9 Automation Tricks that Will Rock Your Real Estate Business

Time is money, and the more time you can free up, the more money you can put in your pocket.

Maximum efficiency is the name of the time-reclaiming game, and the first step toward that goal is to examine what's costing you valuable productivity. Where can your processes improve? Which redundant activities are holding you back?

Surprisingly, the answer could lie in the very thing that's supposed to make you more efficient—the technology you use. The average brokerage provides its agents 12 different pieces of technology, according to consulting firm T3 Sixty. If those applications aren't talking to each other, you're looking at not only having to input the same client contact information into multiple systems, but you also risk leads falling through the cracks or missing out on automated post-transaction outreach that drives a customer-for-life strategy.

Fortunately, many real estate platforms today can integrate with one another directly, or through third-party services like Zapier or API Nation. These integrations can help you automate tasks that you may be doing manually—or skipping altogether.

To help you understand the many time-saving automations that can take your business to the next level, here we're highlighting nine handy examples of real estate integrations.

Because the transaction is at the heart of any real estate business, the smartest move is to use your transaction management platform as the hub of your integration efforts. To help us illustrate this point, we're using transaction management platform dotloop in these examples. With over 75 integration partners, dotloop is one of the best-integrated technologies in the industry, and they offer two-way integrations, which means data can flow both in and out of their platform to your other applications. Learn more here.

Ready to dive in? Here are nine automations that will rock your real estate business:

1. Start a new transaction right from your CRM or lead management tool.

Did that lead you've been nurturing finally convert to a client? Save time by starting a new transaction right from your CRM. Dotloop integrates with both BoomTown and Zurple (and many more), enabling you to not only start a transaction from a contact's profile, but also view the status of a transaction and which tasks still need to be completed, all without leaving your CRM.

2. Streamline the earnest money process.

Digital management of earnest money is one the best real estate innovations of recent times. Not only is it more secure, but it makes things far easier. The good news is, it can get easier still. Dotloop's integration with Earnnest lets you request earnest money right from the transaction platform itself. In turn, the customer can pay money directly to the escrow holder digitally via Earnnest, which processes the funds using a bank-level encrypted digital transfer. No more worrying about identity theft that could accompany mailing checks or wire-fraud.

3. Sync your email contacts with your transaction management platform.

Transactions require a lot of back and forth between you and your client. Make sure you don't miss a step thanks to incorrect or hard-to-find contact information by syncing your email app with your transaction app. Dotloop integrates with both Outlook and Gmail. For a deeper Gmail integration that lets you start a transaction from your email, check out this Google Chrome plug-in.

4. Never miss a task or appointment with calendar integration.

Speaking of Google, if you use Google Calendar to stay on top of your to-dos, integrating your transaction management solution with your calendar will automatically add important transaction dates to Google so you never miss a beat.

5. Digitally notarize documents with synced data.

Skip the double data entry by syncing your transaction data to your digital notary platform. Notarize and dotloop work together so you can import transaction data from dotloop into Notarize for a streamlined process—and your clients can review, sign and notarize real estate documents faster.

6. Automatically send an anniversary message one year after a sale.

The best way to keep a client for life is to stay in frequent contact. Celebrate your client's one-year home purchase anniversary by sending an automated message. BombBomb's integration with dotloop syncs close dates so that BombBomb automatically knows when to send the message. See what else this integration can do here.

7. Back up your transaction data to Google Drive or Dropbox.

You know what never hurts? Backing up your data. Sync your transaction data to third-party services like Dropbox or Google Drive to give yourself a little peace of mind.

8. Keep your clients up-to-date on the transaction in Slack.

Slack, a communications app, is all the rage in Silicon Valley. Many tech-forward Realtors have also taken to using it to keep internal communications about a transaction in one convenient place. If you're among them, connecting Slack to your transaction management platform means that you can automatically send or post Slack messages when, for example, a new document has been uploaded. See what the full integration with dotloop does here.

9. Stay in the loop on transactions from your franchise software platform.

Last but not least, dotloop integrates with many of the major brokerage franchise's software platforms. That means you can start and access transactions right from your brokerage platform. Here's a list of franchises that integrate with dotloop. For more information or support, talk to your broker.

• EXIT Realty
• Realty Executives
• Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate
• Century 21
• Coldwell Banker
• ERA Real Estate
• Keller Williams

To learn about more ways dotloop can streamline your business, visit dotloop.com.