Technology For Agents

Ever had an issue that you had to call customer support with that you thought you resolved, only you had to later call them back and use a reference number to bring them back up to speed? Did you lose that reference number?

In many cases, I’ve had very important notes from conversations with technical support for various products I use that I had to keep safe and easily able to access just in case. I’ve kept notes from calling my cell phone provider to calling my contact manager provider, because if I ever have to call back I’m going to want to let them know I remember everything.

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If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or any other software program to manage your emails and are concerned about backing up your data you should consider GMail as an archive tool.

Using GMail, you can effectively archive all your emails in case your main office computer goes downhill. You can also use it as an emergency “on the road” email program in case you can’t access your main computer to send emails.

If you are not archiving your emails, what happens when you have a system meltdown?

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When I first started to use Gmail as my main email provider, I was saddened to learn that I could not put my signature below every email I sent out. My email signature is used to provide my contact information to recipients, and also as a constant reminder for referrals. Having my email at the bottom of all messages was not the way I wanted my emails structured, so I migrated over to using Outlook. Greasemonkey has brought me back to using Gmail.

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Today, Chris McKeever over at the NAR Center for Technology Blog gave insight into how to use your cell phone’s email address to become a more efficient real estate agent in the field. He hit on a great tip; every cell phone provider has it’s own email address. I really like his approach to using email on your cell phone. He doesn’t use it to check messages. Rather, he uses filters in his main email account system to forward important emails from specific clients/persons to his cell phone so that he has an instant notification of an urgent message.

Great idea indeed, Chris! Read up here.

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I’m surprised when touring many new, experienced, and veteran real estate agent offices just how rudimentary and out-dated their email systems are. I think it’s necessary to shed a little light on just how nice Gmail is for real estate agents, and how using it can improve your day-to-day business.

First off, let me explain that just because your email may be johndoe@kw.com doesn’t mean that by using gmail you lose your email address. Gmail is advanced in the aspect that you can send emails from any account that you can verify ownership of using gmail’s software backend. What does this mean? You can log in to gmail and send emails as if they were coming from johndoe@kw.com.

As a real estate agent, I can attest to one FANTASTIC feature of gmail. Searching for lost emails is by far the easiest I’ve ever experienced. I don’t know why other email providers haven’t gotten it right just yet, but gmail sure has. Simply enter in a search and gmail will find emails using your search phrase in a split second. Can’t find that email from the title company you sent last week but you remember the topic in the email? Easy; enter the topic in the search field of gmail and voila! Out populates emails that use that phrase somewhere in the email.

If you have some spare time in your busy real estate schedules, take some time and familiarize yourself with what gmail can do for your stress levels. Head over to gmail.com and create a new account and play around with it a bit. I can almost guarantee that you’ll love it.

By the way, how does 2+ Gigabytes of storage sound? This is another gmail feature, and it’s growing every day.

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