automation

Work ON Your Business Not IN Your Business

I have a guest post for you today from Jimmy Moncrief on “Organizing and Automating Your Real Estate Business”.

This is something that all of us should be doing, but we get so caught up in “doing everything” that we often fail miserably at this.

In today's guest post, you will find some tips and free tools to help you with this process.

 

Organizing and Automating; Why Is It So Hard? 

Throughout history technology has always disrupted industries.

  • For farmers, tractors replaced wagons.
  • For airlines, websites replaced travel agents.

Interestingly enough, most real estate investors continue to operate as they did 20-30 years ago. Driving around looking for deals. Getting rent in the mail via a check. Sounds crazy, right?

I know these methods work…I use them myself.

However, why not also leverage technology to your benefit?

For instance, I know driving around and finding FSBO houses and abandon properties work, but why not have a website to also get motivated seller leads?

I’m not here to talk about websites. I want to talk to you about how to organize and automate your real estate investing utilizing free software: Evernote.

Evernote is completely free software that will radically change how you do business.

Specifically, it will keep you more organized and increase your bottom-line as it will save you a ton of time.

The best part about Evernote (for me at least) is that not only is it free but you can use it online and offline. There is a smart-phone app for your phone, an iPad app, and it can be used as stand-alone software on your computer.

 

Here are some quick uses of Evernote for Real Estate:

Folders – this solved my biggest time-suck in my real estate business. Evernote folders got me out of “email hell” This is how. Instead of me and my business partner emailing our banker, tons of files, only to get them lost and have to re-email most of them multiple times, we just put them now in an Evernote folder. Then we just share the folder with our banker.

Skitch – Evernote lets you annotate all kinds of documents, whether they are online, .pdfs, whatever. This is very handy for all kinds of things from giving directions, to marking-up construction projects.

List – I know there a million to-do list out there but Evernote’s is the best because it’s not just a to-do list. For my real estate company we primarily use this as a punch list for renovation projects. It’s super-easy to use.

Email – you get a personalized email when you sign-up with Evernote. Any important document you get or see you can email into Evernote. This saves a ton of time and organizes any kind of information you send to Evernote. You can use the #sign to add tags.

Above is primarily how you organize your real estate business. Now, I’m going to talk about how you can automate parts of your real estate business.

 

Tips for Automating Your Business

Most people get overwhelmed when they here words like “workflows” or “automation” but in-reality it only takes about 10 minutes to automate one activity. For instance, I created a contact sheet for all new tenants in Evernote, updated with all of my maintenance contacts. Now instead of calling me, they simply call the applicable phone number.

Another way to automate your real estate investing is to start using another free internet web app called IFTTT – an acronym for If This Then That

There are tons of different ways you can use IFTTT, so I’ll just stick to one simple way.

Use the search function in Craigslist to whatever you use to find your favorite search for motivated seller leads.

Connect it using IFTTT with either your email and you will get these seller leads automatically sent to your email.

 

Free Templates

Exclusive for Sharon Vornholt’s readers there are some free Evernote automation templates to get you started click here: http://realestatefinancehq.com/sharon

 

About Jimmy Moncrief

Jimmy Moncrief

Jimmy Moncrief is a real estate investor and bank underwriter. He blogs about real estate finance and automation. Be sure to check out Jimmy’s site at realestatefinancehq.com.

 

 

 

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