I had the opportunity to speak at the NAR convention on “Google Tools for Real Estate” and wanted to share some of the neat tools that I found. You probably know some of them but it is nice to be reminded of others. Plus there is a great new tool that the the people at the Google booth showed me that you will just love. Here is 5 of my Top Ten Google Tools for Real Estate.
Google Gmail offers email with up to 25 GB of storage per custom email address, mail search tools and integrated chat. It is the poor mans’ synch with an email enabled phone. Aggregate all your email accounts to Gmail and then send them to your email enabled phone with the special program you can download on your phone. There is less spam, plus Gmail groups all replies with their original message, creating a single conversation or thread. So much easier than searching your Inbox for related messages.
Google Docs – Create and share documents without managing attachments. Upload PDFs, PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents. It is a great place for online storage for all digital documents. Always have access to your important real estate documents even when you don’t have your computer.
Google Maps and Google Docs Build a map in seconds, Identify locations of schools, recreation, highways for online visitors. Then, in Google Docs, open an excel spreadsheet and list all the addresses of the homes you want to put on the map either for buyers to tour, or for a listing CMA. Insert a Gadget called Google Maps and select the range of data from the excel spreadsheet to populate the addresses of the map. Publish the map to its own web page or to a blog. Sound complicated? It is not, but email me for a PDF with full instructions. Mailto:amy@amychorew.com
Google Alerts – Set up alerts for key words, like your name, your business area. Google will email updates of relevant Google search results based on your choice. Great way to keep tabs on the competition. Every time someone mentions me in their blog or website, I get a Google alert. I then go to that blog and comment on their post. Great “PR”.
THIS IS THE NEW ONE! – Google Sites allows you to collaborate Google gadgets like picasa to add photos, google calendar to show Open House dates, and a file cabinet to store documents related to the property. All of this is secure in the Google environment where you can control who has access to the site to both collaborate or to just view. You can equally use these sites to create public pages that ANYONE can access, even WITHOUT a Google account. Single listing websites anyone?
You can get more information at sites.google.com
