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This post was updated May 25, 2023.
There’s more to your real estate future than worrying about clearing title and negotiating inspection credits. Before you get to those places, you need to be able to run a business — your business, and there are a lot of tools to help you do that.
Customer relationship management solutions and transaction automation are all part of a bigger picture, the long-term. But what about empowering you to do more in less time before you get to following up and signing off? Inman assembled a quick list of a few software products designed to help you do just that. These are products that don’t necessarily fit into a specific category, other than getting work done.
Tasks, transactions and deals
Trackxi
Trackxi is a transaction tracking and deal communication application.
This is an app for managing all the little things that hamper progress between signature and closing. It’s not a clinical transaction manager, but more of an activity management solution, and it’s very good at it. It’s Trello, or Asana, for real estate deals. It includes task list templates, which can be edited, visual, actionable timelines, dynamic calendering and a non-CRM contact management element relevant only to active deals.
Communications are handled in-app and can include title and mortgage vendors, as well as clients, using permission-based views to ensure they’re not distracted by irrelevant business tasks. The intent of Trackxi is to support and inform users as to the who, when and what of a deal. Log in, find out, go about your day.
ListedKit
ListedKit is software to help agents manage transactions.
ListedKit is the type of lightweight, sign-up-and-go software that targets individual agents, teams and smaller, fast-moving brokerages that appeals to the heart of good deal flow: systematization. It centers deal management around list templates and task drivers. It’s not overbuilt; it’s intended to be engaged once the contract is official and designed to support how you work, not change it. It has accounts for teams, agents and clients and can be fully branded to the user.
Jointly
Jointly is offer and transaction management software for real estate agents.
This isn’t the “big” transaction system your brokerage may be offering, or as it appears to be. It’s lighter, more nimble.
Jointly is a powerful, intelligently built offer and deal management web application with the functionality and feature selection to do more than most in this category. It uses an array of powerful form-fill and auditing technology, project-based task list creation and smart categorization of transaction roles to offer a competitive advantage to users.
Jointly manages the balance between buyer, seller and their agent representatives with a coherent, well-organized admin experience. Each party is concisely summarized in columns according to deal stage, such as Onboarding (new), Active, Pending and Recently Closed.
Business tasks and finances
Formations
Formations is a tax and revenue management app.
Formations is not accounting software. It’s a revenue tracking and tax management application that helps agents create an S-Corp and direct themselves as a business. It facilitates self-payroll, manages all tax withholdings, gauges tax-to-revenue metrics, tracks expenses and handles aspects of simple bookkeeping.
This app an file tax returns, offer liability predictions and help agents control profit and loss. This is as well-designed software as I’ve seen in years, able to offer long-sought relief to any independent contractor who suffers from anxiety or stresses over the numeric nuance of business self-governance. This is what Turbo-Tax wants to be.
Symba
Symba is a business and financial management app.
Symba is a mobile app (a browser version is pending) for managing agents’ and teams’ transaction finances. It easily creates deal net sheets, connects multiple bank accounts, provides income/expense breakdowns, creates income projections, and clearly delineates tax obligations for every deal, quarterly and over time. Its fintech-light layered over a deal tracker, spliced with back-office accounting. It’s a superb tool for anyone new or growing in the business and a solid accessory solution for those already comfortable managing their numbers.
Bublup
Bublup is business content organization and management software.
Bublup, the app with a fun(ny) name — the company should note its name is also a sound someone might make when drowning — offers users a bunch of ways to leverage its colorful, simple and smart file and content organization suite.
It’s very simple in concept: name a folder, put related stuff in it — all kinds of stuff. Bublup can store, label, sort and share everything from web addresses to home tour videos to listing agreements. It can also create presentations from specific folders and import photos directly from your phone’s camera to a specific folder with no sorting or uploading.
KeyPleaz
KeyPleaze is showing and project outsourcing app for real estate agents.
KeyPleaz is a showing and real estate task outsourcing app. Hiring agents plug in a need, and another agent can claim it. Projects are listed in the app as Home Showing, Open House and as a catch-all, Runner, which can be anything from being present at an inspection to collecting signage.
There’s also an “Available” module to sort through published needs. Because it’s brokerage driven (a very savvy business play by the creators), tasks are broadcast to all offices and agents under the same brand and location, and assigned on a first-to-claim basis.
UnlockdBox
UnlockdBox is an app that helps agents outsource work to other agents and, vice versa, provides a side job for willing, usually newer, agents.
UnlockdBox is an ideal way for inexperienced agents or those new to a market to get to know colleagues, network, learn their market and get a feel for all the little things that go into building a real estate career. It also has a vendor marketplace for preferred and regularly used business partners to be promoted as they relate to assigned tasks.
The app is purpose-driven, meaning its user experience cleanly reflects the app’s reason for being. There isn’t any interference from weightless, ancillary features or design miscues, a noteworthy step for a founder not versed in app design and development.
SignMore
SignMore is a US-based virtual reception service for the real estate industry.
SignMore does more than answer and route calls on behalf of real estate agents. It’s a lead qualification resource, driven by actual people using provided, or customized, scripts for the purpose of learning what a person has to sell or where, what and for how much they want to buy.
There is some very sharp technology backing the callers, too, empowering them to push conversations and people into your existing CRM, connect to your calendar and detail the caller’s wants and needs. This is a technology company as much as it is a people company.
Agently
Agently is an automated real estate business planning and coaching solution.
This version of Agently is all new. It once focused solely on automating content for listing descriptions and promotion, but now has built on top of that automation a smart, insightful coaching system for new and evolving agents. There’s no doubt this can also serve as a valuable brokerage tool rolled out for new hires to aid in recruiting and retention, something with which not enough brokers concern themselves.
Marketing
ListAssist
ListAssist is software for automating property marketing descriptions.
Based in New Zealand, ListAssist has landed its first few clients in the U.S. after building a robust client base on its home turf. Unlike ChatGPT or Jasper AI, ListAssist is focused solely on helping real estate agents write faster, more engaging property content.
The software leverages its “computer vision” algorithm to scan uploaded photos, reading images from each room to identify prominent features and display them as a series of tagged writing prompts. Saving, editing and regenerating content is very intuitive.
This is an ideal solution for marketing teams tasked with cranking out original copy day after day, the creatively drained agent and the tech-savvy team that wants to further automate business tasks they find tedious.
NilaJune
Nila June is software that automates listing descriptions.
Nila June is a product that writes listing descriptions for agents. This is the latest alternative in a quickly growing niche of real estate marketing, and each iteration shows me something better than the last. Agents who struggle with writing or simply want to make their marketing more efficient could benefit from using this easy, affordable software.
There isn’t much to write about here. (Pun intended.) Nile June is as straight-forward as software gets. There’s no CRM integrations, drip campaign tools or bold, mobile-inspired user interfaces.
ESentry
ESentry is an open house marketing and lead capture app.
ESentry is an iOS app for agents to use to capture lead information at open houses using QR code scanning. It leverages the user’s CRM API (application programming interface) to reconcile visitor data with any existing records, create an in-app lead profile and also populate the CRM with the open house visitation data.
The focus on user experience is immediately evident, as the app greatly shrinks the process of setting up an open house and finding out more about who is coming to see the home.
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