Higher Efficiency Brings Higher Profits with Evernote

Real estate investing is a scalable business. We can do as little or as much as we want, and many people simply want to own a couple of rental homes and not have too many tenant problems as they enjoy retirement. However, for those of us who are wholesaling or engaged in fix & flip activities, it’s a busy world.
With both wholesale and fix & flip, a major profit component is locating a great deal we can buy or control at a deeply discounted price. We can’t just hang a shingle and wait for deals like that to come to us, so marketing and research to dig them out is the name of the game. There’s also the need to recognize a great deal when we see one, or to toss it if our data doesn’t support our profit on the other end. That “data” thing is where most of our time and effort is expended.
Evernote.com provides a tool, and online resource, that isn’t equaled by anything else out there in the power to gather, file, and retrieve data efficiently. The basic free account will work for most of us, but the $45 annual cost of a premium account may provide features you want. One big reason more than 100 million people use this tool is that it is so easy to get information into it no matter where you are or what you’re doing. You can:
• Use the Evernote “Clipper” in your browser to:
o Clip whole articles straight to notebooks without adds or sidebars
o Clip entire pages with all information, ads, etc.
o Save these clips to specific file notebooks
o Tag your clips to make retrieval even easier later
• Email items into notebooks
• Send to Evernote from your smart phone:
o Photos
o Scanned documents taken with scan camera
o Geotag images or files as you desire for location and mapping
There’s more, but you begin to realize the value of the application when you think of all of the places you are in a day, and all of the information you may want to save, but don’t because you don’t want paper files or you just don’t have the discipline. And the Evernote search engine is every bit as powerful as Google’s, so finding your stuff again is a snap.
Now when you see a home you want to research, take a photo into a notebook for that home. Then if you’re at the courthouse checking on it, scan image documents into the folder. If you buy it for a fix & flip, walk it with your contractor and take photos with notes about work to be done. Then share that project folder with your contractor, and everybody’s on the same page. Efficiency can help you to grow your business for more profits.