Tech Tools for Better Property Research

Successful real estate investors come in all types and have a great many business plans, and success doesn’t always require a big operation. However, few real estate investors would be successful without doing the due diligence, the research to get through the many possible properties. Moving properties from “possible” through “probable” to “serious candidates” works best when you gather as much information as possible about the subject properties.

Technology provides a great many tools to make research faster and easier, and a couple of tools are helping real estate investors to capture information, file it away and retrieve it at will. Let’s take a look at them now, and the first is a simple device. Your smart phone, and most of us have them, is all you need for a mobile research tool and information capture device. It doesn’t matter if it’s an iPhone or an Android device, as the main tool we’re going to talk about here has an app for both.

Evernote

Evernote is an information capture and storage tool that has become immensely popular because it’s very efficient at its job. First, it installs on your desktop, but also keeps copies of all of your notes and information in the “cloud” as well. Apps for all mobile devices make it just as easy to capture information from anywhere. However, one of the top reasons it’s become so popular is that the service makes it so easy to get information into it:

• drag and drop on your desktop
• email notes into the system
• capture voice notes and have them converted to text
• capture video or images as notes
• clip information from websites

Since you can do almost everything from your mobile device as well, Evernote can become your file cabinet for property information. And, it’s free for basic level services, enough for most of us. It’s only around $50/year for the top level with more storage and features like indexing text inside PDF files and even recognizing handwritten notes and text inside images.

Using tagging and “notebooks,” you can organize and retrieve your information with Evernote’s very effective search tool. So, the next time you’re driving by a property, take a photo right from the Evernote app on your phone, add a typed note and send it up to the cloud. It will sync with your desktop as well, and you’ll be able to pull up your info for due diligence and purchase decisions.