Agents are busy. Very busy. The one sunny break in an otherwise gloomy economic forecast during the pandemic has been the real estate industry. Home sale activity has exceeded the most optimistic projections, and many agents have been inundated with business. It’s extra tough when most of your free time and work time are now spent under the same roof: at home.
Ensuring you continue to remain productive is vital for closing transactions today and building new business tomorrow. You can increase your efficiency while still building future business if you get a little help. The good news is there is technology available today that you can use to help you speed up or simplify some time-consuming tasks.
Here are three apps that can help you save time, make you more efficient, and help you build future business:
- Felt: Handwritten Thank You notes.
Few things have a greater impact on making a great impression on a client or prospect than a personally handwritten Thank You note. They are well worth the effort, but they take time, right? Not if you have the Felt app. With Felt, you can create printed Thank You notes that are then mailed to clients.
Felt offers a wide variety of designs to match the message you want to send. You write your personal message on your phone or tablet screen, using your finger or a stylus. For even greater impact, Felt offers custom envelope designs. Its toolkit enables you to customize colors and fonts. Felt can even help you tighten up your writing.
Individual cards, printed and mailed, range from $4-$7. Felt also offers two membership options. Felt Plus membership at $6 a month allows you to send up to three cards monthly. At $15 a month, Felt Pro gives you all the perks of Felt Plus and will enable you to custom brand your Thank You cards with a custom back panel that includes your logo. You even receive a free stylus.
- Pocket: Save any online content instantly
You need to stay informed about the real estate industry and keep tabs on your local market. You come across new stories and videos that pique your interests all the time, as well as social posts that jar an idea you want to revisit later. But you are too busy closing transactions to take the time to stop, read, review, and file everything that catches your eye.
Pocket lets you save anything you see online — articles, videos, Twitter posts. Then you can look at them offline on your own time, without being distracted. It’s a great way to curate ideas that might help you craft a blog or social media post, an article for your client newsletter, or a personal email to clients who might enjoy seeing links to some of the content you discovered.
Downloading Pocket automatically synchronizes it to all of your devices (computer, smartphone, tablet, etc.), allowing you to access the app – and what you saved – anywhere. Whenever you save an item to Pocket, it is added to your list. When you open the app, you’ll access either the Article View or Web View, depending on the content that you added.
Pocket also uses a Discover feed to keep track of your interests based on the content you save and then personalizes recommendations. You are also able to save online content just by adding the Pocket Extension to your browser.
Pocket offers a free version as well as a Premium version. The Premium version is available for $4.99 a month or $44.99 per year. The Premium version is ad-free, organizes your suggested tabs, and creates permanent copies of what you save to Pocket, even if it’s deleted from the web.
- Calendly: Making it easy to schedule client appointments
If you don’t have an assistant or someone helping you manage your meetings, you can save a lot of time using a calendar scheduling app to automate your schedule. With over 5 million monthly users, Calendly is a popular app that’s simple for anyone to use. With Calendly, you avoid the back-and-forth calls, emails, or texts. It even has an option for teams.
Calendly is easy to set up, as it integrates the most popular web calendars, including Google, Outlook, Office 365, and iCloud, so you avoid double booking. Calendly gives you control over how you set up your schedule, offering a plethora of features to customize your scheduling experience. Calendly features confirmation and reminder notifications, buffer time for before or after events, scheduling notices, daily limits for meetings, and even time zone detection so your invitee’s time zone availability lines up with yours.
Calendly is excellent for teams, as it allows every team member to set up their schedule with different event types that are offered. Metrics provide insight into how well you manage your time and helps you keep track of your productivity. Calendly also can be embedded into your website and connects with other apps you own, such as GoToMeeting, Zoom, and Google Analytics.
A free 14-day trial of Calendly comes with all the perks. After your trial, you can use its free basic version or sign up for either the Premium or Pro versions. Premium is $8 a month and provides unlimited event types, customized email notifications, and group events scheduling. The Pro option is $12 a month and comes with everything Premium offers and SMS notifications, and team availability options.
Finally, keep in mind that whenever you have questions about how to download an app, how to easily find our apps, or how to organize your apps, you can reach out to Tech Helpline for support.