Here’s a List of Time-Saving Productivity Apps for 2016

After conducting a recent survey of “pain points” for real estate professionals, the results indicate that real estate pros want two things: 1) more leads in their sales pipeline, and 2) increased productivity. “When you have to schedule time for showings, meeting appraisers or photographers, reviewing home inspections and more, it is easy to feel overwhelmed sometimes.  I am always looking for ways to organize my time better and simplify the many things I must do,” says Elisabeth Lentulo, a San Diego based Realtor®. In order to ease your pain, I’ve created this handy list of mobile-friendly tools that I love. I’ve found that these tools have increased my personal productivity and the productivity of the agents that I work with. One caveat however, you need to make the use of these tools—or whatever ones you select—part of your daily habits, processes, or systems. In order to successfully evaluate whether a tool or product is helping you, I think you need to diligently use it for a good three to six months.

5 Mobile-Friendly Productivity Tools

1. Gmail. Since Google is the number one search engine and website in the world, it follows logically that the tools owned by Google also have some pretty number one qualities. When you use Gmail (in Gmail not in Outlook), assign labels and filters to make your whole email experience much quicker and more efficient. (Watch my video tutorial on how to use Gmail labels and filters to better organize your real estate transactions.)
2. Streak. Streak is all sorts of awesome for managing your sales pipeline. It lives in Gmail and you must use both Gmail and the Chrome browser. I’ve often lost leads because I’ve forgotten to transfer them from my email to my CRM. But, with your CRM (Streak) in Gmail, that doesn’t happen. You can use Streak for free. If you are remotely interested in looking at new options for your sales pipeline, I would check it out. Plus, the Streak app for your smartphone is a pretty great way to have access to your clients on the fly.
3. Sunrise Calendar. There are all sorts of calendars available for your smartphone or tablet—including the ones the come pre-installed on your phone. I’m a girl, so maybe I’m attracted to Sunrise Calendar because it is cute and easy on the eyes, but males and females alike will love the way it integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Wunderlist, Todoist, and all sorts of other apps. In this way, you get everything calendar-related (including tasks and reminders) all in one place. My productivity idol, Steve Dotto, has created this great video tutorial on how to use Sunrise Calendar.
4. Dropbox. With Dropbox, I never have to worry about what would happen if my computer crashes or gets stolen from my hotel room. I can be up and running again from any device a few minutes later. You can use Dropbox to share projects and folders with business associates or just to house your files and documents in the cloud—instead of on your hard drive. If you don’t already use it, try the free version. Then, when you’ve used up your space allotment and fallen in love, you can get the paid version if you like the idea of saving your stuff to “the cloud.”
5. Evernote (and Scannable). During a recent webinar, Lottie asked me, “What’s the difference between Dropbox and Evernote?” There’s a fine distinction. Both house your stuff in the cloud. The main difference is that Dropbox is a notetaking and organizing app for just about everything—from receipts, to business cards, to documents whereas Dropbox is like a huge storage space (although each of these companies may describe their products a bit differently). For a bunch of new and different ideas for how to use Evernote to increase your productivity, join the Evernote for Real Estate Group on Facebook.

5 Mobile-Friendly Lead Generation Tools

1. Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social-media management platform that helps you manage, schedule, and post all of your social media from a single place. Sometimes it is hard to bounce from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram and beyond. That’s where Hootsuite comes in; it saves you from bouncing around. In addition to checking out Hootsuite, you might like to download my infographic on the best times for posting to each of the social media sites.
2. Zapier or IFTTT. Have you ever wondered about the benefits of having your own coder or hacker on the payroll? (You probably haven’t.) Basically, Zapier and IFTTT are two products that can bring you the benefits of having your own personal computer coder. For example, with these two products you can create 2-step systems that integrate two different apps to create a single result for you. For example, you can add a label to an email in Gmail, and then that email address can be added to a list in Mailchimp. Or, you can write a post on Facebook and the same post can automatically be posted to LinkedIn. With hundreds (maybe thousands) of integrations, these two products can be used to create lots of efficient lead generation and pipeline-building activities.
3. Mailchimp. One of the ways that I have personally been most successful in generating leads is through customized email drip campaigns. Mailchimp is one company that I use to create email campaigns. You can create custom campaigns for target groups, such as buyers, sellers, and past clients among others. Some of these campaigns can even be set up once to send automatically over and over again. If you are looking to kill it with email drip campaigns, I recommend reading this book: Email Marketing Demystified.
4. Felt. Real estate coach Brian Buffini advocates writing 10 personal notes per week. If you want to use personal notes as a way to increase and sustain top-of-mind awareness but you never seem to have any stamps on hand, check out this app or other products like Ink or ThankYouPro. With these products, you can send personal notes via regular mail—all while sitting in front of your tablet or smartphone.
5. Font Candy (or Canva, Ribbet, PicMonkey). These four products are really great at pulling together your images and cool fonts to make gorgeous professional-looking pieces that you can share on social media sites like Instagram or Facebook. I’ll have to go over all of the ways that I use these products in a full-blown tutorial, but suffice to say that I can create all the images I need for all of my listings and promotional ads in 5 minutes—right after I have put the listing on the MLS. This saves me loads of time later in the transaction.

If you are seeking more information on how I use these tools to save time, increase productivity, and generate leads, please subscribe to my mailing list by entering your email address in the light blue box below. You’ll get invitations to free webinars and complimentary access to the latest info on awesome real estate productivity tools. Also, you might want to check out the slides from my presentation on the same topic from the 2015 California Association of Realtors® Expo from November.