The Best Free Real Estate Agent Tools for 2019
Free Real Estate Agent Apps, CRMs, and Tools for 2019
As a real estate agent, there are so many apps, tools, and CRMs to choose from. Each piece of software works a little differently and has certain features. What are the best tools out there if you are on a budget and want to focus on free tools only? We have your back! Here are our favorite real estate agent tools, apps, and CRMs for 2019. They include tools for meditation, productivity, organization, video, lead generation, social media, and graphic design.
In this real estate agent training podcast, you will learn our favorite free real estate agent tools for 2019.
The Real Estate Agent Tools
Calm - Meditation app for iOS and Android. Perfect for busy real estate agents who want to start their day off right or just relax between appointments.
Tomato Timer - Online Pomodoro Timer. Used for staying focused during work sessions.
Focus Booster - App and tool for those who need a little more data on the focus time.
Feedly - Organization for all your news articles and sources. Great for staying on top of real estate related news.
Flipboard - Similar to Feedly and does that same thing but you can also link in your social media profiles.
Google Alerts - Set yourself up for specific keywords so you know when news is published. Tip: definitely set up “YOUR CITY real estate” as an alert.
Evernote - The top tool for organization. There are endless features to Evernote and it can be used in many ways. I like using it for taking notes, to-do lists, and I use the Evernote Web Clipper for saving articles
Trello - Project management tool with a visual interface. Perfect to help you stay on top of your to-dos for your real estate deals.
Mailchimp - Not mentioned in the podcast but this one is a must! Free for up to 2000 people, this is one of the must have tools for real estate agents.
Grammarly - Basically, spell-checker on steroids. Grammarly will pick up sentence structure, spelling, grammar, and it even has a built in thesaurus.
Free Email Tracker - Track your emails so you know who is opening them and when.
Loom - Amazing free screen share and video tool for sending videos in email. One of the best free new tools out there.
Shotcut - Free video editing for Windows users. Awesome for real estate videos!
Audacity - Free audio editing for Windows. I use this for my real estate podcast!
iMovie - Free video editing for Mac users. Easy to learn and great functionality.
GarageBand - Free audio editing for Mac users
RealOffice360 - Free CRM that is fully dedicated to real estate agents. Great visual interface and easy to use.
Hubspot - Huge CRM provider with a free option for those that do not need all the features.
Insightly - Free for up to 2 users. A great CRM with a lot of functionality.
Canva - The best free graphic design tool out there. It works so well for social media posts, brochures, postcards, Pinterest graphics and so so so much more!
Buffer - Social media posting app that also integrates with Instagram.
Email Hunter or Hunter.io - For those that love email prospecting, You can find anyone’s email on a website with one click!
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Rev Real Estate School. The podcast with quick tips and actionable advice to help you sell more real estate in today's world. And now your host Michael Montgomery.
[00:00:10] Hello and welcome back to Rev Real Estate School. I'm your host Michael Montgomery. Today we have an awesome fun episode in store today. We are talking about free tech tools that you can use in real estate to help your business. Right before we dive in just remember we have our hundredth episode coming up where there's going to be some freebie giveaways and we're going to get into some of our top lessons over the first hundred episodes so make sure you catch that episode early next week.
[00:00:41] Let's jump into these free tools and we're going to kind of go in order here. We're going to start with things that maybe they're not even to real estate focused and then we're going to get very specific about real estate. So the first one the first free tool this is something that you can basically start your day with whenever you'd like. It's the Calm App. So it's called Calm. It's for iOS it's also for Android. It's a meditation app. And yes this isn't necessarily real estate but the ability to focus and the mental flexibility that you'll get from meditation on a daily basis will definitely improve your business. It's one of these things that is extremely important but we tend to just kind of move to the side because we get busy doing other things. So first off is calm is the Calm App.
[00:01:28] Next in order to stay focused. And in order to stay productive is the Tomato Timer. I'll link all of these up and they show note out so you can quickly go and look at them. The tomato timer is the Pomodoro Technique. There's another version out there called Focus Booster. This one is definitely better. And they do have a free option as well. And it does follow the Pomodoro Technique plus it also tracks certain things so you can actually see how productive you are being. It's a great free app. So that's Focused Booster app or just tomato timer.
[00:02:03] Now if you're the type that spends a ton of time going through news articles and trying to stay organized with what's happening in the world make sure you have a smart news reader so Feedly is one option I think Flipboard is another option. Basically you're able to organize your news and you're able to look at things that are important to you. So you're not going to the news and you're just scrolling through whatever it might be you're actually tailoring your news to certain articles that will be of interest to you in real estate. I'd also recommend setting up Google Alerts. This is very important. I use it all the time Google alerts for different keywords and that sort of thing. But if you're going to do anything just make sure that you have a smart newsreader they're free. They work very very well so that's fiddly Flipboard or another one like that.
[00:02:48] Next let's jump into organization. For organization definitely get Trello. If you haven't used Trello yet it's an amazing project management software. It's used by a ton of real estate agents out there a lot of top producers use it and they have a free option. So it's a great tool to get familiarized with and start using it's very visual which I love. Also on the organization front Evernote you have to have ever known. It just makes your life so much easier when you're going through homes and you can take quick notes you can use the Evernote Web Clipper if you use Chrome. Evernote Web Clipper is great if you just want to save a quick article or something like that. Make sure you use Evernote and you can leverage it like crazy. There are so many things that you can do within Evernote even down to my to do lists are in ever know you can do so much. So make sure you are using that.
[00:03:38] Next if you want a free email tracking software. So one that's paid out there is called Yesware there's a number of different other ones out there. But if you just want a free one you can just get this from the chrome extension store if you're using chrome it's just called Free E-Mail Tracker. It works very well. Basically what happens is you send your e-mail and then it tracks when it's opened when it's red. If links are clicked this is a very important for prospecting. If you're sending prospects properties you want to know if they're opening your e-mails you want to know if they're clicking on the link so you can know when to follow up.
[00:04:11] Now if you are sending emails I highly recommend Grammarly I use the premium version because I really really need it. I have no problem getting the content out there and putting together a quick email but proofreading it and making sure that is written properly is not my strong suit. Grammarly is an amazing free app. They do have the premium version but the free program works very well.
[00:04:35] Next on our list and probably my favorite one on this list is Loom. L-o-o-m. You can download it at useloom.com. It is great. So it is video recording software for free so you can do screen recordings you can even do web cam recordings and put them into emails. It's amazing and it's absolutely free right now. I use it all the time works with both Windows and Mac. It is a great program to have. If you're doing screen casting or if you want to send video emails for free. The main one out there of course is BombBom comes with a cost. If you just want a free option go to useloom.com.
[00:05:17] Now if you're doing video editing or audio editing if you have a Mac of course GarageBand and iMovie. They both work very well. If you have a P.C. if you have a windows computer and you want to do audio editing audacity is the way to go. I use it Audacity for this podcast. It works super well it's a free program and it works great for audio editing. Now if you have a Windows computer you don't have iMovie of course. If you want a free option for editing videos Shotcut. Works very very well. Slightly less robust but still works extremely well.
[00:05:51] Next let's chat CRMs. Now if you do not have a CRM you need one. There are free options out there. One I'd recommend is RealOffice360. I use it. They have a free option. They do have premium plans but they have a forever free option. It's a great option for a newer real estate agent or even growing real estate agent just wants a solid free CRM. If you're looking for other free CRM, HubSpot has a great free CRM and Insightly works quite well to it's free for up to two users so there are free CRM options out there so there's really no excuse to not have a CRM and these are great free options RealOffice360, Hubspot, and Insightly all work great.
[00:06:34] Next up is graphic design you need Canva. If you haven't used Canva yet make sure you go and grab it. It is unbelievably easy to use. You can do graphic design it honestly ends up looking like it's straight from Photoshop but it's all drag and drop in fact on our website a lot of what I do is all done through Canva. Now I have a professional account with a free account. Works really well and there's not really too much of a learning curve with it. You can start doing Pinterest graphics you can do blog graphics you can do social media posts I even do my door knockers and feature sheets and postcards all on there. It is a great tool. Make sure you go check it out if you have not used Canva yet.
[00:07:16] Getting to the end of the list here. Buffer buffer is great for social media posting. If you are posting a lot on social media and you want to organize it buffer has a free option for you to post. I think it works with Instagram. Of course Facebook as well and your other social media platforms. But I believe the free version does work for Instagram as well I'm not a one percent sure about that but I believe it does.
[00:07:41] Second last if you are out there doing a lot of prospecting and you need to get email addresses easily off of websites, Email Hunter is a great extension. All you do is you land on somebodies website and you just go to this extension basically and it's going to send you all of the emails that are on the website. It works very well if you're doing a lot of prospecting. If you're doing lead generation and prospecting through Websites it will save you a ton of time.
[00:08:07] The final one and I know it's cheating but it's super important is text message. You can't really use that one I know it's not really a tech tool but out of anything if you're gonna use any tool out there using text message and the phone will get you the furthest. But we have all these other free tools that you can definitely go check out as well. Like I was saying they are linked up in this show note so if you do want to go and check out any one of these please do. Thank you so much for posting this episode. I really appreciate it. Remember you can ask adoptees or anything I have to do is rate and really show head over to our website go to free coaching section let us know where you did that and you can have a chat with a top producer about anything that's on your mind.
[00:08:43] Thanks so much for listening and we'll see in the next lesson this episode of Rev real estate school has come to a close. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you back here for the next lesson.