Signing contracts, sending out email blasts, and creating social media posts are some of those tasks that will always be on your to-do list as a real estate agent. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to do these things faster and smarter so you can spend more time on lead-generation activities on the tasks that delight your clients.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the best tools for real estate agents to improve productivity, save time, and deliver more seamless experiences to their clients.
Top tools for real estate agents
- For new client intake: Content Snare
- For signing offers and documents: DocuSign
- For virtual staging: Virtual Staging Solutions
- For creating marketing materials: Canva
- For CRM: Propertybase
Key takeaways
- Real estate professionals spend plenty of time on administrative tasks like sending emails, signing contracts, and creating marketing materials.
- Incorporating a range of tools or comprehensive CRM tools can help significant time, improve productivity, and give you more bandwidth to focus on lead generation, property listing showings, and negotiations.
- Before investing in any real estate marketing tools or software, audit which activities take you the most time. Then, find software that automates those tasks for you.
What are some of the biggest time sucks for a real estate agent?
Aside from spending time on the phone for negotiations and showing prospects property listings, there are plenty more tasks that take up a real estate agent’s time. A realtor might spend a great deal of time every week on administrative tasks like:
- Creating and filling out new contracts
- Making posts on several social media platforms
- Collecting information from buyers and sellers over email
- Designing and distributing marketing materials
- Putting together email blasts featuring new listings
- Manually analyzing listing and campaign performance
Top productivity and marketing tools for the real estate industry
1. For new client intake: Content Snare
Bringing on a new real estate client involves the lengthy process of asking questions and collecting important documentation. If you’re still collecting mortgage pre-approvals and identification documents over email, it’s time to switch to Content Snare.
Here’s why the tool is awesome for the real estate industry:
1. You can collect large file sizes easily
No need to worry about running into file size limitations like you do when using email. The tool makes it easy for clients to upload lengthy contracts and other large files super quickly.
2. It comes with templates for the real estate business
Rather than having to figure out what questions to ask in a new client intake form, seller questionnaire, or buyer questionnaire, Content Snare offers several real-estate templates you can send to your contacts to use as-is or tweak as you please.
3. You can protect sensitive information
Content Snare comes with plenty of security features to help you protect the sensitive information you collect like SIN numbers, mortgage information, and banking information.
4. The tool sends auto-reminders
Once you send your clients a request for information, Content Snare will then send your clients email reminders to complete your requests.
That way, you don’t have to waste time remembering to manually bug your clients yourself when you’ve got viewing appointments to drive around to all day!
2. For signing offers and documents: DocuSign
DocuSign is so popular in the real estate business now that chances are you already use this one!
Given the large volumes of contracts and documents you send to clients and other agents to sign in any given week, you need a tool that makes this all easy.
DocuSign is a tool that lets you:
- Generate offer agreements or upload your own agreements from MS Word or PDF
- Verify signer identities
- Send agreements via SMS, WhatsApp, or email
- Sign agreements with eSignatures
- Store and manage all signed contracts and documents in one reliable place.
We can’t stress just how much using this tool can help realtors automate their workflows compared to all the back and forth you’d typically spend signing documents over email!
3. For virtual staging: Virtual Staging Solutions
Ok so, this one is more of a service for the real estate industry, but we had to share it since it’s pretty neat!
Let’s say you’re about to show your clients a home that isn’t staged. Virtual Staging Solutions is part tool, part online service that lets you digitally add furniture to photographs of your listing to give your clients a photo-realistic idea of what the space can look like furnished, without your sellers having to spend a fortune on staging.
How does it work? You submit property photos, share details of the style and furnishings you’d like to see, and then pay to have each photo staged. Once you approve what’s been done to the photos, you’ll be able to download the final result. If you want to impress new clients even more, you can use the Pro option to paint the walls a different color or change the flooring!
This is a great option to explore to help you sell your listings as well as boost the look of your portfolio of past properties to help you win more listing contracts.
4. For creating marketing materials: Canva
Given that you’re probably no graphic designer, creating listing flyers and social media posts can take ages, or worse, take ages and still not look very good in the end. That’s why Canva is a popular tool in the real estate business.
Canva is an easy tool to create marketing materials like listing flyers and social media posts on any device. It offers thousands of templates you can start with and tweak as you please so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you work for a real estate agency, Canva is also handy because it gives teams the option to work on the same Canva file together.
Plus, its brand kit feature lets you seat your team’s colors, fonts, and logo to help you stay on brand with everything you create to market your open houses and showings.
5. For CRM: Propertybase
If you’re looking for a more comprehensive tool to take your real estate business to the next level in more than one, then Propertybase is what you might be looking for. It offers you several different real estate tools in one platform to help you with lead generation, customer relationship management, and real estate marketing.
Here are just a few things that Propertybase can help you do:
- Launch fully automated social media campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and the web that promote your property listings to the right audiences.
- Build your real estate website with a drag-and-drop website builder without needing any coding skills.
- Build out your email blasts just as easily.
- Create, edit, and syndicate listings with other popular portals, integrating with every major MLS.
- Gain valuable insights into the performance of your real estate marketing campaigns and listing performance with access to data about website analytics, transactions, commissions, etc.
- Get notifications when contacts open your emails so you can follow up in a timely manner.
How to choose the right real estate tools
In this post, we’ve shared some of what we think are the best tools for realtors, and there are so many more! Before signing up for any subscriptions, we recommend keeping track of where your time goes every week to determine what type of tool will help you the most.
