James Muscolino is an agent with Prudential Gary Greene.
Ah, the iPad…Truly one of the most amazing, innovative pieces of technology that I have ever owned; but it wasn’t until I received my real estate license that I realized its true potential.
There are so many apps for real estate agents that it becomes a bit mind-boggling to choose which one to use. After many trial and error downloads (and a handful of $1.99 charges that were wasted), I have come up with my top three must-have apps.
Firstly, Dropbox is a great way to make buyer agents paperless. Instead of handing my clients a stack of stapled pieces of properties (that more often than not, will be crimpled from tossing it in my bag), I simply throw all of my properties that we will be viewing into a folder on Dropbox and hand my client the iPad to peruse the showings we have scheduled. It’s a much more cost affective way to show properties and stay organized.
Tablet Scanner turns your iPad into a scanner, which comes in handy when you have to quickly move paper back and forth from the other agent in the transaction, to the title company, to the client. Snap a picture of your document, hit scan, and it uploads into your Dropbox account as a PDF file. From there you can easily email the document out.
Finally my most useful and favorite application is called Open House. For the most part, it is strictly for the use of real estate agents to make their open houses run more efficiently and less costly, all while showing potential clients that we are hip and cool with technology! Quite simply, prospective buyers sign in on your iPad. First and last name are mandatory. You can than have customized questions that they choose to answer. These questions allow us to create a rich database of information about the visitors who stop in to tour the open house.
Responses can be required or optional, such as getting their email address (which is always the goal) or if they are working with a Realtor, etc. When your open house is complete, with one tap, an email can be sent to the owner of the property with the count of people that strolled through their home as well as any comments they may have had about the property. Another tap can send a customized “thank you” email to each visitor who came to check out the house. In my opinion, this app is a must-have!
Technology is consistently changing, and our use for it is becoming more and more demanding. The more I use the iPad the more I see how valuable it has become in the real estate arena. It shows our clients that we are well organized and resourceful, that we welcome the constant change of new innovations…and, of course, it doesn’t hurt to be able to play a game of Angry Birds at the open house where no one shows up.