Protecting your smartphone should be an imperative for any real estate professional, considering now valuable they now are for a successful real estate practice.

By Peter Ricci

Let’s face it – smartphones are more than mere mobile devices; rather, they’re precious, indispensable companions, ones that we use for our photography, scheduling, email, messaging and, of course, phone call needs, and in many cases exclusively. Therefore, given how valuable these little gizmos of metal and wiring are, wouldn’t it make sense to protect them and the data they store? So, in the name of protecting your smartphone, here are three worthy apps to consider for the job.

Protecting Your Smartphone – 3 Sources of Protection

1. Find My iPhone/Where’s My Droid? – Smartphones are not only tiny, but are used constantly, and therefore, the potential for losing them is quite severe. From leaving it on the table at Starbucks to forgetting it in the car, there are endless avenues for your phone (and all the client contacts and contracts they house) to mysteriously disappear; thus, you should strongly consider downloading Find My iPhone from Apple and the Where’s My Droid app, if you’re an Android user. Both use GPS technology to track the location of your phone and, hopefully, avoid any panic attacks (we should mention, though, and if someone steals your phone and wipes your phone, you may be out of luck).

2. eWallet/LastPass – Between your online accounts with your brokerage, your e-mail, your profiles on Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, your MLS log-in, your Twitter account, your Facebook page, and the many, many other online accounts you likely maintain, there are quite a few passwords that are necessary to maintaining a professional online identity.

These two apps, though, make that scenario much more manageable; eWallet stores all of your passwords, and will also generate longer, more secure passwords, while LastPass creates one master password, which it syncs with all your accounts.

3. Mobile Vault – There are a number of truly awesome document-management apps, from DotLoop to DocuSign. If you’re ever handling or distributing important documents across mobile devices, though, you may want to think about ways to protect those documents and the information they store; heck, even the informal text messages between you and clients should remain confidential. Therefore, consider Mobile Vault (for iPhone and Android), which, simply, allows you to protect your files in secure locations on your phone.

Protecting your smartphone should be an imperative; after all, think about the thousands, if not millions of dollars in properties that you’re utilizing them for each and every day! So with a few simple downloads and tweaks, you can protect your information and find a peace of mind.