technology » Technology Tools for Real Estate

Let me start out by saying, it can’t be done!

Even if you scoured the Internet 24/7, signed up for every new online tool, purchased every new tech gadget, and ordered every new software update—assuming that it was humanly possible to do all of this—you’d still be behind. The pace of change in technology is so rapid that it’s impossible for most tech experts to keep up, let alone real estate professionals who have other things to think about.

So don’t try to “keep up” with technology. Instead, recognize that for agents and brokers, technology is a means to an end. It exists to help you do business, that is:

To connect with potential clients;
To market yourself or the properties you have listed; and
To facilitate communication before, during, and after a sale.

Figure out which of these things you need to be doing better and then identify the hardware, software, and Internet services that will help you get the job done. Become an expert in the handful of technologies that improve your marketing efforts and enhance your ability to serve your clients. Learn all you can about those technologies and always be on the lookout for new and better tools that do the same thing.

You can’t be an expert on everything, so first and foremost be an expert on your business and what works for you.

Recently we wrote about the importance of making your real estate blog easy to read from a mobile browser. Today, we consider several tools that allow you to do this if you’re blogging with WordPress.

Mobify is a web service that provides a quick way to optimize your site for mobile access. The basic plan is free and offers great controls over how your site will be seen in mobile web browsers. But because it requires some knowledge of CSS style sheet language, it’s not a solution for everyone.

WpTouch Pro ($29 for a single-site license), is a WordPress plug-in that lets you create a separate mobile theme for your website. When a visitor comes to your site, WPtouch automatically determines whether the visitor is using a computer or a mobile browser and displays the appropriate version of your site. Images, captions, videos, and text are all scaled to make them easy to view on the smaller screen.

MobilePress is a free, open source WordPress plug-in that adapts your blog for mobile viewing. You can customize your site by creating your own mobile theme or use one of MobilePress’ pre-designed themes. And because it’s open source, you’ll enjoy plenty of support from its community of developers and users.

Along with these “outside” resources are several traditional WordPress plug-ins:

WPtouch iPhone Theme Plug-in. The free version of WPtouch Pro, above, WPTouch iPhone Theme Plug-in automatically transforms the mobile version of your blog into a cool iPhone-application style theme complete with iPhone-style icons and tap functionality. The iPhone-style theme works for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm users and gives them the option of easily switching to your regular blog theme if they need to.

WordPress Mobile Pack is a comprehensive set of tools that includes mobile themes, extra widgets, and a mobile admin panel that lets you configure your site or post content from your own mobile device. Images, text, and videos are scaled to fit the viewer’s mobile browser and viewers can from switch from the mobile theme to your regular website theme if they wish.

WordPress Mobile Edition transforms your blog into an easy-to-read version for mobile visitors. This is a great plug-in if you want something easy to use that you don’t have to fiddle around with. But beware: this plug-in has few setting to change since almost everything has been configured for you. As a result, there’s no easy way to alter the configuration or customize the viewing experience for your mobile readers.

The end of the summer is upon us, and what a summer it has been!

Facebook surpassed 500 million users in July and Twitter logged more than 20 billion tweets. But what were the best technology tools for real estate and business professionals?

Here’s my list: the Top Ten Tech And Social Media Tools to come out during the Summer of 2010.

Number 10: Facebook Announces Places. Only days ago, Facebook announced its new location feature which puts it on a head-to-head collision course with Foursquare. Facebook Places has great potential for marketing and location-based ads, but as is often the case with new features on Facebook, many users have concerns about privacy. As a result, it’s too early to guess its true business impact.

Number 9: Make Bank Deposits With Your Smartphone. Chase Bank has put technology to work and created a system that allows us to deposit checks using an iPhone app and camera. It won’t be long before there are more time saving features like this on our phones.

Number 8: Make Phone Calls from Gmail. In the last week of August, Google announced that it had i ntegrated Google Voice into Gmail. It’s kind of like adding Skype to your email. Make free phone calls from your computer to U.S. and Canadian numbers and save your cell phone minutes; pay only two cents per minute for international calls.

Number 7: YouTube Ups its Time Limit. Couldn’t make it fit in 10 minutes? No problem. YouTube has given us all 5 extra minutes. This means we can add more time to the videos we make, but it also means we’ll spend more time watching other people’s videos.

Number 6: Google Allows Rich Text Signatures. Now your Gmail signature can include images like your company logo. Very nice touch.

Number 5: Google Expands Real Time Search. It’s been there for sometime. Do a search and Google includes what people are saying about that topic on the Internet. But now Real Time is its own application, which you can use to look up trending topics or to find out what people are saying about you and your company.

Number 4: Google Voice Opens Up. Google Voice lets you have one number for all of your phones so that callers can find you wherever you happen to be. It’s a great application for busy business people and as of mid-June, it’s available to anyone with a U.S. phone number without an invitation.

Number 3: WordPress Unveils Version 3.0. This newest version of the most complete blogging platform incorporates multi-user functionality and a beautiful new default theme, Twenty Ten.

Number 2: Starbucks Offers Free Wi-Fi. While other establishments were getting rid of wi-fi or putting limits on how long customers could use it, Starbucks was tearing down the barriers. They’ve invited us all to stop in with our computers, they’re giving us free one-click wi-fi, and they’re letting us stay as long as we like.

Number 1: iPhone 4 Hits the Market. Multitasking, HD video recording and editing, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash: can it get any better? Yes it can. The snazzy FaceTime videophone feature puts us up there with the Jetstons. Can Jet Packs be far behind? Even with its antenna problems, the iPhone remains the leader of the smartphone pack.

What’s your choice for the best tech or social media product of the summer?

How does your blog look when viewed on a smartphone browser?

Given the popularity of smartphones and the reality that prospects often need real estate information while they’re away from their computers, it’s important to be sure that your website is smartphone friendly.

The best way to find out how your blog or website works on a smartphone is to try it yourself. Navigate to your blog on your mobile phone and see how easy it is to read. Also ask yourself these questions:

Do I write with plenty of paragraph breaks, or is my blog one long unbroken block of text? (Paragraph breaks make blogs easier to read on a computer and are a must for reading on a smartphone.)
Do my pictures take forever to load? If you have pictures, their file sizes need to be reduced for quicker downloading from the Internet.
Is my blog written in a traditional journalistic style with the most important information (the who, what , when, where, and why) in the first few lines of the article? Readers often don’t follow long blog posts all the way to the end and that goes double for readers checking your blog post from their iPhones.
Is too much going on? If it’s a traditional website rather than a blog, be aware that flash intros and other “gimmicks” also take a long time to load and often don’t run at all on smartphones.

If your site doesn’t perform well on the small screen, it may be time for a redesign.

Geotagging is the process of adding data to your digital photos to indicate the latitude and longitude where the photo was taken.

The digital photos you take already have a great deal of data stored with them. This “metadata” helps define and categorize the photo. The music on your iPod offers a good analogy; each song contains embedded information that includes the name of the artist the songwriter, the musical genre, and perhaps even artwork and lyrics.

Similarly, a jpeg image also has embedded information. The metadata in a jpeg can include the camera make and model, date and time the photo was taken, lens settings, information about the software that was used and, increasingly, a geotag that shows where the photo was taken. A growing number of cameras add geotags to each photo, and photos taken with a GPS-enabled smartphone almost always include a geotag.

This is both good news and bad. The good news is that geotagging helps you remember where you took a photo. You could use this technology, for example, to take pictures of properties for your records, or to make note of amenities or interesting architecture in your neighborhood. Later, the geotags will allow you to view the photos on a map, and to see the location and the address where each photo was taken—great for searching, organizing and displaying the images.

But the downside is that photos of your home, your family, and friends that you post on, say, Facebook or Twitter, may also contain a geotag. Photos taken at your home, for example, will contain information that shows exactly where you live. Photos taken and posted while you’re on vacation will advertise loudly that you’re 1,000 miles away. You may not know how to extract the metadata from the photos you post on the Internet, but lots of would-be cybercriminals do.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to know how to turn off the geotagging feature on your cameras and smartphone, so that it only works when you want it to. Click here to find out more.