Run Your Real Estate Business On Google The Cloud Note: Fill & Download for Free

Startups and businesses are constantly churning out new tools and apps that cater to the needs of real estate professionals. Today we’re taking a look at some of the most useful and innovative ones. We’ve rounded up below a list of 10+ useful tools and apps that help real estate agents navigate their busy schedules and streamline their services. Check them out below, in no particular order. We’ll be continually updating it to include the latest - and greatest - tools out there.BannersnackBannersnack is an easy to use online design platform that allows you to create all of your marketing visuals in one place. From digital, print, static, or animated banner ads to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, IAB, Pinterest, or LinkedIn visuals, this tool enables you to design killer ads effortlessly.The platform's primary focus is on maximizing productivity when designing ads. You can either start from scratch or choose from their many handcrafted real estate banner templates and generate 30+ ads of different sizes, all at once. Plus, the drag-and-drop editor and the advanced animations and interactive elements insert options make it possible for any real estate agent to design ads seamlessly.BoxBrownieOffering high-quality professional products such as Image Enhancement, Virtual Staging, Twilight Conversions, Floor Plan Redraws, CGI Renders, Virtual Renovation, plus so much more.As the leading photo editing company in America, we have established ourselves within the Real Estate Industry. With strong relationships with NAR and multiple MLS’ across the country, we continue to work together to provide better support and education around property marketing."A picture is worth a thousand words and the guys at BoxBrownie know it all too well. Good photos are the first step to increasing the likelihood of a showing so they've created this photo editing website that can show your listings in their best light. And in addition to image enhancements that include brightness/contrast adjustments, color balancing, straightening, sharpening and more, with BoxBrownie you can also stage the property by adding virtual furniture in the picture, showcasing the full potential of the home to prospective buyers, or remove items from the image to declutter the space.Digital FlyerDigital Flyer is a real estate text rider and SMS marketing software tool from Pro Agent Solutions. Digital Flyer is free to use for any real estate agent. The tool saves you time and money by using SMS marketing so that you don’t need to get new text sign riders made for each property, and you don’t have to manage multiple phone numbers. All of your listings are accessible with your Digital Flyer phone number, which makes life easy for any real estate professional. Pro Agent Solutions can also text you the phone number of the prospective home buyer while they are still in front of the house, via an instant text message and email. Then, you can use their CRM Pro features to nurture those leads and close more deals.FolioPowered by AI, the Folio app was designed to simplify and organize communication with clients by attaching to your Gmail or Office 365 account where it automatically organizes transactions, documents, and deal timelines. The machine algorithm scans and sorts sender and receiver information, the subject line, the email body, attachment file names, as well as text within attachments. Also, it enables the user to sync calendars and set reminders, which is a handy tool for a busy real estate agent.LaterSocial media has grown into a powerful marketing tool, and the people at Later are well-aware of that. So they've come up with a social media scheduling app that allows users to schedule a month of content in just a few hours. For real estate agents, this is a great time-saving tool, as it enables them to focus more on their multitude of tasks while maintaining a well-organized and planned content feed on their offers, specials and the like. Its features include auto-publishing, a visual calendar, a feed preview with drag-and-drop capabilities and analytics to check what content works best with the audience. A cool, informative video is available here.PalmAgent ONEThe PalmAgent ONE app comes with preloaded calculations and closing costs based on specific cities/counties that help you get an initial idea of financials associated with real estate deals. The user has dedicated fields to enter the sales price, the interest rate, the broker fee, and up to seven additional pieces of information, and automatically receives a report with detailed graphs and tables. This management software also allows users to run calculations such as monthly affordability, rent vs. buy, sell to net, as well as compare multiple offers.ProofHubProofHub is a cloud-based project management solution designed for businesses/teams of every size, in every industry. For real estate agents, this tool serves as a central place for projects, people, tasks, files, reports—and everything else that comes in between running a real estate business and making it successful.Gantt charts, Kanban boards, Custom roles, Chats, Discussions, @mention, Notes, Reports, Calendar, Timesheets, Timers, Proofing tools, Announcements, and Third-party integrations (Freshbooks, Google Calendar, iCal, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive), these are some of the key highlights of the ProofHub's scalable feature list. Overall, this simple project management software has every feature or tool that you, as a real estate agent, may need.And if that isn't enough to convince you, ProofHub's pricing surely will. Unlike most real estate project management solutions available on the market, ProofHub has a fair and reasonable pricing structure—no per-user fees. The tool offers two paid plans, along with an initial 30-day free trial. And there are special discounts if your firm is a nonprofit.RealScoutRealScout is a collaborative home search platform that includes MLS data, photos, and personalized text that caters perfectly to both the agent and the homebuyer. It has an excellent search capability, which allows you to filter your home search by whatever feature is most important to your client, such as 'natural light' or 'open plan.' Typically, homebuyers start their search online, and this tool helps the collaboration between the agent and the homebuyer: the homebuyer has access to the tools to choose, and the agent is given visibility into that choice.ScheduleOnceScheduleOnce is a scheduling app that makes it easier for real estate agents to schedule apartment showings, property inspections, and any other events. Moreover, it connects seamlessly with any other calendar so that you can have all your appointments in one place. The tool can be used for a variety of industries, including B2B, finance, healthcare, consulting, lifestyle, and education, so it can be used both for professional purposes and for personal event scheduling.Showing ProShowing Pro is a cloud-based showing service that incorporates a team-showing calendar for all your team's listings in one place. Basically, you carry with you and access from any device your every member's showing calendar and manage all other appointments and tasks. The app also includes approvals and automated feedback requests, so in a way, it acts like a 24/7 call center.VenngageThe Venngage app is a great design tool as you can use it to compile your data in catchy infographics, reports, and flyers or even presentations. It's easy to use, as it offers a variety of templates to choose from to share your information and listings in a descriptive and illustrative way. You can also add your company logo onto published graphs and juggle with the color palette. Once you've designed your project, you can download it in PDF format or .jpeg and also share it on social media directly from the app.11 of the Best Apps and Tools for Real Estate Agents

First off I think Christopher did a great job in breaking down the mechanics of what you would need to develop this project. Now being that you did state that you hold a small firm of 12 employees and I am going to assume they live within the general area so I don't believe that yours will be as large of an undertaking as was Christophers may have been.I will break it down in 5 basic steps for you so that you can get an understanding as to what order in which you need develop this project.Data - I am sure that you have an offline application / database that you are able to store your data in currently. You need to verify that the data currently stored can be exported into a .csv or zip file as most online databases such as MySQL will have the ability to import them. Building this information from scratch isn't impossible but definitely painstaking.CRM - Stands for Customer Relationship Management software is usually web baed software that will allow for you to store contact/customer information and any data related to the customer online (ie. Contact Info, Call Info, Purchasing History, Notes, Birthday Information, Status Info). This can be done in one of two ways, some CRM's are cloud based such as SalesForce.com or SugarCRM.com while others are available to either hosted on a webserver that you build or lease online. I am currently building this system for a Real Estate Broker in Los Angeles utilizing a core vTiger CRM but building it for the needs of a Real Estate Brokerage Firm. Utilizing an Open Source platform such as this allows for the development to expand beyond what the initial developer had in mind. The data that is exported from your current application can be imported into your CRM. Think of the CRM as the heart of your application infrastructure. Do your homework and research the differences between them, some offer a mobile platform as well as a standard web-based application so that your Real Estate Officers can access their data from outside of the office without the need for a laptop.Website - Now a modern website isn't just a bunch of Static HTML Code just slapped together for the sake of having a website. Your website should be database driven that allows for the developer to integrate forms into your CRM. This becomes your new Lead Generation Tool for new prospects and leads as they come to your site, view and send information to you from your site that can be pushed or pulled into your CRM. What your potential customers view is the website, what your employees log into and view is the CRM.Storage - Now that you understand the applications needed to run your cloud based infrastructure you need to think about storage. If you develop and host the sites inhouse then you can manage and build storage as needed but if you use a web hosting company you need to make sure that storage isn't going to be an issue. To the very least, you need to verify with the host that if you need to expand or add on more storage that the option is available for you. Besides your customer contact data, what other forms of data do you plan on storing on your web server to make available for your Employees? Do you want to load brochures and flyers? Video and podcasts? If so all that data adds up and so you need to make sure that you have adequate storage to host all that data. Amazon offers a scalable platform for expanding businesses that is very cost effectiive, just google "Amazon EC2".Backup - The very last thing you would ever want to happen is to have all of your data lost due to your lack of backing things up. If you are self hosting make sure that you backup all of your database(s) information at the very least, if you have a good backup solution then monthly or quarterly, backup the site and CRM as well. Make several solutions for your backup, meaning look into both online and offline backups so that no matter what, you data is available if by chance you ever need to restore it.Dependant on your technical background this could be an overwhelming project or one that you can take on with a comprehensive plan. Hopefully if you take your time and break it down as I have done for you, you may be able to tackle this project and create a successful cloud based infrastructure.

Keep in mind my answer will be US centric and personal as that is where I have spent most of my time and I'm no pollster or statistician.Hipsters have been around for such a long time that it is almost cool again to be one. YOLO is sounding it's death knell, and possibly we have seen the last boy band and boy singer ala Bieber and One Direction. *crosses fingers*... Facebook and Twitter are at Peak Social, so expect some alternative thing to come up like Instagram or Snapchat but more pervasive. Vampires are out; Zombies are the new Vampire (they need a way to make Zombies sexy). Disney is probably wondering how they can stop producing talent such as Selena, Miley, and Demi, and keep to animated characters like Elsa and Anna (Frozen movie) that they can control.It seems like conflict has migrated to different countries than the 2000s. I believe part of this is due to the Arab Spring where many countries are increasing awareness of inequality and social injustice and movements are organizing. US commitment to engagements around the world appear to be on the decline yet we are still criticized from within for not stepping in such as the ISIS insurrection and the Ukraine crisis.The internet has been slowly attacked as a symbol of freedom in the 2000s and it appears for the first time has come under serious threat in the following decade. Internet users in many countries such as China are clearly being monitored and filtered and while there are means to bypass these controls most users just aren't sophisticated enough. Net neutrality seemed to be favored in the US (SOPA rejection) but when it came down to actual behavior of corporations it was hard to enforce (Comcast vs Netflix).The US is still struggling with things like healthcare and education while outside nations are improving at a faster rate. With the affordable care act, the cost of healthcare has risen almost to a point of just not being affordable anymore to get decent coverage. As we took one closer step to universal healthcare expect the government to start shouldering more and more of the burden and using taxation as a release valve. Yeah Obama, I saw what you did there.On a political note, Republican membership has been on the decline, while social policies favoring a broader and increasingly politically active majority have helped to push Democrats to a wider margin. I'm seeing many Republicans abandon socially conservative values to retain votes, so as a whole our country's political center is on a leftward trajectory. Expect economic and global topics to be the primary areas of debate moving forward.I would say socially one of the biggest changes is that it is almost a mainstream to be part of the LBGT community. What I mean by this is, in the last decade sexual preference was still somewhat of an awkward subject, but in most settings in this decade it is almost a source of pride to be part of or cool to know someone who is of a minority sexual preference. In general I think this is good for society, but I do feel some of the younger generation take advantage of this movement for attention. Another thing we learned is that the gender gap isn't as big as we thought (statistically) once we controlled for things such as child rearing. Unfortunately, the only way to close the gap is for women to choose not to have them, or companies to enforce some sort of affirmative action which I think does more harm than good.In the software development world the open source community is thriving. JavaScript which has traditionally been delegated to handling popup boxes or form validation in the browser has now expanded to a full stack language. What I mean is that now with technologies such as NodeJS and Angular, JavaScript is one of the few languages that runs natively in a browser but also on the server. I personally thought it would die in the 2000s with all the buggy JS engines and the new HTML5 standard being released but Chrome helped bring it back and showed its true potential. (Yes, I'm an engineer at heart and spent way too much time in this post on Javascript)On the hardware tech side innovation is blooming. 3d printer costs have come down dramatically, and wearables are now coming into their golden age. Unfortunately this will generate issues related to privacy and regulation (Google glass in a bar, guns from your printer)In Business, we are seeing some long term cyclical things again. Startups are overvalued (think Uber and WhatsApp which has no proprietary tech) which may cause another version of Dotcom bust. Real estate also hasn't fully recovered but I'm seeing a lot of investment activity, and you know the short term memory of real estate folks, expect a bubble in parts of the country where we are starting to forget the last recession. I also noticed a local bank offering 95% financing with no PMI... Exactly the kinda of terms we saw in the bubble. The cloud and mobile apps are no longer a thing in the sense that it is now an expected part of doing business and nothing exceptional. In other words, no one will care if you make an app and it runs in the cloud.As for myself, I've learned what I'm good at and what I'm not. More importantly I know where I want to be in the next decade. Not earth shattering revelations, but I've graduated high school, dropped out of college, started multiple businesses and find myself leaving the 20s soon, with a wife and two kids. So, for me it has been a pretty eventful decade.