‘Work smarter’ is the mantra of most successful professionals. However, without the right tools in place, Commercial Real Estate brokers may struggle to stay ahead of the competition.
Therefore, we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 must-have tools for CRE brokers to help organize everything from marketing campaigns to paperwork:
1. Email marketing: MailChimp
Mailchimp is a tour de force for your email marketing campaigns. It’s easy to use and lets you create integrated campaigns across social, email ads, and more. Plus, there are plenty of data analytics tools to help you optimize your future campaigns.
2. Social media management: PropertySpark
From Facebook ads to lead generation campaigns, the PropertySpark service does all your social media heavy lifting for you. This online service also organizes your leads in a simple-to-use dashboard where you can group leads by interest and send targeted email campaigns straight to future clients’ inboxes.
3. Team communication: Slack
No one likes an over-populated inbox and, let’s face it, WhatsApp isn’t the most professional or effective tool to keep in touch with your team. Slack is a great messaging tool to help you stay in contact with the right people in the right way. You can create channels for specific groups and easily search across previous conversations.
4. Team or task management: Asana
If you want to take your online organizational skills to a new level, try Asana. This work management platform lets your team focus on its goals, projects, and daily tasks so your CRE business can seamlessly stay on track and you can meet your deadlines.
5. Digital signatures: DocuSign
DocuSign lets you speed up your workflows and make your documents official from anywhere, at any time. This intuitive digital platform gives CRE professionals secure access to their documents, lets you set reminders, check the signing status, and embed electronic signatures on your documents.
6. Scanning documents: Scannable
This tool lets you snap paper documents and then convert them into high-quality scans. From receipts to business cards, Scannable recognizes different formats and lets you edit your photo. It even transforms contact information from a scanned business card into LinkedIn data.
7. Videos: Promo
If you want to promote your listings with a video, look no further than Promo. This highly customizable service lets you create CRE marketing videos in minutes. You can add photos, your business logo, and edit your video from its highly intuitive interface – you don’t need to be a video editing genius. It also helps you create videos that are optimized for social media streams such as Facebook and Instagram.
8. Photos: CurbAppeal
CurbAppeal lets you create fantastic photos of your real estate properties using nothing but your iPhone camera. It uses built-in HDR technology to optimize the lighting levels and reduce the amount of editing required. HDR is a method used by professionals to improve indoor photo quality where lighting levels can be tricky to manage. It works by taking multiple pictures of the same shot and then merges the best parts from each exposure to create the perfect image.
9. Web and print graphics: Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform where you can create beautiful graphics for your external communications. Whether you’re working on a big presentation or designing a flyer, Canva uses a drag-and-drop format and gives you access to thousands of photos, graphics, fonts, and templates.
10. File management: Google Drive
Google Drive is a free file management service (up to 15GB of storage) that’s simple to use and lets you share your documents with the rest of your team and your clients. You can set the appropriate access rights for each document – and it’ll save you hunting through your inbox for the most up-to-date version of a document.
