The Best Real Estate Agent Tools

A modern real estate agent needs cutting-edge tools to get ahead in this super-competitive market. Technology continues to develop and evolve more quickly than ever, and the best tools for real estate agents incorporate these online marketing tools into every successful listing.

Table Of Contents

Get Your own (Digital) Real Estate

To connect with prospective buyers, real estate agents will need to have a professional presence online. Having a professional website or portfolio will help agents build trusting relationships with clients and is one of the most essential tools for real estate agents.

If a real estate agent doesn’t yet have a piece of digital real estate, a site like Squarespace is a must-have tool for real estate agents to establish a website, with plans starting at $12 a month. Consider uploading content like your current listings, an updated and detailed personal biography, and a blog with relevant information for buyers.

A successful real estate agent is undoubtedly juggling multiple social media channels to connect with the right buyers. To maximize your efforts as a modern real estate agent, it is essential to know what messages work best on which platform and when to schedule posts.

To best manage all of these needs of social media tools for real estate agents, consider downloading a free tool like Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows users to schedule social media marketing messages well in advance and across all platforms in one convenient interface.

Have A Reliable Source of Leads

For any real estate agent to be successful, they will require a reliable source of motivated leads. Time is money, and focusing on the leads that are most likely to convert can mean the difference between success and failure.

Unless you’re the kind of agent who prefers doing everything by hand, including finding leads, you’ll want to sign up for a service which can provide a steady stream of motivated home sellers. Here at Agent’s Corner, that’s exactly what we focus on – delivering high quality motivated home seller leads. Using this kind of tool can help you focus on what you do best, while not worrying about running out of leads to work.

For any listing, a real estate agent will be juggling photography, documents, contracts and other large digital files. Ensuring these files are secure and conveniently accessible every time you need them is crucial, both to keep everything legal and confidential and to build trusting relationships with your clients.

Dropbox is cloud storage that allows you to store and share files of any size and file type and with anyone. With 2GB of free storage to start and paid plans for more extensive storage options, this affordable solution can be used anywhere you can access a computer or via the mobile app.

Scan on the Go

Juggling lots of paperwork is just an ordinary day in the life of a real estate agent. But often, those files need to be digitized to be efficiently shared, stored or signed.

With a convenient scanner app on your smartphone, like Cam Scanner, all your important and confidential documents can be easily scanned, stored, and emailed to yourself or a client. This simple interface leads you through the scanning (similar to taking a photo), cropping and sharing of your important documents.

Calculate Fast

Helping your buyers keep their budget in mind is a critical part of building a trusting relationship with the client. But many potential homeowners are unsure how to truly understand the complicated math involved in the most important purchase of their lives, leaving them struggling to calculate the mortgage they can afford.

A forward-thinking real estate agent can provide full service by assisting clients through this process, having a reliable mortgage calculator app downloaded on your smartphone. Mortgage calculators help clients understand the realistic costs of the home they can afford and how much their monthly payments may be.

Upgrade your Notebook

Building a relationship with your potential buyers involves taking lots of notes about things like their budget, their needs, and which properties they have already visited. Consider upgrading from an inefficient and flimsy paper notebook to the digital equivalent so you can perform at your peak.

Evernote is a digital filing system that organizes all notes into virtual notebooks that can be kept private or shared with others. Consider maintaining a notebook for all of your clients and another Evernote notebook for tasks to serve as essential lead generation tools for real estate agents.

Easily Create Slick Designs

The modern real estate agent can stand out among the crowd with custom designs from online marketing tools for real estate agents. And even if that sounds intimidating, there are websites available to help you quickly build brochures, social media images, and other collateral pieces.

The next time you need a custom image or updated piece of marketing collateral, try a website like Canva to help you create a professional design. Canva does have a free version with limited functionality or a more robust option for an additional monthly fee.

Broadcast a Live Open House

Real estate is a global market, and the next homebuyer may live down the street, across the country or around the world! Since open houses are such a crucial part of the purchasing process, live broadcasting is an important social media tool for real estate agents.

Most social media channels have a live function, including Instagram, Facebook or YouTube, so it is important to consider the audience when deciding on a social media platform for broadcasting live. Use your phone or tablet to host an informal live open house and cross-post to your social media platforms.

Connect with Buyers

If you’re searching for the real estate agent must-have tools for this quickly changing housing environment, a newsletter is a great choice. By designing a content-rich, custom newsletter, your clients see you as a trusted expert in the most important purchase of their lives.

There are many web-based email marketing software programs you can explore, but one of the most affordable and simple options is MailChimp. With MailChimp as a part of your lead generation tools for real estate agents, you can easily send beautiful, custom email campaigns to all of your clients or targeted audiences and track all of the results.

Reach Clients Their Way

The housing market is changing rapidly, and a younger generation is excited to become homebuyers. However, many of the traditional marketing tools for real estate agents, like newspaper ads or phone calls, can be intimidating or ineffective for this new audience.

Research an enhanced SMS texting service to help you reach clients the way they prefer to respond. These services help you broadcast listings, open houses and other time-sensitive information to your entire audience or a selected group and still allows you to text your clients one-on-one.

Invest in Affordable Advertising

The modern real estate agent juggles so much content and valuable information they must use to reach as many potential buyers as possible. An important social media marketing tool for real estate agents is choosing an advertising tool to amplify their messages to a larger audience. Without these real estate agent tools, all of your previous efforts may be less effective.

Social media advertising is an affordable and precise online marketing tool for real estate agents that anyone can use. Sharing photos or videos on a platform like Instagram can reach tens of thousands of users within as narrow of a demographic as you want.

Keep Everything Organized

A successful real estate agent needs a useful way to maintain a calendar and coordinate schedule openings for clients. This is one of the most critical real estate agent organization tools. Luckily there are many effective calendar apps to serve as a streamlined lead generation tool for real estate agents.

Many apps offer easy-to-use personal appointment tools, but Calendar.com also has a robust scheduling tool to help communicate schedules and available time slots to your clients. This website gives you a unique scheduling URL you can share with potential homebuyers to let them book an appointment with you.

These are just a few of the must-have tools for real estate agents as social media and online marketing become more critical. By managing your documents and your content and sharing it in the most high-impact ways, you can best serve your potential homebuyers.