; taking pics of people and the outdoors. There tiny lens can only let in so much light and the flash that is built into them can really only light up about 15 away from the camera. Yet, this is the number 1 choice of all real estate agents… My investment (they are not cheap!) of a Nikon D70s with Speed-light was one of the best I have made in my business. I went from taking 100 or more photos inside homes so that I could weed out the bad ones and use around 20 to 25 for my promotion of the home to taking 25 perfect photos each time. Here is another cool fact. I actually got a listing just because the seller said when she looked at my listings online my pics were far better than any others she had been looking at. So one could say the commission I earned off the sale of her home more than paid for the $1,500 investment in my D-SLR!
4) eFax Number
If you are in real estate and you say you love faxes then you are not in real estate. I have yet to find a machine that sends and receives quality faxes. I hate them with a passion. But not every client of mine is savvy enough to know how to scan and email documents back to me. About 3 years ago I got my own dedicated eFax number. For many reasons I feel having your own is important. You totally lose the efficiency of having one by sharing it with others. First, every fax sent to your number is immediately emailed to you in PDF format. Second, you have online access to every fax you have ever received. No more calling the client up because it did not come through clear enough or because you lost it! When I am traveling and don’t have access to a scanner (though I typically do carry with me a portable ribbon scanner) I simply walk up to the front desk of the hotel with the documents and ask them to fax it to my number. Then I have it digitally backed up in an email and can simple forward it to my client!
5) Flip Video Camera
In my market Open Houses have been loosing their effectiveness year after year. Some would simply say its just the market. But I disagree. I truly feel the Internet has replaced the Open House. With technology a buyer can “get a feel” for the home on the web. In fact with floor plans, dozens of high resolution photos, virtual tours and now… video tours, buyers are even buying homes without even walking in the door! The auto industry has been buying cars off the web for years now sight unseen. So it just makes sense that video tours of homes are the way of the future. In fact, I don’t know an online website for real estate that doesn’t offer the ability to attached a video tour of the property being promoted. Yet when I search for homes with video tours in my MLS I only find 1 or 2% of all the listings that have them. A company called Flip Video has a USB camera the size of a pack of cigarettes with 3 buttons that a 5 year old can use. The reason I know this, is that I have several of them and my 5 year old triplets use them often. The picture and sound quality is awesome and the built in editing software allows you to create and upload a 5 minute movie in less than… five minutes!
There are many other cool gadgets for the job, but I felt these were my top 5. Who knows, next year it might be 5 completely different toys….
