Ever since Tim Ferriss wrote “The Four Hour Work Week,” Virtual Assistants (VA) have been all the rage. Mr. Ferriss wrote about people in third world countries who could manage your life for you for about $1.47 per hour.
Doesn’t sound too bad.
But there are a few issues with VAs. Language barriers, time zones, power and internet outages are a few examples.
What if you had a VA for your real estate business who didn’t have ‘issues?’ One who is always available, performs your tasks immediately and proactively notifies you about important items.
What if that virtual assistant were free?
EasilyDo What Needs to Get Done
There is an app for both the Android and Apple operating systems that really helps you manage your life – just like a virtual assistant.
The App is called, appropriately, EasilyDo.
EasilyDo looks through all your emails, calendars, social media and other applications, assuming you let it. Then it tries to figure out how to help you keep track of everything.
The App has the same encryption software used by banks, so it really discourages hackers better than your email or other applications.
When you head over to EasilyDo, you create an account for free. You can set up a username and password, or sign in through Facebook or Google Plus. Then the fun begins…
After you sign in for the first time, the app lets you know that it will request access to pretty much everything on your phone. In other words, everything in your life.
Unlike the NSA, however, EasilyDo doesn’t ‘need’ the information to fight terrorists. The app wants the information to help you manage your life.
Assuming you give EasilyDo permission to review the information like a VA, the app will then start helping you get organized.
First it will look through all your contacts, help you identify duplicates, and see if you want to merge them together.
Then, EasilyDo provides you with a menu of important information for you to act on.
The information can come from lots of different sources, but it will let you know:
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Upcoming meetings or events and when you should leave from your current location to be on time for them
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Easily call, email or text attendees of upcoming meetings, or look at their LinkedIn profiles
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Receive email alerts if a certain person emails you or certain words appear in an email (‘I want to sell my house,’ perhaps?)
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Extract contact information from emails and add to your address book
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Remind you when bills are due
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File receipts and back them up to Evernote
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Sync your Facebook profile to Twitter
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Birthday reminders for your contacts and social media friends, along with the ability to automatically send congratulatory emails or Facebook postings
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Check traffic on your route to your meeting or job
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Automatically send texts when you are leaving from your office
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Trending posts and pictures
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A list of attachments from your email to make it easy to search for them
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Monitoring package tracking information you may have sent
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Alerts to check in to upcoming flights and easy access to get your boarding pass
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Perform monthly privacy checks on apps using your personal information
One particular feature that could be a windfall for real estate investors is EasilyDo’s connection with LinkedIn.
Once connected, EasilyDo will check your LinkedIn connections pages and let you know when one of your connections is experiencing a job change. The folks at EasilyDo did this thinking you would want to congratulate them.
Real estate investors might think that they probably have a house to sell. Or maybe multiple rental properties? EasilyDo will alert you about it.
Want More? Go Premium
Most of the features for EasilyDo come from the free version. If you want more real-time alerting, however, you can upgrade to the Premium edition for just $4.99/month or $49.99/year.
Additional features with the Premium edition include:
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The ability to automatically add new contacts from your email to your address book
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Merge all your duplicate contact entries at once
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Real-time travel advisories and flight alerts
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Proactive reminders about upcoming meetings along with the ability to add call-in numbers to the meetings
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Automatically save email documents to Dropbox
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Auto-forward receipts to Evernote
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Better customer support
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10% off all gift cards you purchase through the EasilyDo app
The next level of service is called Business Level. Business level is $25/month. Business has all the Premium features, but it automatically allows you to add contacts to your Sales Force account.
For most real estate investors, the free version of EasilyDo seems to have all the features we need…
Maybe you are adding a lot of contacts each month (Buyer’s list anyone?). Then it might make sense to upgrade to Premium for the price of a cup of fancy coffee. Then the contacts are entered automatically.
Either way, EasilyDo will help you organize and simplify your life.
Whatcha Think?
Give EasilyDo a try and let us know what you think about it in the comments section below.
Get Organized – Real estate investing is all about follow through. Make sure you have systems in place so potential deals or buyers don’t fall through the cracks.
Outsource – Trying to be a successful real estate investor on your own is a recipe for disaster. Use technology and people to help you run/manage and grow your business.
Use Technology – Often, technology can be the cheapest way to automate parts of your business. If you can’t eliminate the task somehow, look to tech first before thinking of hiring it out to a VA or someone else.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.