Using the iPad in Real Estate
Calgary REALTOR® Cliff Stevenson explains some of the reasons that the iPad has become an integral part of his real estate business, and demonstrates how he uses it. Special thanks to Jared Chamberlain for getting me on the iPad, and his collaboration and willingness to share over the last year. If you have any questions, comments, or opinions on this subject, please feel free to leave comments or email Cliff at cliff@cliffstevenson.com
My name is Cliff Stevenson. I'm a REALTOR® at Royal LePage Foothills in Calgary Alberta and this is a short video on one of the ways I use the iPad in my real estate business.
If you're going to use the iPad in your real estate business, I highly recommend you get yourself PDF versions of the real estate contracts that your real estate board provides you with. And then get your self a good PDF editor.
In this case, I'm using PDFpen, fantastic application for the mac. I understand PDFtypewriter is the one that works very well on the PC but what you want to do is go in and enter any information that's going to be constant information in these contracts. Information that's not going to change.
So I'll just give you an example here, on these contracts for my use, my brokerage information is always going to be in here. So I'm going to include that in here and you can see I filled in some other information as well. And at the bottom here of our contract, my information is always going to be constant. So input that information into a PDF editor before you get it into an iPad. You're going to save your self a lot of time.
Can you do it in an iPad? Sure you can. But this makes it a lot easier. And save yourself copies of this PDF file that you can access through another app.
Before we begin working on the new document what we just entered information in to on the laptop, I just want to say a few things about the iPad in general. Talk about a couple of applications that I tried on this. A couple of apps that you're going to need to download if your going to subscribe to what I'm doing here.
First off, as a real estate practitioner, an Ipad is an amazing tool. But if you need convincing on that, if ever your watching this video, for me, I'm mobile with my clients information. I'm mobile with their files. I can send and receive documents quite easily. I can sign on the iPad and I'm essentially paperless. The other thing that I'm doing, trying to get creative with the iPad, if your anything like me, you take buyers out for a buyer tour of properties, you're giving them paper showing books, something maybe with the copies of the listings potentially, maybe some neighbourhood information. I'm now going to transfer that into a PDF file and give my clients an iPad. They can make notes and mark up with the listing book on their iPad. And before they even leave the vehicle, they can email themselves a copy, keeping the process totally paperless.
So on to the apps. A couple of the apps that I have tried. I think, when the iPad first came out, everybody was pretty excited with iAnnotate. iAnnotate is a fantastic app. I find to be a little more robust than I really need. There's a lot to that app, a little complicated. I wanted a simple signing up and iAnnotate didn't work very well for me. The second one was Zosh. Zosh is a great app. The problem that I had with Zosh is that it's email conveyance only. So sending files back and forth, you're doing it by email format only. And you'll see with Noterize, that's not the case.
So, two apps that you're going to need if you're going to subscribe to this. Number one, DropBox seems to be the most tightly integrated online storage application with the iPad. That's just my opinion. They offer you two gigabytes for free. As you can see, you're in DropBox for myself. I've got a bunch of files here in folders. I'm sharing a couple of these folders with my assistant, which is quite easy to do. You are able to store all the information that you've got for your clients on here. Transferring these files back and forth on computers, whether it's Mac or PC is also quite easy. So definitely get yourself DropBox. And the best app in my opinion is this Noterize. Noterize is really easy to use, really easy to manipulate. You'll see here entering in text into Noterize on a contract that we got here for our real estate association is quite easy. If you want to move this around, you can manipulate it quite easy. And a double tap takes you out of any function. So instead of filling in more text, I'll skip right down to, on our contract, the signature, which is where I think the iPad is quite useful. So point up the pen function, get your client to sign the pad and again double tap. No need to write with the stylus on these text boxes. Quite easy to do and again quite easy to manipulate. And that's the signing and entering text. And then Noterize have got a lot of use out of the way. You share documents on Noterize. As you can see from the list, quite a few options. You can email your self right away, or your client and then putting it back into DropBox in the folder that you designate, the signed copy, is pretty useful. What I'll do is just pull up a listing book, I was referring to the listing book idea. And this is how easy it is to get things into Noterize for note taking or signing of documents. Takes a couple of seconds to pull the document from my online storage. They can make notes and mark up with the listing book. The client can then just turn around and share this and email themselves a copy of the document, send it to email addresses and they've got it.
So that's how I'm using iPad for my business in real estate.
Any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at cliff@cliffstevenson.com.
If you're going to use the iPad in your real estate business, I highly recommend you get yourself PDF versions of the real estate contracts that your real estate board provides you with. And then get your self a good PDF editor.
In this case, I'm using PDFpen, fantastic application for the mac. I understand PDFtypewriter is the one that works very well on the PC but what you want to do is go in and enter any information that's going to be constant information in these contracts. Information that's not going to change.
So I'll just give you an example here, on these contracts for my use, my brokerage information is always going to be in here. So I'm going to include that in here and you can see I filled in some other information as well. And at the bottom here of our contract, my information is always going to be constant. So input that information into a PDF editor before you get it into an iPad. You're going to save your self a lot of time.
Can you do it in an iPad? Sure you can. But this makes it a lot easier. And save yourself copies of this PDF file that you can access through another app.
Before we begin working on the new document what we just entered information in to on the laptop, I just want to say a few things about the iPad in general. Talk about a couple of applications that I tried on this. A couple of apps that you're going to need to download if your going to subscribe to what I'm doing here.
First off, as a real estate practitioner, an Ipad is an amazing tool. But if you need convincing on that, if ever your watching this video, for me, I'm mobile with my clients information. I'm mobile with their files. I can send and receive documents quite easily. I can sign on the iPad and I'm essentially paperless. The other thing that I'm doing, trying to get creative with the iPad, if your anything like me, you take buyers out for a buyer tour of properties, you're giving them paper showing books, something maybe with the copies of the listings potentially, maybe some neighbourhood information. I'm now going to transfer that into a PDF file and give my clients an iPad. They can make notes and mark up with the listing book on their iPad. And before they even leave the vehicle, they can email themselves a copy, keeping the process totally paperless.
So on to the apps. A couple of the apps that I have tried. I think, when the iPad first came out, everybody was pretty excited with iAnnotate. iAnnotate is a fantastic app. I find to be a little more robust than I really need. There's a lot to that app, a little complicated. I wanted a simple signing up and iAnnotate didn't work very well for me. The second one was Zosh. Zosh is a great app. The problem that I had with Zosh is that it's email conveyance only. So sending files back and forth, you're doing it by email format only. And you'll see with Noterize, that's not the case.
So, two apps that you're going to need if you're going to subscribe to this. Number one, DropBox seems to be the most tightly integrated online storage application with the iPad. That's just my opinion. They offer you two gigabytes for free. As you can see, you're in DropBox for myself. I've got a bunch of files here in folders. I'm sharing a couple of these folders with my assistant, which is quite easy to do. You are able to store all the information that you've got for your clients on here. Transferring these files back and forth on computers, whether it's Mac or PC is also quite easy. So definitely get yourself DropBox. And the best app in my opinion is this Noterize. Noterize is really easy to use, really easy to manipulate. You'll see here entering in text into Noterize on a contract that we got here for our real estate association is quite easy. If you want to move this around, you can manipulate it quite easy. And a double tap takes you out of any function. So instead of filling in more text, I'll skip right down to, on our contract, the signature, which is where I think the iPad is quite useful. So point up the pen function, get your client to sign the pad and again double tap. No need to write with the stylus on these text boxes. Quite easy to do and again quite easy to manipulate. And that's the signing and entering text. And then Noterize have got a lot of use out of the way. You share documents on Noterize. As you can see from the list, quite a few options. You can email your self right away, or your client and then putting it back into DropBox in the folder that you designate, the signed copy, is pretty useful. What I'll do is just pull up a listing book, I was referring to the listing book idea. And this is how easy it is to get things into Noterize for note taking or signing of documents. Takes a couple of seconds to pull the document from my online storage. They can make notes and mark up with the listing book. The client can then just turn around and share this and email themselves a copy of the document, send it to email addresses and they've got it.
So that's how I'm using iPad for my business in real estate.
Any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at cliff@cliffstevenson.com.
