Let’s face it… a lot of us really want to run our real estate business as lean as possible.
There are people who want to run a multi-billion-dollar real estate empire. Then there are the rest of us. We’re the ones who want to:
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Flip our way to a very comfortable retirement.
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Wholesale XX number of deals per year that gives us the lifestyle we desire.
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Buy & hold enough rentals that we receive regular monthly paychecks from, without working a ‘real’ job.
Whichever path we choose, we enjoy running our operations by ourselves. Sure we hire contractors, bird dogs, Realtors, banks, etc., but we don’t have employees. Give us lean and mean.
The trouble with being on your own is that you have to manage lots of different functions. At various times in running your business, you have to assume the role of:
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Marketer
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Lawyer
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Handyman
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Accountant
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Psychiatrist (landlords, you know what I’m talking about)
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Grief Counselor (Ever talk to a REALLY motivated seller?)
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Realtor
And of course, there’s even more roles too... trying to wear all those hats can be challenging.
Combining All of Your Hats into One
You combine all those roles into one person: You. Wouldn’t it be great to have one piece of technology to track what you need to do with all those tasks?
You knew there would be. It’s called, appropriately enough, 17hats. Many applications work with other applications to give you a complete picture. Other than integration with a few apps such as Facebook, Google and iCal Calendars and QuickBooks, 17hats tries to do it all within it’s own program.
One of the best features of 17hats is the ability to create workflows. This is a great way to automate your business. Look at your business and see what could be automated, such as…
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Autoresponders for motivated seller leads or potential renters
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Setting up a new tenant with a lease
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Sending out offers to Realtors on properties
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Creating bids and quotes as a contractor
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Putting together a project plan to flip a house
These are just some examples of how you can automate your real estate business. Workflow tasks are broken down into three different categories:
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To Do Items – The workflow can remind you of tasks that need to be accomplished.
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Action Items – 17hats can automatically do these items. An example would be creating a purchase agreement and emailing it.
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Pause Items – Actions that wait for a certain input from you before they are automatically performed.
Once you have your everything set up, you can just run the workflow and 17hats will take care of the rest.
No Need for All That Other Tech
There are lots of other features of 17hats that can help you in your business. As you are running your investments, you can keep track of everything in the 17hats dashboard:
On the dashboard or overview screen, you can see the tasks you need to do, recent activity in your business and what you have coming up. It’s a great place to stay on top of everything. What does 17hats track for you? Let’s get into that...
Start with marketing. Real estate investors need leads. 17hats can create forms for you to post on Facebook or your own website. When a lead comes in, they can fill out the form and have their data instantly stored in 17hats.
You can decide how you want 17hats to handle that lead. It might be nice to send out an autoresponder message saying you received the inquiry and will get back to them shortly. 17hats can also alert you about the lead either by email or text message.
You know that lead is probably calling some other investors soon after they hang up with you. Being alerted by text message seems like a great idea to beat out your competition.
Once you have a lead, 17hats can quickly set them up as a contact for you. Then when you assign workflows to that contact, they will receive everything they need to be happy doing business with you.
17hats has a great ability to fill in pre-loaded contracts, such as purchase agreements and leases. You can autofill information from your buyer or seller or renter, have them initial certain paragraphs or pages, and sign the bottom all electronically.
As with other tasks, 17hats will also notify you when the other party is done with the contract.
You can also send out list of quotes to potential contractors, or provide quotes if you are doing some contracting for someone else. Once you are working on a project, 17hats allows you to track your time for billing or for your own information.
Any kind of billing can be done with 17hats. Credit card payments can be processed with Paypal, Stripe or Authorize.net. Invoices can be automatically sent out just like another workflow.
Once payments are made, 17hats can keep track of your finances. You can integrate the payments with QuickBooks or just keep track of everything in 17hats.
17hats integrates its bookkeeping with around 19,000 banks in the U.S. (are there really that many banks?). If you do business with any of these banks, you can hook up to your account electronically. Then you can download all your transactions right into 17hats.
Take a look at 17hats, especially if you are a solo investor. We think you might like all the features they offer and how much time you will be able to save.
Nice Hat
Do you have experience with 17hats or another program like it? Share below.
Automate – What do you do that you shouldn’t? If it’s a routine, repeating tasks - chances are technology can do it instead.
Make it Easy to Get Paid – People are hesitant to pay their bills in the first place. Are your tenants or buyers slow to pay you? Look at how they pay you. Can you make it easier for them?
Respond to Leads Quickly – There’s a reason for the saying “You can’t steal in slow motion.” Make sure you are notified of leads right away. Then take action immediately. Good deals don’t hang around for long.
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.