A real estate agent guides and assists people in buying, selling, and renting residential and commercial real estate properties. To accomplish these tasks, an agent also performs several other functions:
- Advertise a property
- Find buyers, sellers, renters, tenants, and landlords for their clients
- Find properties that match their clients’ needs
- Draw up contracts for real estate transactions
- Help prepare properties for viewing or selling
- Advise clients on property management
- Advise clients on how to negotiate their terms for a real estate transaction successfully
- Create and maintain property listings
- Track and manage transactions
Real estate agents do many things daily, and those who want to become the best real estate agent they can be will do their utmost to perform with excellence. It’s tough juggling these responsibilities, but like most jobs, it gets easier over time. Still, it doesn’t hurt to take every opportunity to make one’s work easier. Real estate agents can find such opportunities in apps and programs designed specifically for their use.
Essential Tools for Real Estate Agents: Management Apps
The following are examples of tools for real estate agents that are helpful in key areas like customer relations, task and time management, and data storage and accessibility.
- CRM Programs – CRM technology can be beneficial to real estate agents, especially those who also take on the responsibilities of a property manager for their clients. The uses of CRM for real estate are numerous:
- Track leads
- Record interactions/touch-bases with clients
- File, organize, and keep within reach information about prospects, leads, and existing clients (e.g., what type of property are they looking for, buying histories, email outreach preferences)
- Oversee client relationship cycles (e.g., from unqualified lead to hot lead to customer to repeat customer)
With CRM technology, real estate agents can nurture their relationships with leads and clients; provide better-quality and timely services; always stay on top of ongoing conversations and transactions with each client, and access these data anywhere, anytime via the cloud.
What is the best CRM for real estate agents? There are several popular platforms to choose from, such as Property Raptor, Wise Agent, PipeDrive, and LionDesk. Agents can also develop CRM solutions that are custom-made to match their needs. Arextech is an example of a custom CRM product provider.
- Team and Task Management Apps – Whether you lead a team of agents and staff or work on your own, a team and task management app will be very helpful. These apps are often structured such that nested or sequential tasks must be completed in the right order. It’s a useful function when you’re juggling several to-do lists at once. Group and task management apps also allow users to log the time spent on each task, attach files relevant to a task, share files with team members, and link tasks with email and messaging apps. Examples of these are Trello, Asana, Monday, Google Tasks, and Weekdone.
- Electronic Signature Apps – Now that it’s becoming the norm to finalize business deals remotely through video conferencing and other online-based communications, apps that make it easy to affix electronic signatures on original, softcopy documents are a must-have. Examples of apps that real estate agents can use and recommend to clients so they can sign paperwork digitally are Adobe Sign (integrates with the Adobe Document Cloud suite), DocuSign, HelloSign, and Preview (for Apple users).
- Amateur-Friendly Graphic Design Apps – Sometimes, real estate agents need to whip up marketing materials as quickly as they can. Fortunately, there are now many free, graphic design tools that are made specifically for people who’re not knowledgeable about graphics creation and photo editing. These apps provide eye-catching, pre-made graphic templates that make your images and texts look like they’re professionally done. Canva, Piktochart, Picmonkey, and Stencil are some of the most popular visual creation apps for real estate agents.
These simple tools can make life a lot easier for real estate agents. Use these apps and tools to increase efficiencies, improve your performance, and make your clients happy.
