Being a real estate agent in this white-hot housing market is no easy task. In addition to staying current on Florida real estate law and your agency’s policies and best practices requirements, you have properties to inspect, showings to schedule, and closings to attend, not to mention prospecting for new clients and marketing your name in a highly competitive field.
Here’s the good news. We’ve combed the industry to curate six great time-saving tools—and best of all, they’re free! (Giving you more time to chillax at the pool.)
Calculate Title Insurance in record time: This shortcut allows you to zip through one of your most often required but most tedious tasks.
- The Rabideau Klein Florida Title Insurance Calculator is an easy-to-use tool that allows you to quickly calculate your client’s title insurance costs. It’s available on the website, so bookmark the page and be ready to use it often.
Attentively manage your customers: Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a must for any business, but especially for realtors.
- The Streak app is a CRM built especially for real estate agents. It works right inside Gmail, offering free canned messages, quick tracking, and even builds a color-coded sales pipeline designed especially for real estate. The basic plan is free, but you can maintain a larger list size and get additional functionality for a low monthly fee.
Design your own marketing: Custom marketing materials are a must-have, but can get expensive. Here’s a cost-saving solution that covers the basics.
- If you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to check out Canva, it’s a one-stop shop for all your marketing needs. Create professional-looking brochures, social media posts, videos, and business cards with ease using special templates. There are thousands of design elements to choose from, many of them free. Canva helps you create great-looking marketing collateral even if you’re not a design expert.
Provide swift market research: Knowing your local market can be a very strategic secret weapon as a realtor. But mining all that much-desired data can be time-consuming.
- That’s where SunStats comes in. This application gives you all the up-to-date real estate metrics, charts, and data you need branded to your business. You can even build charts and create infographics—perfect for sharing with clients and prospects via social media, and its accessible on desktop, laptop, and mobile.
Calculator clients’ mortgages: You probably already know that helping your clients forecast their monthly spend is greatly appreciated and brings you closer to closing.
- Mortgage calculation positions you as a valuable resource. Here’s a terrific mortgage calculator that helps you estimate mortgage costs. Enter the home price, down payment and other info to quickly get the estimated monthly payment.
Determine room sizes: Figuring out floor dimensions with a tape measure or carpenter’s rule and a pad and paper is time-consuming. Thankfully, there’s an app for that.
- The Magicplan program uses your phone to scan a room and calculate the dimensions and ceiling height. You can build complete floorplans and save them as a pdf, and it’s super accurate. It even generates 3D models and helps with remodeling estimates. It’s also available for Android.
As a real estate agent, you know your job can be time-consuming, complicated and stressful—but working smartly can help with that. We hope that by adding one or more of these tools to your sales arsenal it will free up more of your time, help you make more money, and give you greater peace of mind.
Your Florida Bar Board-Certified Attorneys David E. Klein, Esq. and Guy Rabideau at Rabideauklein.com are at the ready when you need to streamline your best-practices with experienced legal oversight throughout the closing process. Whether your property is located on the Treasure Coast, in South Florida, or anywhere in the State, you are welcome to Contact Rabideau Klein today to discuss how we can help you and your client during your Florida real estate transactions.