June 05 2018
One of the things we read about in consumer-focused articles about a real estate career is that it is a great self-employment opportunity to make lots of money and take great vacations. NOT! It can get you down when even your customers and clients think that you're going to make a pot full of money in the few, short weeks you work with them.
Disregarding the fact that you work with many more customers who never result in a commission, there is a lot more to this job than they think. However, you can make a great living—maybe even a pot full of money—in real estate. You just need to get your own real estate top producer's filing system.
When we're doing our jobs right, the sheer volume of information and documentation that we must create, manage, review and deliver is amazing. Get your information and management system humming along, and it frees you up to work with clients—the only way to get to commissions. Even if you end up with an assistant, you're going to be doing most of this stuff every day:
Why keep listing, as it's almost endless? Sure, back at the office, wherever that is, there is a file cabinet, several or, more likely, a whole file room. It's just that trying to grab it and take it along on a busy day to access the information we need is just not going to happen.
Yes, many agents have an app for checking and using email on the go. They have some software for back-end office management stuff. They may have other software for task and to-do lists. They may even have a high dollar transaction management system. Put enough software solutions together, and you can cover that endless list above.
What if there was ONE solution that would actually allow you to grab that file cabinet, or whole file room, and carry it around with you all day? And, you won't get a backache or need a little red wagon to haul it. Let's take a look at a typical day's activities and how you can cover everything, access your files and documents on the go, and file away information and documents no matter where you are.
Evernote software is the solution we'll use to cover these daily activities, filing them away in numerous ways and retrieving information with ease no matter where we are.
When we talk about the office, this could be a cubicle or office at your brokerage, your kitchen table at home or even the front seat of your car. The common factor is that you're normally using a desktop, notebook or tablet computer. It's where you normally do your most keyboard intensive stuff, a lot of your online research and things like CMAs and document management, storage and delivery tasks.
By using the Evernote Web Clipper and also saving notes and emails related to a transaction through automated sending to the transaction notebook, you are keeping all related emails and notes in a transaction notebook (folder) for future retrieval or permanent filing. PDF, word processor and other documents can be attached to notes.
Private Email Address: You get a private Evernote email address to forward emails you want to file away in your transaction notebooks. These can be very helpful later if you're trying to recall what your client asked or instructed you to do. When you receive an important email, you can file it away with tagging to help you find it later.
When you're out and about, your power real estate top producer filing system really comes into play to save you time and make you an information power player with your smartphone.
There are even Evernote widgets to save you even more time. Using a note widget, you can just pop it up and start your note without opening the app.
This software on all of your devices not only saves your information in the cloud, but on your device as well. You quickly discover that with all of the ways to create notes, there isn't a scrap of information you can't save if you think you'll need it later.
OK, now you're an information powerhouse, a literal walking real estate top producer filing system. It's great to have it all in your system, but how easy is it to get to it when you need it?
You're on your way back from a day of showing properties. Just before you left in the morning, you received a title binder for your buyers. Since they work all day as well, you popped it over to Evernote as a note attachment and also made a note or two of your own about what you want to remember to look for. You think there may be an encroachment with a fence over the line.
You stop by your clients' home and email it to them on your way in. You can all go over it on their big screen or they can print it out and you can help them to understand the details, requirements and exceptions. You haven't even committed it to paper yet, but it's safely stored on your notebook, smartphone and in the cloud.
Now you're back in your home office and you want to check out that agent's sign you didn't recognize. You remember that the name was Sylvia something, so you search on Sylvia. Evernote has converted the writing on the sign photo to text for search, and it pops right up.
You also want to check out a couple of transactions, the latest new items, activities, documents and notes. You open the transaction notebook, and you're viewing everything from the newest back in time. You can scan the note thumbnails, opening the ones you want to check out more closely.
Searching in Evernote has all of the power of a Google search, with the ability to not only use keywords and phrases, but also tagging to help you to locate related information. There is simply no way to lose information, as you can even have Evernote index the text in your attached documents, including PDF files.
That's how a real estate top producer stays on top!
To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.