Real estate investing holds a reputation of an industry that’s slow to adopt tech trends. However, nowadays, there are more and more tools and resources real estate investors can use to their advantage.
So, in today’s article, we’ll break down some of the most useful apps for real estate investors that you might not have heard of before, useful for both novices and experienced investors. You know the drill – any hack that helps to streamline your process can save some time. So, by using these apps, you can reach more people and have more time on your hands.
Let’s check the list. In no particular order:
We learned about the importance of electronic signatures during the lockdowns. Apps like Docusign, allow investors to upload, send, and sign documents. And it can be different type of documents: offer letters, invoices, contracts – you can manage all of them. It’s a great app for remote work. In the past two years, a lot of investors closed contracts through this app without leaving their home, and you can, too.
This is another app that helps you handle documents efficiently. The idea is to skip the use of physical printers, scanners, and fax machines. So, apps like ScannerPro allow you to make a document from a photograph (PDF) and send it right away. Some investors use it to scan bills and save them for taxes. It’s great if you hate handling paper that eventually ends up in the shredder anyway.
Landlords have to send all sort of forms and agreements to their tenants. Creating these templates on your own can be very time consuming, and if you aren’t experienced, you might even miss out on an important detail. You can use free rental agreement templates to complete this task. Templates include lease agreement, eviction notice, lease termination letter, lease violation (secret pet, guest occupant), disclosures, and smoking policy. It’s always better when you have an eForm ready to send to your tenants.
Those of you who invest in rental properties need a calculator to project the returns. This is not a simple calculation because you have to factor in closing costs, rehab costs, mortgage payments, interest rates, tax, rent, vacancy rate, etc. If you aren’t good at math (like myself), you can use a free rental property ROI calculator. Others have gone through these calculations, so here’s a shortcut if you ever need it.
Although mortgage costs and budget are included in the rental property ROI calculator, sometimes you need a separate mortgage calculator to run the numbers. Things like determining mortgage payments if you refinance, affordability calculators (maximum house price you can afford), amortization of the property, and similar metrics can only be calculated with a mortgage specific calculators.
This is an online tool that allows you to compare rents within a neighborhood. In a nutshell, you enter the number of bedrooms and the ZIP code into the rentometer, and you get a report on the average rent for the selected type of property. It’s an app that is used by both renters and landlords, but it can provide you data on rents that goes as back as 48 months. Of course, if you do rental property calculations, you will have to include other variables in the equation.
You all know this one, and if you are not using it to pull property data, you are missing on a great resource. The Zillow app lets you browse properties based on their addresses. Once you pinpoint the property, you can check data like number of rooms, last time the house was sold, and similar info. It’s a tool you can use to find good investment opportunities.
Are you after foreclosure leads? Platforms like Auction are great for sourcing motivated sellers for foreclosure deals as well as bank-owned properties. It offers live auctions and you can start placing bids right away as most of them are open to the public. The downside? The properties are sold fast, so you need to be at the top of your game to get one. Auction has foreclosure home properties help center that can help you master online property auctions.
Xome works a lot like Auction, however, it offers some extra perks, too, like MLS listings, for example. It’s one of the go-to apps for house flippers and you can start browsing properties by address or ZIP code across real estate markets. On Xome, you can access a wide inventory including occupied properties, new properties, and you can even place a last minute bid in auctions that are about to close.
Making a go/no go decision on an investment property is in the center of each investing strategy. This decision is always based on calculations. Many investors turn to DealCheck to set deal parameters and to compare recent sales (or rents) before placing property offers. In a way, DealCheck is similar to the rental property ROI calculator, however, it also includes data on the real estate market that can be essential for placing an offer sight unseen and on short notice.
Speaking of making offers on the fly, DealMachine delivers vital information about homeowners, including a phone number, so that you can contact them right away. While it’s not as comprehensive as some of the other apps out there, when it comes to identifying property owners when you are driving for dollars – it’s the best. If you activate the feature that tracks the movement of your vehicle, you can even save on gas. It’s the sort of app you better have when you need to call a homeowner as soon as you decide that their property is a potentially good investment.
Many real estate investors take photos during a house inspection visit. Now, it would take you hours to draw the floor plan of the house based on those photos. The Magicplan app does this for you right away. Also, it develops a 3D model of the property, and you can save measurements of specific elements. You can use this type of data to coordinate a rehab project with your contractors. You can send it to your team for estimates, and you can even use it to find a buyer for the house. Magicplan is great for getting as many tasks done before you go to your office.
Most people become real estate investors to achieve financial freedom, or to maintain it. Although Personal Capital is developed for tracking financial goals like retirement savings and investments in stocks (or funds), you can also use it to be on top of your cash flow. It employs the latest encryption technology, and it provides tools for analysis where you can make projections about your goals. Once you have the goals, it’s easier to commit to daily objectives that help you achieve financial independence.
There is another alternative for tracking expenses in your budget. Dave Ramsey created EveryDollar so that users can know where each of their dollars was spent through what is known zero-based budgeting. While you can use this app to streamline your budgeting, one perk sets it apart: you can use it on multiple devices. Whether you need to coordinate spending with your spouse, or with your business partner, this feature lets you track spending in real time. It can save you from arguments because it makes budgeting transparent.
This is an app for house flippers. Property fixer provides the tools to do your due diligence on rehab projects. So, you put property data and then you can run the numbers on estimated costs. Also, you can calculate mortgages and compare price of other properties in the same market. The main perk? You can create a report based on all that data, and this makes it really easy to share your calculations with your team or with a hard money lender.
ARV Calculator is an essential tool for fixer upper projects. There are quite a few after repair value calculators, however, this one is available as an app. So, those real estate investors who practice the fix and flip or fix and rent strategy will find it useful for calculating ARV on the go.
The value of video emails is underestimated. Bombbomb is an app that makes it easy for you to put together a video email. Some investors use these type of messages in their email marketing efforts, others use them to build relationship with venture partners – it’s your call. Bombbomb allows you to record the computer screen, your face, or both. Also, you can have a better picture about the success of your campaigns because this app provides performance metric that shows you who played your video and when.
If you haven’t used Realtor, you are missing out on a great resource. Of course, the property data is not compiled for the needs of property investors, but you can find it useful nevertheless. Realtor provides property metrics relevant for the market, like time spent on the market, its listed price, type of property, and address. Investors can benefit from checking these listings on a regular basis.
HUD stands for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. You can source data on foreclosures and bank owned properties from the government site. However, if you like to get a shortcut that directly concerns foreclosures, you can also visit view HUD foreclosures as well. It’s nationwide listing that includes the size of the properties (number of rooms), square foot area, and how long has it been listed. You can search properties based on ZIP code, which is very handy if you operate within a small real estate market.
This is the call answering service that was bound to pop up at some time. Call Porter has a staff that is trained in real estate prospecting and their task is to take inbound calls. This is very useful to all those solopreneurs who’ve used Google Voice or some similar service. And frankly, Call Porter is much better than any of those services. It projects an image of a real estate investing business in which everyone knows what to do. Leads get cold if you don’t answer within the first hour, so if you don’t have an in-house lead acquisition team that handles this, better outsource call answering to someone who can.
Entrepreneurs juggle different responsibilities and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything that needs to get done. Evernote is a mobile app that is not used by real estate investors exclusively, but it’s a great productivity hack. Disclosure: Some of us at Adwords Nerds use this app as it helps us share notes, calendars, outlines of ideas, important links, images, etc.
Speaking of hacks, 12min is an app that shares both short and long summaries of books. It’s a great alternative to reading for those real estate investors who want to learn about the latest ideas but don’t have a lot of time on their hands. The app has a big library of books on entrepreneurship and you can listen or read the gist of any of them in 12 minutes. Or you can revisit a classic, like “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” to inspire you as you go through your daily business operations.
This is a business that connects investors in residential properties with hard money lenders. Center Street Lending approves loans for fix and flip deals, short term and long term rentals, and other hard money loans. The only downside to Center Street Lending is: they don’t lend in all US States. They are active in all of the West Coast States, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Florida, and some of the East Coast States. Loans for investors in other states are considered on a case by case basis.
As the name implies, iFundCities is a platform for real estate investing loans in selected cities. You’ll need to check if your specific real estate market is included on their list – there’s no way around it. They cover loans for fix and flip, fix and rent, new constructions, and multi family units. Investors use them because of the streamlined real estate loan process.
Flipfunding is another lending platform “built by investors for investors.” This one covers real estate markets nationwide and provides funding for fix and flip, rental, and multifamily deals. They offer loans for projects within wide range of metrics: after repair value (7.99% to 75%), loan to value ratio (4.25% to 80%), and loan to cost (7.99% to 90%).
Real estate investors who are into short term rentals find AirBnB very useful, particularly when it comes to scheduling, determining availability, arranging a check in/out, and collecting payments. So, if you were a user (short term renter), now you can use it to manage your rental business.
Everybody uses Google Maps, but real estate investors can use it to complete day-to-day tasks. It’s easy to find a satellite view of a neighborhood (and check out other properties within the same ZIP code), and also, you have the street view. You probably need to navigate through places you’ve never been to to attend meetings, to perform house inspections, or to close contracts. Google Maps is more helpful than people imagine.
This is an app that helps lead generation. PropStream provides property data that you can use in your marketing, especially if you are into traditional methods, like direct mail campaigns and cold calling. However, even if you go for digital marketing, you can still use the elaborate filtering categories on Prop Stream to determine whether you’d like to pursue a specific deal based on the available data. And, of course, you can use a skip tracing tool to find homeowners phone number.
This concludes our list of resources and tools for real estate investors. Of course, a lot more websites, mobile applications, platforms, tools, and services could have made it on this list, but we simply had to draw the line somewhere.
Also, the element of personal preference is at play, so you might not like a specific app, but as a real estate investor, you probably need some version of it. And if you stop and take a look, some of these resources are remarkable. When the industry was established, real estate investors had to spend time completing task or sourcing data for something that’s two clicks away from you.
So, put these real estate investing tools to practice and kill the market. Good luck!
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