Real Estate Systems
1. Calendar / planning the day
2. Phone
1. CallRail / Google Voice / Skype
3. Slack
4. Direct mail marketing – YellowLetters.com / GoBigPrinting.com
5. Contact management – Podio / InvestorFuse – Timed followup / Evernote (Use reminder function for followup)
Calendar
This is the only way that I get through my day. ?
Each day I have a contract with myself to get through everything that I have scheduled on my calendar. And each day, I open up my calendar, and get through each of those scheduled things on that timeline.
The real important thing here is making sure the you have that contract with yourself to take your calendar seriously.
I joke, but am really serious that if it’s not on my calendar I can’t do it. So, I ask everyone to send me calendar invites, if they actually want my time.
This has helped me to get probably twice as much done, compared to if I don’t have a plan for my day.
Potential Pitfall
You must have you day/week planned before you get started. If you wake up and don’t have anything on your calendar, there’s a high probability that you’ll fall into reactionary mode. This is something that we NEVER want to have happen!
Side Note Bonus
MAKE SURE TO SCHEDULE WHEN YOU WILL CHECK YOUR EMAIL!!!!
Also, it doesn’t matter which calendar system you use. As long as you use it. We use Google Calendar.
Phone
Our current phone system is Call Rail. We use Call Rail because of the tracking abilities, and how it easily populates info into Podio.
You can also get started by using free systems like Google Voice (which I still use as my business phone number).
Slack
This might seem weird to you, but you should get your team away from using text and email to communicate with each other.
Slack is an internal communication system that keeps all of your internal business communications in one place.
This is great because you can turn off all of your other notifications, but keep your Slack on. That way if you’re in the zone, your business partner can still get your attention if something important comes up. But you don’t get the noise from all of the other emails and texts.
I think this system is brilliant for keeping things organized and on task.
Direct mail marketing
This is a system that everyone needs to have if they want to be successful in real estate investing. It’s direct mail.
We like to use YellowLetters.com for most of our mail pieces.
Discount: you can get 10% off your next order from yellowletters.com with the code: SeattleInvestorsClub
We also will use GoBigPrinting.com if we want to send to a smaller list using their Elixir automated mail system. This is great because they send a variety of different mail pieces without you having to plan them yourself. It’s just a little more expensive.
If you use one of the same mail houses as us… great! If not, that’s fine. Just make sure that you’re marketing, and tracking your metrics.
Contact management
This is one of the real estate systems that everyone thinks they need to have right off the bat. And it needs to be all setup, and sophisticated from the start.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. When I got started, I didn’t use a paid contact management system until we got paid on our first big deal.
Before that we used a spreadsheet for keeping track of leads, and MailChimp for sending emails out. All free.
Now days – we use Podio as our base platform, and InvestorFuse, which is bolted onto Podio to make all of the automations happen.
If I were just getting started, I would setup my own non-sophisticated Podio setup, and then get InvestorFuse after I did a deal or two.
Conclusion
These are our top 5 real estate systems. If you have any systems that you enjoy, we’d love to hear about them. You can share those in the comments section below. Thanks!
Also, if you listened to the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. Every 5 start review helps us get more followers on iTunes.
Leave a Reply