Do you want the inside info to Top Producer’s new mobile application?  Do you want to see if it will easily fit into your lifestyle and daily activities? Want to see what’s missing from the application and learn what’s coming down the pipeline?  I helped in the development of this product when it was just an idea and can give you an insiders view of this cutting edge app that you won’t get anywhere else.

Am I biased, yup. Is it perfect, nope. Do I love it, absolutely. It is a giant step in the right direction in the creation of something special and unique.

This ain’t yo Momma’s Top Producer!

I thought of him a few nights ago when I was tying to hang the blinds. It didn’t go so well. What I concluded was that I wasn’t lacking the mental capacity or physical ability to hang them, I simply had the wrong tools. The job surely could have been done in minutes with a power drill, I don’t own one. I did have a screwdriver, but it was too wide and made the job way harder than it needed to be.  You get the point.

A lot has been written lately about what the right tools are and whether Realtors need to invest in more or less shiny objects. I specifically enjoyed recent posts on the subject by Darin Persinger (@darinpersinger) and Daniel Rothamel (@realestatezebra).

So what are the right tools right now? It must be tough for many of you to wade through the sea of newness and pinpoint what really matters to your business so I thought I would do my best to help. The list below will be the hammer and nails from a technology perspective of what a real estate agent needs in today’s market to compete. Instead of lacing this post with affiliate links I am offering anyone who wants specific information or product selection guidance on any of the things that I mention below to email me directly and I will help you diagnose the best solution. Chris (at) techsavvyagent dot com.

A killer blog/website – There are still way too many online brochures floating around. A good indicator as to whether or not you need an upgrade from your current site is to look at a few of the sites of the top agents in your market and if you were browsing the web and would hands down choose them over you, you need a new site. My #1 recommendation is a WordPress.org custom site like The Good Life Team or Dale Chumbley’s but the reality is that doesn’t always fit into a single agents budget. There are website providers that can make you respectable again for plus or minus $30 per month while you build towards the end goal of a full blown custom WordPress option.

An amazing IDX – This one is fairly huge. I promise you that when it gets close to the point where it is time to hop in the car and go look at homes, many if not most consumers are going to contact the agent whose IDX they found the property on. Why do you think so many of the leads on the web come from Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia? Sure they are SEO’d to the max, but they also provide an amazing user interface while searching and do not require you to regiter via email like many agent IDX’s do.  Map search, neighborhood specific search and more are no longer optional and using your local MLS provided IDX or your company provided IDX can often seem tempting due to cost reasons, but is usually not the best tool.

CRM/Database – Everyone is focused on lead generation, everyone is forgetting about lead conversion. Last time I went to the bank and tried to deposit a lead they laughed at me. This is a relationship business and managing relationships effectively is what leads to in person appointments and listings. Database or Customer Relationship Management will always be a core tool for Realtors. During the toughest 2 years of the recent market I can not tell you how many agents came up to me and told me that if it was not for their database they would have done zero business. I also want to shout this from the mountain tops: Outlook and Gmail ARE NOT client relationship tools. They are good at email and calendar and make for a great online rolodex but they are not enough to manage your business.

A nice laptop and smart phone both with mobile web access- These 2 devices are where you will spend the majority of your time when you are not belly to belly with clients. If your computer sucks and runs slowly get a new one. If your smart phone requires that you take the battery out several times a day to reboot get a new one. The advances in technology within these 2 spaces combined with the reduction in cost has been tremendous. Stop using sluggish devices. Time is money right?

That’s it.

But Chris what about a Facebook Page you always talk about Facebook? You didn’t mention Twitter I thought I needed HootSuite? Just last week you told me to put a QR Code on my forehead for God’s sake and I did!

This post was about the core tools that run a successful real estate agents business not the shiny objects that so often distract us. Facebook, Video, Twitter, QR Codes and the like can and will help your business grow, but only after you have mastered and put in place the right set of core tools and learned how to use the effectively. If not the blinds will never get hung.

Again, if you have any questions or would like specific examples that are right for you I can be reached via email at chris (at) techsavvyagent dot com.

If you think my list sucks, I left something off or you appreciated the post please feel free to leave your feedback in the comments below.

PC’s have always had some pretty good options for contact management systems, but if you are a Mac user you were historically more limited.  While investigating what programs were suitable for real estate and available for a Mac, I stumbled across a few systems that seemed interesting, one of them being Daylite.  I took the plunge on behalf of our Tech Savvy Agents and am quite surprised by what I found.

I want to preface this review by saying I have 10 years experience with using Top Producer and know that system inside and out, down to every last feature.  I am extremely comfortable with it and was a little nervous to try and tackle a new system.  The terminology is different in Daylite, as well as most of the processes used to manage and track your business.  I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Setup

If you want to use Daylite on multiple machines, setting up isn’t quite as easy as most programs.  That said, I didn’t have any problems loading the server program on my computer, also my iphone could immediately access my database.  Daylite is not a web based product, but you can access your info from multiple machines by installing an extra program on your computer.  Setting up was fairly uneventful for me, I had heard of horror stories on the web.  All in all absolutely no issues importing my database from iCal into Daylite either.  So far so great!  I like it when things go smoothly.

Initial Thoughts

When I first opened Daylite, I was pleasantly surprised.  The screens were clean looking and all the info I was looking for was easily accessible .

Clean Layout

I felt at home because the layout of the screen seemed “Mac” like to me.  Daylite is only made for Mac’s, sorry PC users.  Like most programs, you have most of the main features accessible on the top of the screen but, a really neat feature is this is totally customizable and you can make your own buttons where many CRM’s are hard coded and can’t be customized.  While using Daylite for a few months this is a common theme that I have come across.  The entire program is highly customizable, more so than any other system I have ever used.  However you would like to conduct your business or whatever you would like to track, you can.  The freedom you have in the system is good and bad.  The learning curve for Daylite is actually worse than Top Producer or Outlook.  I know a lot of agents that say Top Producer is tough, but when you are not guided through steps by a wizard, like Top Producer, it can be really difficult.  However, once I settled in and had some training, I absolutely love the freedom.  There are a lot of videos on the Marketcircle website which were pretty decent.  It wasn’t until I started watching the MacAngel videos that I really felt comfortable.  These videos are not free, I had to pay for them, but what’s the point of wasting valuable time trying to figure things out on your own.  My time is worth more money than the few hundred bucks I’ve spent on the videos.  The MacAngel has personal consulting too, which I hear is awesome.  With any good CRM tech support and training options are critical and while there was a cost the return on investment when properly managing a database far outweighs the initial cost of learning.

Contacts, Opportunities and Projects

Smart Lists

The power of Daylite is really built around three things…. your contacts, opportunities and projects.  Lets start with your contacts.  If you have ever used itunes you are going to feel right at home tracking your contacts.  You can create smart lists and have Daylite group your contacts in a limitless fashion.  There wasn’t a single list that I thought of, that couldn’t be created in Daylite.  If I wanted to have a contact list of all of my contacts, who were fsbo’s and entered in the database within the last 30 days I could create it and Daylite would dynamically update it.

This IS the most powerful feature in Daylite as the flexibility it provides an agents for tracking their entire business quickly and to their liking is amazing.

Opportunities

Visual Pipelines

Opportunities are your way of tracking leads and where they fall in your pipeline of business.  The system comes set up with real estate pipelines built in, you can also obviously create your own.  You can clearly see where all your leads are within an opportunity pipeline, which I really like.  The same smart lists I was referring to earlier in the contact section applies to opportunities too and looks like this.  Here is the basic overview of an opportunity as described by MarketCircle (the makers of Daylite).

An opportunity is a person or business who is interested in using your real estate expertise to search or list a property. In the real estate template, each active client is considered an opportunity. When you create an opportunity, you can associate one of the following pipelines to the opportunity.

1. The Purchasepipeline is the work-flow for clients who wish to buy a property. This pipeline contains all the stages involved in purchasing a property starting from the searching process to the final closing.
2. The Listingpipeline is the work-flow for clients who wish to sell their property. This pipeline contains all the stages involved in selling a property starting from listing the property to the final closing.
3. The Rentalpipeline is the work-flow for clients who wish to find a lease or have a property that they want to lease to other people. This pipeline contains all the stages involved in finding a rental property or renting out your property starting from the initial interview to the final agreement and closing.

These opportunities are very similar to the “Listing and Closing Plans” in Top Producer.  I must say, I do like the graphical “pipeline” it gives me, so I can see where we are at a glance in any opportunity.

Projects

Projects Smart List

Projects, again, work in a similar manner to contacts and opportunities.  Projects are used to help you track your personal plans and organize information essential for anything other than your real estate work-flow. For example, if you are planning a personal or office party, or selling your own property, you could work with projects.  They also work well in keeping you motivated and on track of all the little things you need to do to support your business like, marketing, web site design, blogging, etc…

You can completely customize how you manage those projects by setting up custom pipelines.

Email

The email client and work-flow is nothing short of fantastic.  If you are on a Mac you are probably using their “Mail” program.  Daylite allows you to continue using Mail because it adds a new tray to the side that allows you to track all your incoming and outgoing messages in each contacts file within Daylite.  You even have the choice of the attachments being copied too.  If the contact isn’t in your database, you can quickly add them into Daylite with a click of a button.  You can even create a task or an opportunity right from an email.  Everything is fast and smooth and it just plain works.

Other Features

Daylite comes chock full of other features as well.  The mail merge works with Word, Excel, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and works well might I add.  There is an

Direct Mail Stats

add on program called Direct Mail that allows you to create great bulk emails and has a powerful tracking system.  You can see who opened your email, what links were clicked, number of views or link clicks over time and even the location of the recipient when they viewed it, the data any tech savvy agent is looking for!

iPhone

The iPhone app is as you may think at this point, amazing.  It looks good and is extremely easy to navigate and use.  All of my notes, emails, projects, opportunities, appointments and of course contacts are accessible through the iPhone app.  Not only can you view most of the info that the Daylite desktop app has, it gives you complete freedom for creating activities too.  The thing I like the most about the app is that Daylite syncs with the address book on my Mac, which means when someone calls me, their name pops up on my phone and it tracks the phone call in their record too….. awesome!

The reports within Daylite look good and there is even a task timer which can help you track how much time you are spending on each individual activity.

What’s not to like

I really love Daylite but it does have some limitations/faults.  For one, there is no way to have the system automatically send out emails for you like Top Producer action plans.  You can set reminders for emails and have a template but, you have to manually go in and send it.  I was really surprised to see this program lacking something Top Producer as the industry standard has been doing for years.  Even though I love how flexible and open the program is now, the learning curve was definitely steep which may not bode well for the non tech savvy agents out there(a few!). There are no wizard based actions to point you in the right direction when you first start trying to tackle the system.  Lastly, there is no MLS connection, so listing info has to be manually entered.

Summary

All in all I really like Daylite.  It is not as much of a “marketing system” as Top Producer is, but it sure is an excellent CRM.  It has a smooth, polished feel to it, that is usually a trademark of a Mac only product.  There are no half baked features in this system, if it’s in the program, rest assured it works flawlessly. Daylite is a subscription product and costs $189 dollars a year for the basic program and mail integration, with an extra $50 to use it on your iPhone. The more I use Daylite, the more I really love it.  On behalf of the Tech Savvy Team, we can enthusiastically recommend this program to anyone.

Check out the Daylite for Real Estate website here and if you have any comments or questions leave them below.