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This column wouldn’t be much fun if I only talked about BoomTown and Lone Wolf Real Estate Technologies all the time.
It’s valuable to peer outside the gates of the industry to investigate options not already being sold to you.
This is what led me to ContextSmith after being alerted to it via email. Asana and Cloze intrigued me in the same manner.
ContextSmith
ContextSmith uses the existing Gmail domain of a company to automate the organization of projects and people.
It tracks dates and feels around for critical terms like “delay” or “frustrated” to highlight messages needing immediate attention.
Subject lines and recurring terms are turned into project titles, and every email with them is quickly sorted appropriately. This happens within minutes of setting up an account.
Messages are turned into Alerts, Opportunities or Action Items, and since ContextSmith is designed for teams, every stakeholder’s input is nested into a conversation.
Users can add notes and quickly measure which clients are seeing the most activity or which ones have fallen through the cracks.
Some customization would be needed for ContextSmith to fit snugly into a real estate office, but company head Will Cheung assured me it’s more than doable.
The company has left beta recently and is backed by a fund that has partners in Box, Cisco and Apple.
Any boutique agency wanting to better manage their information flow should give this software a look.
Cloze
Good for the individual, Cloze pulls in a multitude of online contact points and information channels to better organize the who and what that drives your business relationships.
For example, Cloze combines its knowledge of your calendar and inbox to send you a notice about what you and the person you’re about to meet with last discussed. It connects documents and social media context, too.
From my initial review:
It wasn’t built specifically for real estate, but the Deals feature is a natural fit to common transaction workflow. It can also be used to manage special events, like open houses or buyer seminars.
Cloze enables the creation and rollout of common task lists that can be used to “systemize” a typical home sale process.
Emails, documents and dates related to each Deal are consolidated within it and presented to users already prioritized.
Asana
Asana is another team-focused smart organization tool like ContextSmith.
It has users across multiple industries and makes a fun exercise out of bringing together people and work tasks.
Have conversations, share documents and intelligently keep order to the chaos that can accompany handling an office full of real estate transaction paperwork.
From my initial review:
When a preclosing meeting needs to be scheduled, create the task, add the seller’s best times in the comment box, assign it to the “Stark Family Sale” project and move on to the next. It takes only moments.
Asana is contemporary software rooted in the need to share with a number of people a lot of different things. Its very reason for being demands an open, engaging workspace. That is without question achieved here.
Task lists are broken down logically, and it’s easy to drill down into what’s most recent and pertinent.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
