Realtors – Improving your Productivity

People are usually curious how a full-time real estate agent schedule looks like, since time is being managed by them freely and they have the rights to choose when, and when not to work. Here’s a glimpse of my typical week.

A typical week in the life of Benson
A typical week in the life of Benson

My schedules are usually packed and yet spaced carefully for more opportunities to appear as the days unfold. What could have helped me and made all these even possible? These are the tools which I’ve embedded in my daily life.

Calendars

The default calendar works well in my iPhone and Macbook but I’d usually love to spice it up so that it looks colorful and fun. (Would be nice if any app dev does something that breaks down the different calendar to show the number of hours utilised!) This is extremely useful when you’re cooperating with your team mates since you can invite them and vice-versal.

The apps I use are WeekCal for my iPhone 6 Plus that syncs with iCloud. I do use Sunrise occassionally which syncs Evernote and phone reminders in as well for a great quick overview of what needs to be done for the next 3 days.


Rose, my abled assistant also takes care of my working partner Bruce and my time by managing a shared calendar on our personal and joint events.

Evernote

People who knows me know I’m a strong advocate of Evernote. I practically use this to keep track of all my leads, forecasting, team manage and remind myself of the tasks and big picture ahead. The functions are endless and practical, but these are the most important ones.

Search Box

Search box allows me to find my things very quickly as a very heavy EN user. Everything in my way gets into a notebook and it gets special attention when I have time to rearrange them later. People don’t really have to know how messy you are as long as you are fast to recall or could get to your documents fast. As the notes get very heavy, tagging is useful.

The OCR recognition has time to time proven it’s worth as well since the team mates and I share a common notebook with articles. These articles are essentially good for us to keep up with the history and latest of what is happening on the search subject and allow us to communicate better with our clients.

The search box is the best tool of Evernote
The search box is the best tool of Evernote

Continue reading “Realtors – Improving your Productivity”

Difference between Cloud Storages & Evernote

A Happy New Year to everyone :-)

SRI5000 SLP Realty, Benson Koh training on Evernote 101 - The Basics.
SRI5000 SLP Realty, Benson Koh training on Evernote 101 – The Basics.

After a training for my agency SLP Realty earlier in the morning and I think these snippets are pretty useful to share as they are common questions to which Dropbox, Google Drive users would normally ask in terms of how they manage their cases and productivity. There are also several other pointers which I brought out which is important in order for Evernote to be useful to you.

Evernote vs Dropbox, Sugarsync, Google Drive, SkyDrive (Whatever you can think of)

Dropbox, Sugarsync, Google Drive, Sky Drive are cloud services which offers online backups. Although they are useful and many swears by organizing their database cleanly so that it becomes effective, it was never meant to be a planning tool. Continue reading “Difference between Cloud Storages & Evernote”

5 Evernote Applications to Boost your Real Estate Sales

As I was writing about why Evernote was essential to my business 3 days ago and getting ready for the lesson for my team, it would be better to further deliberate on some scenarios why Evernote could boost your sales instead of just plain boasting about that green elephant. These are some snippet applications on what you could use your Evernote for in Real Estate.

Using a Pen and a Paper to Goal

Cool ainnit?
My goals for 2014

I love to doodle. It’s innate. And it’s still my best way to get many things done with even checklist boxes and things to do with scenes to follow. Since it’s the end of the year and most of us would write the goals for 2014, why not try this:-

Write your quarter goals for 2014 (Q1, Q2 nada nada) and have them broken down into what you would be doing on a piece of paper? I use Moleskin because I’m a sucker for quality products, but hey, a 555 jotter (your childhood 10cents book) will work here. Write down everything you want to do for 2014 and snap shot with Evernote ‘Document’ camera mode.

It’s that simple. Continue reading “5 Evernote Applications to Boost your Real Estate Sales”

Evernote for your Real Estate Business

After a good 7 years, I have been going through what is seemingly a high transition on how print media dropped its anchor of being the leader in information and coverage; where Real Estate sales became more transparent with different media portals, discussion boards, and even the way that you handle your clients have changed.

Brooding over the weekend, these are the factors which are important to me and why Evernote is a game changer and why you should use it to run your Real Estate business.

Why Do You Need a Third Brain

There’s too many things happening in our fast paced career. You have appointments to appointments, with things to follow through from different customers. You have things to learn everyday. You follow up with real estate news. New cooling measures break in, you have to follow through the regulatories to understand and see how it applies to each of your clients.

You drive. Calls come in, you have to probably “take notes” or call your clients later. This can go on, sometimes even 14 days in 2 weeks. And you forget something important in the midst. You get into trouble.

This happens. Continue reading “Evernote for your Real Estate Business”

6 Essential Singapore Realtor Apps For Your iPhone

As Blackberry loses its market share further and failing to roll out its BB OS10 this year, I’ve mawkishly swapped to the latest iPhone 5 since we are promised by Apple that it should have a better standby battery life and talk time (the main disadvantage of the phone since the battery is integrated).

Geared with the iPhone as the main arsenal to my business, here are my must have apps for work which you might find them useful for you as well:-

1. Streetsine

The best tool ever developed to help agents get the earliest possible information on the local property market real-time. Use this and you look like a pro anytime, anywhere :) I’m on the investor subscription since Streetsine was born and I’m still loving it. Benefits of using this app includes

  • real-time update of property prices
  • location & amenities around 2km vicinity
  • comparative projects around search subject
  • useful listings from fellow Realtors using Streetsine

If you do not deal with commercial properties, you can opt for the Professional version (S$659 annually). If you’d like to use two instance of the app in both your iPad and iPhone, go for the Investor version ($959 annually).

Look out for “Streetsine” in the AppStore.

2. Sugarsync

Sugarsync

We can start the Dropbox vs. Sugarsync debacle again, but this is what I use. This great cloud storage offers 5gb free and has solutions for all your smart devices (Android, Blackberry, iPad, iPhone duh). Sugarsync can be useful when Continue reading “6 Essential Singapore Realtor Apps For Your iPhone”