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5 Technological Tools to Boost your Property Investment Efforts

Creating seamless interactivity between the property and the buyer

As a property investor, your prime focus to get potential buyers and renters to view your properties is via marketing. However, read any blog or industry newsletter and they’re teaming with reviews plugging a new and ever-more impressive and expensive marketing tool to help your property investment efforts.

Of course the need to stay on the cutting edge as far as investing in a few technological tools is imperative if you expect to woo buyers and put your properties more accessible to the right audience. The following five technological tools can help you boost your property investment efforts by helping you build a visible presence online, make property transactions more seamless—with things like rental and down payments, and even organizing your own business documents so you can access and share files when you need them and do your job more effectively.

In the end, these tech tools can add more time to your already busy day. Here are the must-have technological tools for property investors.

1. Dropbox
Sharing your property files with investors, potential clients and real estate agents can be a constant hassle for property investors hoping to flip a property. Luckily, there’s Dropbox, a tech tool that conveniently and securely stores and shares all of your vital business documents in one central location so you can seamlessly share or access them anytime you need them. Look no further than Dropbox is a cloud based system that you can use to upload all of your business documents—including things like sensitive financial information, client files, legal documents, spreadsheet market data, investment ideas, contractor meeting notes, slide share presentations, home tour videos, and more. When you save any document, image, or video to Dropbox you can securely share files with team members, partners and clients. And if you travel to pitching a potential investor or sale, you can store your presentation in Dropbox and access it across all of your devices (PC, laptop, Android device, iPhone and iPad) —and with a few clicks—when you arrive at your location.

2. QR code readers
I’m talking about the barcodes that property investors and real estate agents use on signage to drive interested buyers to their websites for home tours and so forth. These QR codes are basically two-dimensional bar codes that appear on every buyable product, from the energy drink ad posted at the subway stop to the one on your favorite box of cereal. The interested user will use their smart phone to scan or snap a photo of the QR code and be instantly taken to the company’s website. You can see how property investors could use a tech tool like this to provide consumers with a compelling ad or poster—then drive potential buyers or renters to your rental website or online open house tour for more detailed information.

3. Cloud storage
Similar to Dropbox, but focused more on internal business productivity, the many cloud-storage tools available, such as open stack, store all of your essential small business data in a cloud, so for example, you can start a monthly financial report in the morning on our office desktop computer, break for lunch and go to the café with your tablet to access it and finish it over a coffee and bagel. Cloud storage encourages the mobile property investor to work while outside the office—anytime and from anywhere!

4. Augmented reality
Probably the coolest high tech tool available on the mass market, augmented reality is of particular use to visual businesses like property investment because it goes above and beyond the visual experience, creating a encounter between consumer and product (in this case buyer and house or renter and rental) that’s out of this world! Imagine seeing the front door of an investment property in a real estate magazine and being able to hover over it with your smart phone and go inside to take a tour. Augmented reality creates this sort of out of the world interactivity between interested buyers and the home itself. It’s basically a really cool way to show your clients and business partners that you are on the forefront of out-of-the-box marketing in your industry.

5. Digital watermarking
QR codes are still a hot commodity and their already old news for property investors and other marketers. Why? Because unlike a QR codes that eats up a lot of space on an ad or poster with a scan-able logo, digital watermarks (like those created and embedded in print ads and on websites by Digimarc) invisibly tag images with a mark. When the user scans the image with their smart phone they are instantly taken to a website where they can learn more. Again, like augmented reality, it’s all about creating an interactive experience with your printed marketing materials.