Real Estate in the Electronic Age

By Brenda Marshall, KWU Coursewriter, KWRI in Austin, TX

KW agent and co-author of “Soci@l – Attracting Friends, Followers, and Connections to your Business,” Ben Kinney sat down with Joelle Senter and Bryon Ellington at Mega Technology Camp 2010  to share his vision of the real estate team of the future.

Ben excels in effectively managing expenses while increasing the effectiveness of marketing and lead generation budgets. He uses a virtual staff to perform tasks such as data entry into Craiglist and blog posting.

He looks forward to the day when all transactions are conducted entirely online and all signed contracts are stored electronically—no more paper—and can be accessed online, from any location. He has been looking at DotLoop as a possible solution, but faces the challenge of not every local MLS supporting electronic transactions yet.

Ben makes the most of what technology has to offer and avoids tools that don’t generate a sale or lead. A few of his favorite tools are listed below.

• Zendesk is a trouble-ticket system which also stores answers to frequently-asked questions in a wiki. Ben’s team uses Zendesk to free up admin time.

• Mojo can increase productivity by 300% by reducing downtime during lead generation time blocks. Its auto-dialer calls 3 numbers at a time, sending only the live calls and leaving a custom voice mail for the others.

• Flowtown lets you import your contacts’ email addresses and find out how to contact them via all of their social media accounts. This is a great tool to help you incorporate social media into your 8 x 8 or 33 Touch campaigns.

• Nearby Tweets finds Twitterers located near you. You can specify the search radius as well as include keywords in tweets.

Follow at twitter.com/benkinney to see what he’s doing with technology today!