Using Cloud Storage Apps for Real Estate Client Service

No matter how much you learn about "selling," we know that real estate is a client service business. If you want to succeed with solid referrals, exceptional real estate client service is how to do it.

So how do you provide better real estate client service? While you help sellers to get their homes ready to sell and value them, and you help buyers find and purchase a home, your greatest involvement with clients is during the transaction process. It is also an excellent opportunity to build goodwill with your clients and create a referral resource in the future.

There are fancy services for transaction management, and you may want to use one or more of them. However, using the cloud services available to you today, there are ways to create a smooth process for efficient document storage, sharing and signing. You can accomplish what you need to provide excellent transaction services without spending money. As an example, Google Drive is free for up to 15 GB of storage, and 100 GB is only $1.99/month. Another way to get the job done is using Evernote.com. This service is not free, but with different levels of service costing between around $35/year and $90/year, it's a small expense for the value.

Whatever service you use for cloud document storage, it needs to be secure, and these two say they are. You can also encrypt documents, though few go to that much trouble. What you want to be able to do with a cloud service for real estate includes:

• Document storage
• Document sharing
• Document editing, if needed
• Filing for selective sharing by the involved party
• Ease of use, mainly having documents in specific folders on your computer that automatically sync to the cloud

Here are a few easy steps to get started using a cloud storage service:

1. Prepare and Arrange Your System

The first thing to do is to create folders for proper segregation of your data based on the parties involved in the transaction and the level of sharing you wish to use. A main folder for each transaction is a must. Then there can be sub-folders for the title company closer, the client(s), and your documents that do not need to be shared, or your notes. When you save a document to a folder on your hard drive, it is created in the cloud as well.

2. Explain to the Players

Make sure that your title company closer understands that you'll be sharing a private folder with them for documents that do not require a personal presence for signing or processing. Once you share the folder, they have access, and you can set that access for just downloading to be safe, not editing. This way, they need to download the document to make changes and then upload it again. You keep the original as it was, just in case.

Explain the folders to your clients as a customer service feature. You're not going to be emailing them huge attachments. Instead, you just share their folder with them and they get a link to the new document in their email, and can click and access it in the cloud.

3. Create Permanent PDF Document Reporting

This is a major benefit to the client(s). How many times do homeowners need to access one of their closing documents later for insurance, taxes or other purposes? Instead of flipping through folders of paper, they can simply access their single transaction PDF file for information or to print a document copy. The beauty of this is that it can be a huge PDF file of all of their documents, but they can find what they need in minutes with a keyword search.

This is all easily set up, and it's a super way to serve your clients, and create a customer and referral source for life.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.