I get asked all the time about how a Mac Book Pro works with the MLS and various other real estate programs.  Short answer is that yes you can buy a Mac today and you will be fully compatible with anything you need by leveraging Parallels which runs Windows 7 or XP.  The beauty of the Mac OSX is that it runs anything a PC can, but a PC can’t run anything that a Mac can so “best of both worlds” does come to mind.  If you are a real estate agent considering a Mac for your next purchase don’t fret it is an option and the best one at that!

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.