Every real estate agent knows: there’s no cutting corners in this industry.
If you want to succeed in the real estate business, you need to work hard. But that doesn’t mean you need to hustle from dusk till dawn. With the right technology by your side, you can close more deals in less time—without dropping the ball on your customers and prospects.
We’ve compiled the ultimate real estate tech tools hit list, consisting of 20+ high impact tools and apps to help you automate time-intensive workflows, increase your personal productivity and convert more leads while still making it home in time for dinner.
The power of Google Calendar comes from the fact that it synchronizes with almost any scheduling app or service out there, allowing you to easily track all your meetings in one place.
Real estate agents can take it one step further and integrate Google Calendar with their CRM or sales system to schedule client meetings, see each other’s availability, and track client events without interrupting your prospecting time.
If you want to take the back-and-forth out of scheduling meetings and phone calls, Calendly is the tool for you. Simply give Calendly access to your current calendar, then send your custom scheduling link to anyone you want to meet with.
Calendly presents your prospects with a beautifully clean interface where they can choose the time that works for them. Calendly will also automatically check your availability on multiple calendars and allow you to host group meetings, or even distribute meetings to team members based on their availability.
Pricing: Free basic plan for one user, $8 per user per month for unlimited meeting types, reporting, custom email reminders, and group events.
Alternatives: Doodle, Acuity Scheduling
If you were to combine Calendly with a personal assistant, you’d get x.ai.
The only exception is that, in this case, your personal assistant is a handy little piece of AI. All you need is to simply tag amy@x.ai in your email to your prospect, and the service will automatically schedule a meeting for you both. Done and done!
Pricing: Free for all basic functionality, $8 per month for advanced features such as Zoom integration, customized signatures, meeting locations, and more.
Alternatives: Calendly
Trello is a go-to project management tool for small teams that want to keep things simple and visual.
In Trello, you can create any kind of task on a card and move cards between columns to track your progress in a glance. You can create as many columns and tasks as you need, use several boards for tracking different projects and invite team members to create, edit, and move cards as they complete their parts of the project.
Trello also works great as a personal to-do list (just be careful not to clutter your boards with too many micro-tasks).
Pricing: Free for up to 10 boards, $9.99 per user for unlimited boards and advanced features such as calendar, voting, and spectators.
Alternatives: Asana
Dynalist is a combination of a personal knowledge library and a to do list.
You can create tasks and notes, then interconnect them using the tool’s nesting features. If you’re deliberate about organizing your notes, over time you’ll end up with a vast personal library that can be used to quickly retrieve information or find new ways to solve your tasks and running to dos.
Pricing: Free plan, $9.99 for Google calendar integration and many other advanced features.
Alternatives: Todoist
No more triple guessing the wrong passwords or relying on the name of your first pet. Using 1Password you can quickly generate secure passwords for every website and online service you’re signed up for.
With 1Password, you have all your passwords securely stored in one place which prevents you from getting locked out of your online accounts and saves you tons of time in the process. You can also update passwords automatically and share access with team members.
Pricing: Starts at $2.99 per month for personal use, $3.99 for teams.
Alternatives: Lastpass
Ever asked a client to give you a ring, only to realize you didn’t have their number saved?
With all of the tasks real estate agents have to juggle, contact syncing doesn’t have to be another one. PieSync effortlessly two-way syncs contact data between a host of your favorite cloud apps in real time. Whether your contacts are stored in Follow Up Boss, Mailchimp, iCloud, or any one of dozens of cloud platforms, PieSync ensures you and your team always know who’s calling, and why, no matter where their info is stored.
If you're a Keller Williams agent, you should know that PieSync is the most popular way to sync Follow Up Boss to KWCommand.
And, in case you were wondering, there are more than 200 Follow Up Boss integrations and counting!
Pricing: Starts at $9 per month.
Alternatives: Syncgene
Ah, Zapier. This handy tech tool will help you become an ace at real estate systems, even if you don’t know the first thing about coding. In fact, if you want to remove your time-draining routine workflows completely, Zapier is your one-stop destination.
With Zapier in your tech stack you can automatically connect various software tools and apps to share new Instagram photos to Twitter, upload signed DocuSign documents to Google Drive, automatically send new leads to Google Contacts, and so much more.
Zapier integrates with over 2,000 applications, so your automation workflows are limited only by your imagination.
Pricing: Free for up to 100 single step automations per month, $19.99 for 750 tasks per month for multi-step tasks.
Alternatives: Automate.io
(Psst! Want to see some of our favorite Zapier + Follow Up Boss tricks? Grab some of our top-performing zaps here.)
Ever wish you could instantly turn open house visitors into warm, qualified leads?
Meet Spac.io.
This handy real estate tool helps you uplevel your lead gen with professionally designed open-house lead forms visitors can access digitally. Spac.io also enables paperless lead capture and integrates directly with your CRM to send automatic follow up messages to every person who stopped by to check out your listing.
Spac.io also provides access to real time engagement reports so you can learn more about how people interact with your forms.
Pricing: Starts at $25 a month for a single agent and $100 per month for teams
Alternatives: Open Home Pro
Canva is an online graphic design tool that can help real estate agents create any and all marketing material, from the hero image for your next blog article to a full-fledged newsletter or detailed home buying infographic.
Canva’s library consists of tens of thousands of professional looking templates, images, fonts, and icons that you can combine to create a perfectly polished high-quality design in a matter of minutes.
Pricing: Free! Note that you may be prompted to purchase some design elements separately, or you can opt to sign up for a Pro subscription to access more templates and assets for just $9.99 per user per month, billed annually.
Alternatives: RelayThat, Piktochart, Snappa
Okay, this one’s a bit of a cheat because technically, Fiverr is a service, not a tool. But we love it for its versatility. Whether you need help with a design problem that Canva just can’t solve, or you just need a quick one-off admin project, Fiverr lets you outsource almost any small or routine task.
There’s even a separate real estate category that lets you easily find freelancers with relevant experience in areas like local property photographers, 3D floor plan modellers, and even yard sign designers.
But be warned, with over 1 million freelancers on Fiverr, it’s important that you’re crystal clear about what you’re looking for so that you can effectively screen for the right partner.
Pricing: Every freelancer has their own rates ranging from $5 per gig to several hundreds
Alternatives: Upwork.com for longer-term collaboration and/or bigger-scale projects. If you want to hire someone to manage your Instagram page or develop a mobile app, for example, Upwork would probably be preferable.
3D virtual property tours are currently one of the hottest ways to engage prospects and attract a wider audience for your listings. But the idea of shelling out thousands of dollars for specialized cameras and software simply feels like too much work for most agents.
With Matterport, you can create 3D virtual tours of any property within seconds using your iPhone. According to Matterport’s website, 74% of real estate agents using their technology win more listings.
Pricing: Free plan for 1 active tour; $9.99 for 5 tours, and $69 per month for teams with advanced features like collaboration and automatic face blurring
Alternatives: Cupix
If you’re actively using social media to generate new business, then Buffer is one tech tool that can potentially save you tons of time. This super-efficient social app lets you schedule and publish content across all your social media channels from one place.
Buffer works especially well if you already have a strong presence on one social media channel and want to repurpose your content for other platforms to generate low-cost leads from new channels.
Pricing: Starts at $15 monthly
Alternatives: Hootsuite, Zoho Social
If you have a large base of email subscribers, Mailchimp is a stellar platform for sending full HTML emails and A/B testing your email campaigns.
As one of the first and most user-friendly email marketing tools, Mailchimp lets you trigger specific real estate newsletters or messages based on certain actions your website visitors or subscribers take.
You can even use Mailchimp to control your social media ad campaigns and schedule social posts from one central platform.
Pricing: Starts at $9.99 a month
Alternatives: Constant Contact, Sendinblue
We’ve all heard it before: one of the best ways to engage and convert more leads is to use video.
But who really has time to record a video, compress it, upload it to YouTube, then paste a clunky url into an email?
With BombBomb, you can skip almost all of those steps and record highly engaging videos without ever leaving your inbox, allowing you to send personalized video messages to your prospects and clients in seconds. BombBomb also supports more than 50 integrations so that you can record and send videos directly from your favorite CRM or email marketing platform.
Pricing: $29.99 per month for sending 1:1 videos, or $588 per year for sending video emails at scale
Alternatives: Jumpshare, Loom, Hippo Video
Let’s face it, no one likes paperwork. DocuSigns lets you and your customers quickly sign all the necessary documents in a matter of clicks. As an added bonus, you can easily track whether clients have seen the document. If the document is sent to several parties, you can track who signed it and who hasn’t yet.
With DocuSign, you can dramatically reduce the time spent on paperwork and according to their website, you can get up to a 25X faster turnaround time on your pending deals.
Pricing: Starts at $10 per month for a single user and $20 per user for the team plan with advanced features (collaborative fields, branding, in-person signatures, etc.)
Alternatives: Dotloop, HelloSign
Google Drive is often seen as purely a storage tool, but for real estate agents who use it to its full abilities, it can easily become an all-around solution for all your document workflows.
Agents can create new documents, share them online with team members and clients, and work on documents together in real time.
Google Drive integrates directly with other Google services and almost any other tool you want to use. With the right integrations, you can instantly send documents for signing to a tool like DocuSign, or export CRM data directly into Google Sheets. You can even edit documents offline, then automatically synchronize your work on your computer or mobile phone when you’re back online, letting you work from literally anywhere.
Pricing: Free up to 15 GB of storage, $1.99 per month for 100 GB and $9.99 per month for 2TB.
Alternatives: Dropbox
Evernote makes it super simple to take notes on the go.
If you come across a great real estate newsletter, ad, or website slogan—you can save a fragment of it or the full page using Evernote’s web clipper Chrome extension. And with the latest version, you can also scan paper documents and automatically upload them into Evernote using your phone’s camera.
You can also use Evernote’s mobile app to take notes, record voice messages, and even shoot videos. You never know when a good idea might hit you, Evernote makes it a cinch to capture and save your best ideas and info, anytime, anywhere.
Pricing: Free for the basic version which has a 60 MB limit, $7.99 per month and higher for premium plans with larger storage.
Alternatives: Microsoft OneNote, Joplin, Notion
Brokermint is a complete back office management solution for real estate brokers and agents that allows you to track all your transaction management tasks in one place.
With Brokermint, you can also automate agent onboarding, set agent goals, automatically create transaction archives, automate commission tracking for agents, track compliance tasks, and much, much more.
If you already have a transaction manager, this tool will make their life so much easier. And if not? No worries. Brokermint can still save you a ton of time on transaction management tasks so you can keep your pipeline moving.
Pricing: Starts at $99 per month per user.
Alternatives: Skyslope, BackAgent
CamScanner lets you quickly scan paper documents using your phone camera. The app is available for Android, iPhone, and iPad users.
CamScanner auto-enhances image quality and recognizes text from images for further editing. It also integrates with Google Drive, Evernote, and OneDrive so you can quickly digitize your paperwork. No messy paper files needed.
Pricing: Free basic account, $4.99 per month for higher-quality scans and advanced features such as book scanning, text editing, eSignature, auto-translation, and others.
Alternatives: ScanPro, Adobe Scan
PandaDoc is a sales document automation tool. It lets you quickly create proposals, quotes, and contracts using a simple drag-and-drop editor. With PandaDoc you can send proposals and collect eSignatures from one central place.
You can also share your documents with collaborators who can review, redline, approve, and comment. PandaDoc also allows you to track document engagements and automatically populate your proposals with data pulled directly from your CRM.
Pricing: Free for uploading and eSigning, $9 for single user per month for creating sales documents using an online editor, $59 per user for teams.
Alternatives: Proposify, Qwilr
Xero is easy-to-use accounting software that helps real estate agents with account reconciliation, expense tracking, data imports, and project tracking.
You can log into the system from anywhere using your computer or phone. Xero also makes it easy to find important attachments so you won’t have to waste time searching for relevant documents.
If you’re working with a real estate VA or external accounting partner, Xero will help eliminate headaches for everyone involved in your bookkeeping.
Pricing: $15 per month for basic functionality, $30 per month for capturing expenses, tracking projects, and multi-currency support.
Alternatives: Freshbooks, Quickbooks
Chatbots are rapidly changing and developing many industries including the real estate industry.
24/7 availability of chatbots can be such a relief. Imagine, while you are on vacation, your bot is handling appointments and other tasks on your behalf without losses in quality.
You can set up Botsify to provide all the listings with quick replies. They appear as buttons.
Pricing: Starts at $49 per month for Personal plan.
Alternatives: Structurely
Whether you’re a solo agent or a team of real estate superstars, every tool on this list has the potential to dramatically improve your productivity.
But ultimately, it’s not about choosing the best tool, the newest tool, or the coolest tool your competitors don’t know about yet. Your success with any technology depends on how you use it to grow your real estate business.
Make sure the tools you choose organically fit into your real estate workflows and existing systems. And if you want to take your real estate business to the next level, try using a sales platform with an open API to ensure that you’re always able to use the right tools for your business, no matter how it changes and evolves over time.