Real Estate and technology. There is a marriage made in, well, h-e-double hockey sticks. My mother, Marilyn, was a successful realtor for thirty years (her first office had an 8 track player, and a video tape recorder that was the first VCR I had ever seen). While she embraced email and the internet towards the end of her career, it would be hard to imagine my mom “tweeting'” or using any type of scheduling/calendaring software because it did not integrate with her old school hard cover daily planner. However with most industries, real estate professionals have found that embracing technology is far better than running from it. Additonally, most are realizing that technology means more than just ‘social networking’ or standard back office functions. There is a wide range of free products available, and James Kimmons from About.com does a good job of listing them up. I’ve borrowed from him as I use these myself, but I offer the additonal stimulating commentary free of charge.
1. Gmail for Lots of Things Gmail does lots of things well. It’s great for small business, offers exception email search capabilities, it’s a SaaS platform (a cute way of saying it’s online all the time, and requires no installed software), categorizes emails well, keeps the email thread in a string for easy following of conversations and offers tons of storage. Plus, it doesn’t go all wonky, slow and stupid like the outlook client does. Ever had to restore your outlook file or crop it because it went over 2gb? It stinks, leave that to the IT guys, even they hate it. Gmail is robust and does not have such issues. It sends a strong message of technical credibility, unlike those who are still using AOL (Agent Out of Luck). The only downside is trying to find an email address that isn’t something like funkelburger05458@gmail.com, although there are ways around that.
2. YouTube for Video Marketing – Youtube is an awesome tool for realtors. Place videos of your listings or property previews online for your sellers. Create marketing and training videos and link them to your website. It’s fast, easy and free. New camera technologies (like the FLIP video camcorder) make it really easy to film and upload your movies. Hurry up and use this now, before Google figures out that the cost of running the business on top of the 1.65 billion they spent is going from ‘incredible business opportunity’ to ‘loss leader’.
3. Google Calendar for Time & Task Management – Google calendar is free, online (there is the SaaS thing again) and does not crash and burn like outlook. You can schedule events and invite others using their email, and allow them to get notifications prior to the meeting. It integrates with custom agent and broker solutions like e-agents. It doesn’t handle office resources (say like your meeting room schedules, but who doesn’t enjoy a good no-holds barred cage match over a meeting room scheduling conflict)? PROTIP – use the same username for all google services, that way you can switch from one service to the next (say like google analytics, calendar and Youtube) and enjoy all of the integration benefits.
4. WordPress – The ONLY Blogging Solution – Forget MSN spaces or even blogger. These are OK for most folks, but WordPress is a free blogging platform that offers an online version (All SaaS-y and stuff) or a server version with more features, functionality and control. Create a blog, choose and modify a template color scheme, categorize posts, add helpful plugins and get full use of RSS functionality and imbed to your site (broker and agent solutions included).
5.Google Analytics – If your are not using Google analytics to analyze the traffic on your website, your should do so now. While you may need some help from your IT or technical support folks if you are unfamiliar with HTML, the benefits you will reap will be worth the effort. There are a number of canned and custom reports available, and almost immediately you will see the data. Page views, bounce rates, referring sites, geographic locales are there, to name a few. Want to know what percentage of your visitors are referred from twitter and how much time they spend on your site? Google analytics is for you. Please don’t be intimidated by these tools. They are easier to implement and use than you think. Trust me when I say there is no need for the legions of operations engineers whose sole existence hinges on the practice of gathering and analyzing this information. Although if you’d like to spend hours understanding the incredibly fast paced, exciting and high profile world of incident management, don’t let me stop you.
That wraps up the five tools I think are awesome for Real Estate. Marlilyn would be proud, but still would not relenquish the hard bound old school daily planner. Oh well. Thanks again to James Kimmons.
Filed under: Technology
Joe Capote 