Key Productivity Tools For a Real Estate Agent

It is vital to be always on top of things if you wish to become a successful real estate agent. Now as you start off in the real estate industry, you may initially not find the need to invest time and money in a host of productivity tools. With fewer clients on your roster, you are able to manage everything and keep track of everything-- which is good.

However, if you are going to build your real estate business and you are going to expand your client base, you'll need to be prepared for when that happens. There will be an immediate need for tools that boost your productivity and help you manage your work in an effective manner.

In this article, we have rounded up some of the best and most popular productivity tools preferred by real estate agents across the board. This list includes both free and paid software suggestions, however, all of these are excellent choices in that particular category for any real estate agent.

Office Administration and Productivity Tools:

These tools are meant to help you create and maintain a proper workflow and manage all of your administrative tasks in an effective manner. Most of these tools are available in a free version although it is worth opting for the paid version of these productivity tools to benefit from the wide array of features offered to paid subscribers.

G-Suite:

Let us begin with the most popular and regularly used set of cloud computing, productivity, and collaboration tools — The G-Suite. Developed by Google, this set of tools has undergone a few rebranding and renaming efforts, the latest of which is Google Workspace. In essence, it is still the same with a few additional elements added.

The best part about the G-Suite/Google Workspace is the deep integration and cloud storage it offers. This means you are never away from any essential information or the ability to document your needs. For real estate agents, this is vital as it enables them to be mobile and still be able to be on top of their administrative responsibilities. The G-Suite offers the following communication and management tools:

1. Gmail - The free email solution by Google.
2. Google Drive - A cloud storage solution for all of your vital data.
3. Google Docs - A word processor.
4. Google Sheets -A spreadsheet creator similar to Microsoft Excel.
5. Google Slides - An alternative to Powerpoint
6. Google Forms - A tool for creating surveys and questionnaires.
7. Google Sites - A tool for creating web pages.
8. Google Calendar - A tool for time management.
9. Google Hangouts - A video conferencing tool similar to Zoom and Skype.
10. Google Currents - A tool for internal business communication.
11. Google Keep - A tool for planning and note-taking.
12. Google Vault - A long-term media archiving storage solution. Generally used in forensics, eDiscovery, and investigations.

The paid version starts at $6 USD per user per month, with additional features offered at higher package levels.

DocuSign

DocuSign is one of the most important productivity tools for a real estate agent. It is basically a cloud-based electronic signature solution service provider for businesses. DocuSign can be used to electronically sign most documents required for a real estate transaction.

The real estate agents can upload documents, email them to the buyers/sellers and specify the order in which they have to sign. Tags can be included to highlight where the documents require an electronic signature.

Evernote:

Evernote has been one of the most popular note-taking apps ever since it was launched. And many real estate agents do prefer to use it for all of their daily task planning. Unlike other note-taking or to-do list apps, Evernote is a software that offers support for voice notes, image capture, and handwriting recognition. These features are a must for any real estate agent.

The agents can geotag, email, label, and sync these notes across a wide range of devices so that their work is never interrupted. The basic version of Evernote is free for use; however, the paid version, which is called Evernote Pro, offers integration with a host of other tools, such as Google Drive and Slack.

Communications Tools:

A team functions as well as the communication between the team members. When working or leading a real estate team, it is essential to have a proper system of communication established between all of the team members. In a time-sensitive industry like real estate, it is crucial not to miss out on any message or important communication.

Slack:

Whether you are a broker with your own team of real estate agents or an agent working on a team, the main requirement is for an effective means of communication between all the team members. This is where Slack is helpful.

Slack provides all real estate agents an enhanced and utterly clutter-free communication tool. Real estate agents are often running around attending listing appointments and taking down a lot of notes. They also have to manage documents and keep track of numerous emails.

This makes communication itself a challenge. Slack is basically a highly intuitive messaging app, which helps you boost your productivity while still maintaining clear lines of communication with your team. It effectively streamlines all the communication between different teams or team members.

Boomerang:

As a real estate agent part of your workday is to send out emails to your leads. Now many a times you might get some time to do so only at the end of the day or maybe you catch up on all the emails on weekends. Boomerang is your answer to helping you schedule and send out these all-important lead generation and lead conversion emails at your convenience.

With Boomerangs real estate agents can write an email and schedule it to be delivered at a fixed date and time. This handy productivity tool also lets real estate agents set an email reminder. It also offers a host of other features such as:

1. Reminders if you do not get a reply.
2. Offers a clean inbox and backup for important emails.
3. Allows users to hold their emails until they are ready to address them.
4. Helpful for the agents to keep track of all their essential email conversations with various clients. It ensures that no lead is lost due to a lack of timely response.

Trello:

Trello brings in a different and feature-rich service to collaborative task management. It works in the format of organizing your projects and tasks into boards. All you do is create a new board for each of the projects your team is working upon.

This allows a team to see who is working on which project and at what stage is each project. Once a new board has been created, Trello offers an option of creating sub-lists for various stages of the real estate deal. It also allows you to drag, drop, and modify the cards as required with real-time updates.

Within these cards, Trello offers the features of including comments, creating a to-do list/checklist, deadlines and due dates, and much more. This ensures that all the members of the team are aware at all times regarding the status of the projects.

Marketing Tools:

You do have to market your business. Now there is always a choice to hire professionals for these, still, if you are short on budget or you feel you would be capable of handling these responsibilities on your own, then here are suggestions of the key tools you need.

Canva:

A real estate agent has to constantly work on the marketing aspect of the business in order to keep the pipeline of leads steady. One of the essential productivity tools to help out in this regard is Canva.

Canva helps you enhance your content marketing and social media outreach tremendously. With Canva you no longer need a graphic designer to help create beautiful graphics for your online marketing.

Canva is essentially a web-based graphic design platform. It lets you create graphics in a wide array of formats, such as infographics, charts, presentations, and prints,

It offers you a large library of built-in templates for you to use as a base for your design. The user interface is pretty intuitive and in no time you would have created your next big marketing content.

The free version of Canva is pretty feature-rich to fulfill most of your graphic designing needs.

Leadpages:

All successful real estate agents tend to have a real estate website. The issue however is that not many spend adequate time in designing a proper landing page. Having an attractive and effective landing page is a vital component of your site.

It is not enough to merely attract new visitors, but you need to make sure to convert those visitors. Leadpages help you in this regard.

What LeadPages offers is an opportunity to create and launch high-converting website landing pages within no time. It offers 100s of templates to choose and modify from. Additionally, it also provides a welcome gate to greet first-time visitors to your website. This profiles your visitors and gathers information about them. 

Yoast SEO:

Now that you are already briefed about the importance of a real estate website and an effective landing page, the next task of order is to make sure that your website ranks high in the search engine lists.

You want your site to be one of the top three in most popular search engine results, and this is where Yoast SEO steps in. Although we would advise letting experts handle your SEO requirements, it may not always be possible for a new agent to be able to afford professional services.

Yoast SEO helps you make the optimum choice to maximize the visibility of your website. Whether it is your content or your content format, Yoast SEO provides you actionable suggestions to improve your content before it goes live.

Social Media Management Tools:

Now, after marketing, you have to focus on keeping up engagement on social media too.

Hootsuite:

All of you would have heard the advice about creating and maintaining an active profile across a wide range of social media platforms. Social media management is absolutely crucial for a real estate agent to become successful. Now creating all these profiles is not the issue, the problem arises when, as a real estate agent, you need to post or put up an update on all these profiles.

Hootsuite steps in to simplify this for you. Hootsuite is basically the Boomerang for your social media posts. It lets you schedule and post across all your social media accounts simultaneously. This means you can carve out some time from your schedule and arrange all of your social media updates and then let Hootsuite take over and post it as required.

Customer Relationship Management Tools:

Finally, as we round up our list of productivity tools, we shall discuss the importance of being able to manage all your real estate leads and clients in an effective manner.

Dorrmat:

It is crucial to have a feature-rich and robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. Now although there are many such tools available offering good features. We would like to suggest creating a profile on Dorrmat, which is an online real estate platform.

Although the Dorrmat is primarily a lead generation platform for real estate agents, it also offers a built-in CRM tool to its registered agents. This CRM has extensive backend support. It allows the registered agents to directly transport their new leads into the CRM.

With extensive features, it help agents stay on top of all of their new leads. It scores high in terms of productivity because Dorrmat combines lead generation and Customer Relationship Management into one seamless interface.

Summary:

As a real estate agent, you are always going to be looking into ways to expand your client base. Now with a growing client base, you are bound to have a lot of demands on your time. This is where tools for real estate, productivity tools, and tech tools step in.

Even if you think that currently, you do not need many of these tools, it is still worth your while to one by one start incorporating them into your workflow. So that when the day comes when you are in need of these productivity tools, you are not wasting time setting these up and figuring out how to use them.

The key to being successful in any profession is the efficient allocation of your time. Your time spent in the right place will fetch you the benefits your want. That is why these tools are an integral part of your success as a real estate agent.