Your real estate clients have been able to show interest in buying a new house or listing their property with just a few clicks on their phone. Agents, on the other hand, have traditionally been tied to their offices, digging through files and emails to find necessary information or faxing paperwork for signatures.
Today's best real estate software keeps you productive and organized whether you're at home, on the road, or at a showing. In this article, we'll walk you through the 13 best real estate apps that will improve your productivity throughout the entire real estate lifecycle, from generating leads to signing the final paperwork.
What Makes a Great Real Estate App?
For this roundup, we focused on software that would save you time and energy when dealing with repetitive, burdensome processes. The real estate apps listed here are primarily companion tools, meaning they can be used together for ultimate efficiency. But some are direct competitors, like Follow Up Boss, Wise Agent, and LeadSimple (all real estate CRM tools).
Every real estate app included in our list meets the following criteria:
- Makes it easy to share important information with agents, buyers, or sellers (or all three)
- Centralizes information for a specific stage (or stages) of the lifecycle, so you can act and react faster
- Empowers you to create and manage new programs and activities, with little ramp-up time or without relying on anyone else
Here is the best real estate software, listed in rough chronological order of the average real estate lifecycle.
The 13 Best Real Estate Apps for Agents
- Follow Up Boss for centralizing communication
- Folio for organizing your inbox
- Cloud Attract for building real estate-specific landing pages
- Wise Agent for real estate marketing automation
- LeadSimple for reporting on real estate leads and sales
- LionDesk for recording and embedding videos into emails and texts to bring properties to life
- Mojo Dialer for dialing real estate leads
- Showing Suite for scheduling home viewings via text messaging
- Spacio for digitizing open house sign-in forms
- magicplan for digitally creating floor plans and furnishing rooms
- PalmAgent ONE for estimating closing costs
- Disclosures.io for organizing and sharing disclosures
- DocuSign for signing offers and closing documents
Follow Up Boss (Web, iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for centralizing communication
You'll try a multitude of ways to communicate with buyers and sellers: emails, phone calls, text messages, and video calls. The good news: You'll get hold of them eventually. The bad news: The entire conversation is broken up into pieces across multiple channels. Follow Up Boss, a real estate CRM tool, wants to fix that.
The main selling point of Follow Up Boss is its inbox, the place where all your and your agents' emails, texts, and calls (including missed calls and voicemails) to your contacts live.
When signing up, you and your agents have to link your Gmail accounts so the app can automatically sync and log all email communication in one place. That means that when you read, respond, and archive emails, it happens on both sides (Gmail and Follow Up Boss).
If you use Office 365 for your work email, you can still use Follow Up Boss. Once you're logged in, go to My Settings and click the red Connect Your Office 365 Email button to sync your emails with the app.
The inbox itself is clean and simple and looks like any other email inbox you're used to. It displays all your messages in the left-hand column, and if you click on one, it opens the entire message in the middle of the page. You can reply to or archive emails directly in the Follow Up Boss inbox and filter communication in the inbox by emails, texts, or calls.
Follow Up Boss's inbox also takes organization one step further, only displaying emails and texts with contacts and leads, and excluding marketing emails, spam, bills, etc., so you can quickly focus on the people you need to respond to.
While the Follow Up Boss app doesn't have all the features offered by the web app, that's not a bad thing. When you're on the go, you don't want to have to navigate through reports or admin settings to find what you really need. The mobile app only includes the messages in your inbox, information about your leads, your tasks, and your smart lists (lists that you can create based on tags).
Follow Up Boss Price: Free 14-day trial; $69/month per user for the most popular plan, which includes texting and advanced lead distribution tools. The calling feature is an extra $39/month per user.
Learn more in our Follow Up Boss overview, and automate your contacts with Zapier's Follow Up Boss integrations.
Folio (Web)
Best real estate app for organizing your inbox
Real estate CRMs, like Follow Up Boss, help you manage your emails with clients, but they also come with more advanced features like lead management, reporting, and notifications. If you're only looking to organize your inbox, these additional features can be overwhelming.
Folio, however, offers a customized solution specifically for real estate agents' inboxes. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically organize communication based on buyers and sellers, aggregating all relevant information about each transaction in one place.
You'll sign up with your Gmail or Office 365 account; there is no way to use Folio without linking it to one of these accounts. You'll then be dropped into Folio's web interface, which resembles an email inbox (but without the ability to send emails).
Folio will do an automatic search to find any client or transaction communications from the last 30 days by analyzing your inbox for keywords and phrases that indicate you're working with someone. When Folio finds a potential client, it asks you to confirm whether it got it right and whether it should create a "Smart Folder" for that client. You can approve or reject these suggestions, which also helps train and improve Folio's algorithm. If it doesn't find any matches, you can manually add your own Smart Folder to organize emails by seller, buyer, or both.
You can view all your Smart Folders at once or filter them by buyers, sellers, or under contract. When you click into a Smart Folder, you'll see your entire email history and attachments. You can add notes and tasks, keeping all relevant context and to-do lists in one place.
Each Smart Folder is also pre-populated with either a buyer timeline or listing timeline (depending on the client). Folio suggests items to include in the timeline, which you can keep or delete. For example, a buyer timeline includes steps like staging, photo shoot, listing date, open house, offer accepted, inspection deadline, and more. For the items you choose to keep, you can add a date, time, status update, and note, or set a reminder. Folio creates a standalone page that displays this timeline, which you can share with your clients, other agents, or even a lender or title officer.
If you have a Gmail account, you can also use Folio by installing the Folio Chrome extension. This enables all the same functionality as mentioned above but directly in your Gmail inbox. The main view of your Gmail inbox stays the same, but there will be a new tab titled "Folio" underneath the search bar. When you click that tab, you can go to your Smart Folders to view email activity and timelines, add a new Smart Folder, or go to your Folio dashboard (which takes you back to the Folio web app).
If you have a Gmail account, the Chrome extension is the way to go. It optimizes your inbox, while still maintaining the familiar look and feel and allowing you to send new emails.
If you don't mind jumping back and forth between apps, and want a clear separation between your Gmail or Outlook inbox and client emails, then the Folio web app still does a good job organizing your work (without the extra bells and whistles).
Folio Price: Free 14-day trial for all features. After the trial, you'll still have access to all of Folio's features, but with a limit of three active timelines. $19/month per account for the Pro plan.
Cloud Attract (Web)
Best real estate app for building landing pages
Cloud Attract helps you manage real estate lead generation and create beautiful landing pages in five steps. First, choose what kind of leads you want to attract: sellers or buyers. Then, select one of 16 professionally-designed landing page templates, complete with a high-quality, full-bleed background image.
Then, you indicate what kind of information you want to collect from a list of eight different criteria—anything from name to phone number to when leads are looking to buy (Cloud Attract does require that you collect address and email).
Cloud Attract will auto-generate your desktop and mobile-friendly landing page, allowing you to customize font, copy, and imagery. You can even add your Google Analytics ID or Facebook Pixel ID for advanced tracking, and add a meta title and meta description for SEO. The whole process took us less than five minutes to set up.
All your leads will appear in a designated tab, and you'll receive an email notification when new leads come in. The best part? You can even track partial leads, those potential buyers or sellers who start to fill some information in your form, but then abandon the page.
Cloud Attract Price: Free 30-day trial; $149/month on its own if you are not a member of an MLS; $125/month when bundled with other Cloud Agent Suite apps.
Automate leads and notifications with Zapier's Cloud Attract integrations.
If Cloud Attract doesn't appeal to you, you can create a landing page with a landing page builder that's not specific to real estate. Check out our roundup of the 10 best landing page builders for other options.
Wise Agent (Web)
Best real estate app for email automation
Between listing new properties, scheduling open houses, and closing deals, the last thing you want on your list is remembering to email new leads. Wise Agent offers a simple solution for email automation with its real estate CRM software, so you can set everything up once and then let it run by itself.
Create your own drip campaigns by choosing the number of "events" (emails), and days between those events, or fixed dates that each email should send.
You can also use one of Wise Agent's 16 pre-made email programs that are customized for buyers or sellers and include campaigns like "10 Day Conversion Plan" and "6 Touch Past Client." If you choose one of the templated programs, you have the chance to change the subject line, message body, image, and branding. You can also customize the cadence and the order of emails in the series. Take advantage of these templates if it's your first time creating nurture campaigns—it's much easier to edit content than draft emails from scratch.
While Wise Agent's interface is a bit clunky and dated, it isn't hard to learn. It breaks up the nurture email workflow into different steps, so you don't feel overwhelmed by all the details. It also has a handy calendar view that you can toggle to, which is helpful for determining when to send emails.
Wise Agent Price: Free 30-day trial; From $29/month (billed annually) for up to five team members.
Automate leads with Zapier's Wise Agent integrations.
LeadSimple (Web)
Best real estate app for reporting on leads and sales
Are you wondering about sales trends, marketing performance, or benchmarks, but don't have the time to wrangle all that data in Excel? LeadSimple helps you drill down to understand what is and isn't working with auto-generated reports.
The lead dashboard puts your most important sales metrics right above your lead list so you don't have to go digging through reports. It shows you how many leads you've received, the median response time, the median number of touches, what percentage of leads have been contacted, and what percentage of leads have converted. You can filter leads by priority, calls made, stage, source, and five other criteria.
The Agent Performance report lets you see metrics like how fast each agent responds to new leads and how persistent they are in following up. It displays a color-coded line graph that shows the number of leads, prospects, and won and lost deals based on assignee. You can also dive into pipeline health, company trends, marketing performance, and closed business reports.
LeadSimple Price: Free 14-day trial; From $65/month for the Get Organized plan, which includes up to two users, one lead type, and two connected inboxes.
Automate contacts, leads, and emails with Zapier's LeadSimple integrations.
LionDesk (Web, iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for recording and embedding videos into emails and texts to bring properties to life
Sometimes words can't describe the flow of a hallway, the cozy vibe of a kitchen nook, or how the light fills a room. So when a potential buyer can't visit a house in-person, your next best option is to send a video.
LionDesk lets you seamlessly add videos to your emails and text messages, bringing your properties to life. You can upload your own videos or record directly in the web or mobile app.
If you choose to record your own videos, you need to follow three steps. First, select a video type: a two-minute video for email or a 20-second video for texts. Then, you click the microphone icon on the video player to start your computer's camera and microphone, and once you allow LionDesk to use your camera and microphone, simply click the record icon to begin. Once the recording is complete, you can add a title, description, and tags to the video.
Then, if you want to embed that video (or a video you previously uploaded) into an email, click on the Marketing tab and either use one of LionDesk's email templates (there are more than 100 to choose from) or create your own. Once you're in the email editor, click the Video button to select and insert a recording.
If you're interested in creating videos for emails, but don't want to switch your entire CRM, try BombBomb.
You can also send your videos via individual or bulk text messaging, but you need to purchase the Pro Plus plan to receive a custom number for texting and calling.
Recording and embedding videos are just two of LionDesk's features. It also offers real estate CRM features, like email automation, task management, power dialing, and contact management (among other things). While all the possible features can be overwhelming, it's well organized and easy to navigate.
LionDesk Price: Free 30-day trial; $49/month for a custom phone number, 2,000 outbound texts, and 100 video texts.
Automate leads and contacts with Zapier's LionDesk integrations.
We were only able to assess BoomTown (Web, iOS, Android; custom pricing available) from a recorded video demo, but its predictive CRM is worth mentioning. It tracks user activity and behavior to organize real estate leads most likely to convert, so no one falls through the cracks. The New Opportunities Wall displays a prioritized list of the best opportunities at any given moment, and you can filter all these leads by things like price range, whether an agent has made contact, or whether they recently went back to your site. Then, you can nurture those leads toward conversion with automated emails, texts, and scheduled to-dos for follow-up. You can also create targeted lists based on location, price point, haven't yet called, etc. to help you organize your database.
Mojo Dialer (Web, iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for dialing leads
When you're cold calling and dialing each number by hand, you're bound to make a few mistakes and misdial. Mojo Dialer helps you avoid human error and dial up to 85 calls per hour with a single-line dialer and 300 calls with a three-line dialer.
You can organize all your contacts into calling lists (for new leads who have not been contacted) or groups (for leads who have been contacted before). For example, you could create different calling lists based on lead source or geography. Or, create groups based on lifecycle stage like appointment set, hot lead, inactive lead, or future follow-up.
Once you click on a calling list or group, you'll see a table where all the contacts in that bucket are displayed, along with their address, phone number, number of attempts that have been made, status change date, and listing status. You can also click on any row in the table and move that contact to a different group or list, and assign a manager for that contact.
Then, you can click one of three big, green buttons: Power Dialer, Click to Call, and Marketing. Selecting Power Dialer or Click to Call opens a pop-up window where all the calls will be made, with the options for you to pause, hang up, stop, or redial.
Mojo also helps you get hard-to-find contact information with reverse look-up, just listed and just sold data, and for sale by owner data.
Mojo Dialer Price: From $10/month per user in addition to a single-line dialer for $89 per license.
Automate calling lists with Zapier's Mojo Dialer integrations.
Showing Suite (Web, iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for scheduling home viewings via text messaging
We use our smartphones for almost every task, so why not add home viewings to that list? Create a single phone number that buyers can text to schedule home viewings and access property information with Showing Suite.
Once you sign up, you can import your active MLS listings to the platform and then enable Showing Robot on those listings, which allows you to automate the scheduling. You'll search for an available robot phone number by entering your preferred area code and part of the desired phone number. You can customize how you and your seller want to be notified of new showing requests, choosing between text or email, and selecting whether you need to manually confirm the showing.
Then you can set a default response to initial home viewing requests—the automated message that buyers will get when they text to request a viewing. Finally, you can set reminder options for listing agents, sellers, renters, property managers, asset managers, or other people, sending reminders at five different intervals before the viewing begins.
While this Showing Robot feature is unique and can automate the back-and-forth scheduling of home viewings, the web app has a rather steep learning curve. It's organized by nine tabs for things like listings, showings, calendar, and follow-up. It's not always clear where to go to do specific actions, like set up the Showing Robot feature, for example (which you need to do in settings). The mobile app is easier to navigate, primarily because it doesn't display so much information in one screen and instead breaks it up into bite-sized chunks.
Showing Suite Price: Free 30-day trial; From $24/month (billed annually). There's also a Pay As You Go plan for $30/listing plus $2.95/month.
Spacio (Web, iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for digitizing open house sign-in forms
With Spacio, you can create paperless open house forms to accurately collect visitor information and automatically send follow-up emails after the open house ends. That means you don't need to keep track of loose pieces of paper with unreadable handwriting after each open house.
Add your properties to the web app, and automatically launch sign-in forms on your computer, iPhone, or Android phone. You can use the default form, which asks for visitor name, email, address, and phone number, or customize your own fields (up to six questions). You can also enable automated follow-up emails based on how a visitor responds to a question. For example, if you add the question, "Are you working with an agent?" and the visitor responds Yes, a follow-up email will be sent to the registered agent after the viewing.
For each person who fills out your form, Spacio creates a profile with links to each visitor's social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gravatar, Klout, Pinterest, Twitter, and WordPress, to help you gain unique insights.
Spacio Price: Free 30-day trial; From $25/month for individual plans.
magicplan (iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for digitally creating floor plans and furnishing rooms
Forget measuring every corner and drawing detailed layouts: magicplan lets you create floor plans in seconds with a smartphone or tablet.
You capture each room with your device's camera, taking pictures of each corner of the room and walking along walls to measure the length. You can also draw a free-form room in the editor, import the image of an existing plan and trace it, or add a land survey.
Once the floor plan is created, you can change measurements, wall thickness, corners, and more. You can also furnish the floor plans, dragging and dropping more than 1,000 objects including doors, plumbing, appliances, furniture, and even fire and safety icons to show emergency exits and fire evacuation plans. If there's a room that needs more detail, add notes and photos or use dedicated icons like "To Install" or "To Remove" to action items. You can also connect to a 360-degree camera to take panoramic pictures and create a virtual tour of the space.
You can export these plans in PDF, JPG, DXF, PNG, and SVG formats via email, publish them on the web, or share them with other users in the magicplan format.
The app is available for both iOS and Android users, but in April 2019, magicplan introduced more advanced features for real estate agents using iPhones and iPads. The new magicplan 8 lets you scan rooms in 3D, with the app automatically recognizing, locating, and sizing windows and doors during the scanning process.
Creating the 3D rendering of your floor plan is easy. You first need to capture the basic floor plan in the app. Then, click on the floor plan and tap the 3D button at the bottom of the screen. You can use your fingers to zoom in or out and turn the 3D model around.
magicplan Price: Free 14-day trial; from $8.33/month (billed annually) for one user and limited features. Or pay on demand at $2.99 per floor plan you create.
PalmAgent ONE (Web, iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for estimating closing costs
Whether you're working with buyers or sellers, there's one question that everyone wants answered: How will this affect my bank account?
PalmAgent ONE calculates buyer estimates and seller net sheets in seconds based on your state and county. You enter sales price, down payment, interest rate, broker fee, and up to seven other pieces of information (depending on the report) to automatically generate colorful, detailed graphs and tables. For example, you might want to run a Net at Close report for the seller. By entering sales price, broker fee, repairs, property taxes, loan balance, interest rate, and closing date, you'll get a circular graph that shows you the total closing cost and the amount of money the seller will keep. You can even click directly into the graph to adjust the numbers.
This real estate management software also lets you go one step further and run calculations like monthly affordability, rent vs. buy, and sell to net, as well as compare multiple offers.
PalmAgent ONE definitely saves you from manual calculations and presents information in easy-to-understand graphs. But you do need to have every bit of information at your disposal in order to run these reports. For example, to run the Net at Close report accurately, you need to know how much each repair will cost—and that information is dependent on third-party contractors providing a quote on time. However, if you're looking for a quick way to give buyers and sellers a rough idea of financials, PalmAgent ONE does the trick.
PalmAgent ONE Price: Free; the Premium plan is $.99/month for enhanced reports, infographics, and more.
Disclosures.io (Web, iOS)
Best real estate app for organizing and sharing disclosures
More agents are beginning to share property disclosures upfront, before offers, to make sure deals don't fall through at the very last minute. With Disclosures.io, sharing information, from pre-sale inspections to natural hazards reports, is a cinch. The free tool lets you assemble all disclosures in one online location, share them with interested parties, and track activity.
The web app has a simple interface that walks you through how to create a package for either the seller or the buyer. Just enter the property address and the package is created. From there, you have the option of adding documents, photos, escrow information, and instructions. You can also customize the footer signature block, adding buyer and buyer agent names and dates, and attach DocuSign documents directly to the package.
Once you download the iOS app and log in, all the packages you created on the web app will automatically appear in the Properties tab. You can't create or edit packages in the iOS app, but you can view packages, offers, and documents. You'll also receive push notifications (if enabled) when someone views the package or makes an offer.
On both the web and iOS app, you can share packages with agents by adding their name and email address and customizing the invitation in the pop-up share screen. You can indicate whether you're sharing the package with a team member, who will be able to view, share, and download the package; or with a buyer, who can only view and download the package. By upgrading to the Pro plan, you can also see who has requested disclosures and who has actually reviewed them, as well as send messages directly from the package.
Disclosures.io is a simple, no-frills app that makes sharing disclosures easier to track and more professional than an email with attachments. All your packages are displayed on the first screen you see once you log in, so you can see everything at a glance.
Disclosures.io Price: Free for the Basic plan; $39/month for the Pro plan, which includes priority support, messaging, activity tracking, and the ability to share with sellers.
DocuSign (Web, iOS, Android)
Best real estate app for signing offers and closing documents
Real estate deals don't always happen in an office, with pen and paper readily available. With DocuSign, you can go paperless and get electronic signatures on disclosures, forms, and closing paperwork, regardless of where you—and the buyers and sellers—are.
To get started, drag and drop your document or upload a file from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. You select whether you're the only person who needs to sign or if you need signatures from other people.
Then, if DocuSign detects form fields in your document, you have the option of assigning those fields to a recipient, making the form data read-only, or deleting the data completely. You can also drag in other fields, like checkboxes or dropdowns, change the formatting, add tooltips, and more. Or create a custom field by adding information like value, font, font color, font size, width, height, and more. When the document is ready, you can customize the subject line and message, and send it directly in DocuSign. Everyone is notified when all signatures are added.
DocuSign wasn't created for real estate agents, but it works as if it were.
DocuSign Price: From $10/month for 1 user.
Learn more in our DocuSign overview, and automate your electronic signing with Zapier's DocuSign integrations.
Finding the Best Real Estate App
There's no one app that will take care of all your real estate needs. But by carefully selecting the apps that will get you through the process—marketing, lead gen, client management and communication, showings, open houses, floor plans, disclosures, closing docs, and anything in between—you'll create a better experience for your clients. Plus, you'll carve out more time for you to spend where it matters: closing deals.
Related Reading:
This article was originally published on September 27, 2018, and has since been updated with a new app, Folio, along with new features, platforms, and pricing for the existing apps.
Title image by Coffee Bean from Pexels
from The Zapier Blog http://bit.ly/2VPjZqN
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