Buying a home. Selling a home. Finding a home. Making a home. It takes a lot of work and a lot of resources.
Over the past decade, a lot of those resources have come in the form of tech tools. It only makes sense that the real estate industry would adopt technology to make life easier – when listing homes, comparing neighborhoods, finding specific home features, following up on leads and more.
So what are the best tech tools realtors have available that they didn’t 10 years ago? And what technology should realtors be wary of?
The basics: GPS, social media, smartphones.
What do you need to know about these basics? Well, you probably already know a lot.
Yahoo! Finance reports that nearly 40% of realtors use GPS on a daily basis. Social media is a must. So are smartphones.
Realtors now have the convenience of taking clients to listings without getting lost. They can post great finds on social media pages, and use Internet-connected phones to look up properties on the go. That wasn’t happening 10 years ago – especially since cell phones didn’t even become smartphones until a few years later.
The necessary: FaceTime, Open Home Pro, HomeSpotter
FaceTime. Why is it necessary? Sometimes, you have a buyer that can’t physically make it to see a property. FaceTime is the easiest way to make a virtual house call. You don’t have to worry about logging in, like with other video conference platforms. The only catch is that both you and your client have to have iPhones.
Open Home Pro. If you’re hosting an open house, you need to be organized. Open Home Pro is an app that lets you easily input information from potential buyers, like emails and addresses. You can also make notes, like if your potential buyer is pre-qualified, already has an agent or is likely to buy soon or not. This is a great tool to track the most promising leads, without rummaging through business cards or pieces of papers.
HomeSpotter: This augmented reality app shows you which homes in a certain neighborhood are for sale, which have been sold recently, and how much they cost. All you do is scan over a home with your iPad, iPhone or Android, as if you were going to take a picture of it. As an agent, you can use the app to show potential home buyers other properties that are for sale in the same neighborhood, how much alisted for, and other features.
Other tools to keep in mind: Upload videos to a YouTube channel, use cloud storage system like Dropbox, integrate Google Calendar with your Gmail account, and make a shared photo stream of potential properties with clients.
The questionable: Phishing scams
Anytime you make a living based largely off reputation, like many realtors do, you want to be cautious about your online reputation. That’s why online privacy protection plans and virus protection are so popular. Because if you’re not careful, you could get wrapped into a phishing scam like some real estate offices and agents did recently. What happened?
An email claiming to be from the Better Business Bureau with links to viruses and malware made its way to the inboxes of realtors. The email said that their company was being investigated by the BB, and threatened to take legal action if they did not get a response. What the scam was actually looking for in a response was financial information.
The lesson there? Never click on links in an email unless you’re 110% sure of the source that they are coming from.
By using these tech tools, staying on top of new apps and being cautious of others, you’ll keep yourself, your clients and your business running smoothly.
