As real estate investors and marketers, we’re faced with a lot of decisions on what software, gadget, service or gizmo to use to help us in our businesses. Here are some of my favorites:

Tools For Delegating:

Taskrabbit.com– Outsource your “feet on the ground” from an app on your phone.

Real Estate is Local. You hear that all the time, and it’s one of the things that makes this business very fragmented. Every city is different, however, most of the “on the ground” stuff can be dished out to someone else through an awesome service called TaskRabbit.com. I like this better than Craigslist because it’s faster (they have an app), and all of the “Taskers” that perform your tasks are well qualified and vetted to be smart, loyal people. Virtual Wholesalers will especially LOVE this service. (Caveat: Physical tasks with TaskRabbit are only available in the vicinity of most major US cities, but it’s expanding rapidly, Uber style. Don’t worry though, their Virtual Assistants are on staff for everyone too)

Here are some of the physical things you can delegate no matter where YOU are…
Physical tasks. You can immediately have someone on the ground put up signs, take pictures of or inspect a house, pick up paperwork, let the inspector into your property, put up flyers, door knock, go to auctions, or ANYTHING you need someone to do that is legal and doesn’t require any skill. You can’t hire someone to go negotiate a deal for instance…BUT you could have them get a signature from someone. Side note: Another great service for getting signatures is to use www.123Noary.com and having a notary go and get your sellers ex-wife to sign that contract for once, anywhere in the country! 

FancyHands: Non-dedicated Virtual Assistants that will do anything with extreme accuracy, 24/7.

They are all US based and English speaking. Instead of paying full-time for a talented assistant, just use them as needed with FancyHands They’ve got an amazing platform too, where you can make “requests” from a Google Chrome Extension, from your App, from an email, or even through a text. Some examples of things you can have them do:

Research ANYTHING online and put it into a concise email for you, wait on the phone for you when trying to get information from the city, insurance companies, Verizon, utility companies, or any other vendor you hate dealing with. They can schedule appointments (they have access to your Google Calendar). Research neighborhoods, colleagues, programs, handymans, landscapers, contractors…you name it. Here’s an example of a task I had them do, I needed someone to plug all my emails into a new Mailchimp autoresponder. So I shot a quick video on Snagit and sent this to them: http://www.screencast.com/t/soYFVzIyvx8. They had this done in 20 mins. Another example task I sent today: “Please research a trusted Roof Cert provider (licensed roof inspectors can provide this), and have them send the bill or whatever’s easiest. Let me know how quickly they can get it done. Address is [123 Main St] Thanks!” Got this done without any involvement.

Investor Friendly Virtual Assistants:

If you need a full-time virtual assistant that is very knowledgable about real estate and in particular real estate INVESTING, then you need to contact this company. They put their VAs through rigorous training to make sure they are well qualified to handle your leads, do your due diligence, and make offers on your behalf.

Tools For Streamlining, Saving Time, and Automating:

Camscanner

Copy machines? Printers? Faxing?? I hereby claim all of these technologies obsolete. With Camscanner, you can simply snap a picture of a physical contract, invoice, or any document/picture/note. It will take the document, enhance it drastically, and crop it up to remove it from the background, and the results are equivalent to using a state-of-the-art copy machine.

This tool is slick. Instantly get signed contracts from sellers OFFLINE and into the cloud through Camscanner as a PDF or JPG. You can edit it, make notes on it, email it, save it to dropbox, Evernote, text someone, and it even has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that will scan your document and extract the words from the page so that you can search the content of your documents later. Amazing. It’s available on all devices and the best thing of all, it’s FREE! Unless you buy their premium service which is cool to, but for the sake of trying it for its core function, get the free version. 

Hellosign.com: simple digital signatures.

Upload your contracts to Hellosign’s dashboard and within seconds, send out your contracts to your sellers or buyers for legally approved digital signatures. Even better, you can use Zapier to connect into Podio and initiate digital signatures right from your Podio interface!

RescueTime

AMAZING Chrome extension that tracks your every move on the internet, and automatically categorizes your actions based on the level of Productivity they are associated with. If you’re watching Netflix, that’s low productivity, but if you’re on Podio, that’s high productivity. This can allow you to see a macro level view of what you are actually doing day-to-day. It’s easy to get lost in the moment, but reflecting back and SEEING your habits over time is the best way to analyze and change your habits for the better. You can also block certain websites during certain hours of the day to keep you on track. HIGHLY recommend you set this up once, and log back in a month to get a snapshot of how productive you are online 🙂

Boomerang for Gmail:

Do you ever get an email that you send to someone and they never respond and you just forget about it!? Use Boomerang. You can automatically have your emails “Boomerang” back to the top of your inbox at the time of your choice, while simultaneously archiving it in your “All Mail” folder so you don’t have it cluttering up your precious inbox. This takes your Gmail game to a whole other level. It’s a built in extension  and it doesn’t really get in the way, but it will help you get a firmer grip on your inbox. You can also schedule emails to get sent later. Very very useful tool. Get it!

IFTTT– If THIS Then THAT

This is a very powerful website, much like Zapier.com, that allows you to connect 2 different cloud-based platforms together. Here are a few of my favorite recipes:

Note to Self

Automatic Cragislist Emails

Automatically get iPhone photos to Dropbox

Be sure to check out some of the other recipes on there. Gotta love technology!