Essential Tech for Real Estate Agents

As a real estate agent, you wear multiple hats. You are a business owner, the city travel guide, a marketing and branding expert, and a trusted adviser in the largest financial purchase most of your clients will ever make. Often, you become a close friend to those you help and build relationships that last a lifetime.

With so many responsibilities, your time is incredibly valuable.

Wouldn’t it be great if the technology you use every day could not only save you time but make you more efficient as well?

Zillow Premier Agent App®

With over 160 million monthly visitors, Zillow is a leading real estate database that provides for-sale and rental listings to the general public and helps connect people with you – the real estate agent.

For those of you that have listings on Zillow or want to grow your business with the platform, the free Zillow Premier Agent® app is essential. It is a fantastic tool that captures leads, enables lead sorting, lead assignment, and provides task management for your team.

Aside from its lead capture capabilities, their My Agent program makes you the only buyers agent your leads see on Zillow and provides a detailed look at what your leads are searching for.

Matterport

When it comes to showing your listings online, Matterport remains the premier option to give homebuyers a true 3D virtual tour experience. With an ever-increasing amount of homebuyers searching online for the perfect home, it’s important that you showcase your listings in a way that separates them from the pack.

Matterport allows you to walk your buyers through a listing without them ever having to leave their couch. Showcase homes and bring attention to the finer details, allowing buyers to browse multiple homes online and spend their time with you concentrating on the homes that matter.

Simply use one of Matterport’s 3D cameras to capture a space, then connect to their cloud service – Matterport 3D cloud – to upload your images and generate the 3D rendering. You’re able to capture 3D virtual tours, print-ready photos, schematic floor plans, and 3D measurements quickly and easily. The perfect pairing for a curious buyer.

Total Expert by First Heritage Mortgage

It’s almost impossible to run your business without a CRM, and there is no shortage of options available. With the increased amount of leads coming in from your Zillow Premier Agent App and Matterport 3D virtual tours, you’ll need a way to manage them all.

What if you had a CRM with real estate–specific capabilities? Meet Total Expert.

This CRM may be the perfect combination of contact management, lead nurturing, automated email marketing, single property sites to showcase your listings, open house lead capture apps, and a library of homebuyer focused marketing collateral. Create dedicated websites in less than 30 seconds for each of your listings with beautiful pre-made templates that integrate directly with your MLS listings, and capture leads at your next open house with a lead capture form placed at the entry that puts each visitors contact information directly into your CRM and follows up automatically.

With their growing list of third-party software integrations including Twilio SMS marketing, BombBomb video marketing, social media, and more, Total Expert continues to demonstrate what a real-estate CRM should be.

The best part? It is provided free to all our agent partners.

LoanNow by First Heritage Mortgage

It’s important that your homebuyer understand their financing options, and with the growing use of phones in the homebuying process, it’s no secret they want that same ease of use when it comes to applying for their mortgage loan.

Enter LoanNow by First Heritage Mortgage.

With this mobile app, not only do homebuyers have the ability to easily apply, upload important documents with the snap of a picture, and gain greater transparency into their loan process, you gain greater transparency into the homebuying process and capture more business with a branded version of the app.

Provided free to all of our agent partners, LoanNow allows you to customize the app experience to show your name, picture, logo, contact information, 5-star customer reviews, and a property search front and center. Push your brand forward and push your personalized app easily out to your homebuyers with a simple text message, an email, or a scan of your personalized QR code that takes them directly to the download page.

As they move through the loan process, we’ll update both you and your homebuyer with real-time updates as they pass important milestones or if additional information is needed. Don’t want to be notified? No problem. Jump into the app on-demand to see their loan status in real-time as it’s updated.

Give your buyer the freedom and ease of use the app provides, and improve the experience for a modern homebuyer.

RoomScan

Often, your clients will ask for the square footage of a room or you may need to list measurements on the property’s website. Who needs a measuring tape when you have RoomScan? With this mobile app, measuring floor plans is effortless.

This app is an augmented reality scanner that will take measurements of any space – using just your phone. You are able to generate an entire floor plan in just a minute using the built-in hardware of your phone to record the positions, lengths, and orientations of walls.

To measure, tap your phone to each adjacent wall and the app will quickly generate a floor plan. If you want to really bring your floor plan to life, the Pro version provides users with the option to manually enter their own measurements and add features like doors, windows, and closets.

It’s free to install with no limitations on scanning or exporting your image.

ShowingTime

If your buyer finds a home they love, make it easy for them to schedule a time to go see it with ShowingTime.

With this mobile/cloud app, available on both iOS and Android devices, you can import your active MLS listings to the platform and then automate the scheduling. You’ll have the ability to accept showing requests, see any upcoming appointments, and easily contact your homebuyer.

Make it easy to schedule time at a potential home, and give your homebuyers a fantastic experience at the same time.

DocuSign

Nobody likes dealing with paperwork. The modern homebuyer expects you to provide an option for electronic signatures, and a tool like DocuSign is perfect for the job.

Send your agreements, contracts, and other important documents via email with the ability to electronically sign them on any device. Each document is time-stamped, and DocuSign has the option to set signature notifications. The app even has third-party integrations with platforms like Google Drive and Dropbox.

With pricing for real estate agents starting as low as $10/month, it’s easy to see why they’re the leading eSignature brand.

Save time for both you and your homebuyer, and save trees in the process.

Facebook Live and IGTV by Instagram

Every agent has a headshot and logo they splash on a webpage, but how do you break through the noise to connect – really connect – with new homebuyers? Video.

It’s no secret that video marketing is on the rise, with its ability to reach more consumers and attract more engagement than traditional posts. Video remains the most effective way to remain human in an ever-growing digital world and, as an agent, the relationship you have with your homebuyer is a key differentiator.

Use live streaming platforms like Facebook Live and IGTV by Instagram to share relevant information with homebuyers, give live video tours of new listings, and show new homebuyers you are their go-to resource when it comes to buying a home. The days are gone when you needed to rely on somebody else to bring the audience, the camera crew, and an allotted time spot to push your message out.

If you have a smartphone, all of that is sitting right in your pocket.

Once you have something to share, you’ll need to go to where your audiences’ attention is. Facebook and Instagram continue to dominate as the number one and two social platforms in the world, and all you need to get started is a profile.

You’ll want to think about being consistent and going live when traffic is at its highest, but there’s no better way to connect with both new and current homebuyers than using video.

Canva and Animoto

It’s important to promote your brand and keep its aesthetic modern and professional. Chances are, though, you aren’t both a graphic designer and a real estate agent. That’s why content creation platforms like Canva and Animoto are so valuable.

Canva makes designing gorgeous graphic templates easy. Whether you’re looking to create a flyer about the next open house, preparing an event post for your Facebook page, need to redesign your business cards, or have a need for any type of graphic design, chances are Canva has a library of pre-made templates that you can customize.

Simply click one of their modern templates, personalize it with your own images, fonts, text, and colors, then click download – it’s that easy.

If you want to jump into video, Animoto makes creating and editing simple. The best part about it is you don’t need to know anything about video editing to get started.

Pick a template, drag and drop either images or video into blocks, add text, customize your music, fonts, colors, and then export.

Once you have your new video, share it with your audience on Facebook, or send it to your contacts via email. Have a new listing that is screaming to be featured? Bring in your MLS listing photos, add some music, and watch how Animoto increases engagement and takes your brand to the next level.

Technology is an excellent resource for business growth. When used properly, it can be a fantastic way to increase your customer base, elevate your customer experience, and free up your time to do more of what you do so well – help homebuyers find the home of their dreams.

Questions about tools you can use to help your business?
Contact one of our Loan Officers today!