Real Estate Sales Professional A.K.A. Environmentalists – 5 Tips to Go Paperless

Going paperless just makes sense on so many levels – efficiency, space, time, office expenses and the environment. While going paperless makes sense – doing it on the other hand requires some planning if you want to take a less turbulent leap.

Here are our top 5 tips for going paperless:

1.       Equipment – Before going paperless we recommend you have the following equipment: smartphone, tablet, laptop and scanner. Choosing the same manufacturer of as many as possible will improve connectivity. For example, if you have an iPhone and then buy an iPad tablet, you can sync the 2, meaning that all devices can share the same information.

2.       Organization – Going paperless means that you will want to look at how you will organize all the documents that you would otherwise have in your office in files. On doing so you will want to think through a system for file hierarchy and naming system for different documents.

3.       Document storing – Next you are going to want to look at cloud document storage. At the same time you should have in mind the fact that sometimes you need to send large files when going back and forth on an offer. By investigating document storage that enables you to also transmit large files and for others to transmit large files to you, this will alleviate the need to have a second app for sending/receiving large files. Dropbox is a very popular tool that does all of the above.

4.       Sharing documents – Speaking of sending/receiving large files, if you decide that you are going to store documents locally and not go with a cloud storage solution, apps like We Transfer and Hightail enable you to send and receive large files to one another. Even more exciting is that now that real estate documents in Ontario can be signed electronically, many real estate sales professionals use ViMO, which is a mobile app for real estate that is capable of facilitating the preparation of real estate documents and signing them electronically. It also enables you to share and collaborate with the other real estate sales professionals working on a deal.

5.       Administration – One of the hardest ways to do away with paper is in the arena of note taking! Here is the solution: apps by Evernote like Penultimate - when used with a stylus-style tablet-pen, enable you to take hands-free notes right on your tablet. You can also drop images into your notepads and make notation right on images.

The initial 5 measures above will help you lay the groundwork/foundation to go paperless. Once you have this organized you can dive even deeper into real estate specific apps and other apps that you can integrate into your workflow.

For more about these apps and others that let you go paperless please visit www.myvimo.ca.