Organize Yourself With Evernote To Keep Your Real Estate Business On Track

You may have heard the hype about a tool called Evernote, and maybe someone you know says that they love it, but what do they use it for? Evernote is a simple tool to help you organize notes, photos, conversations and much more. Evernote works on several platforms including your blackberry, iPad, PC and Macintosh.

First thing you need to know is that Evernote is free but there is also a premium version that costs $45 dollars a year– which is only slightly more than free.

There is a free “web clipper” for Evernote for all the popular web browsers. You will want that web clipper because you will be using Evernote to capture everything, organize it and find it fast when you need it. What good does it do to read some important statistic about local real estate sales, or home decorating trends if you are just going to forget it?

How to use Evernote in your real estate business

Buyer/Seller Activity and Conversation Logs

Let’s say you have a client and her name is Mary. Mary is a home buyer. You meet Mary at your office to talk about her home buying needs. Before that meeting you create a notebook in Evernote and call it Mary Smith.

During the meeting you take notes on your phone, laptop, iPad or on an old school paper note pad. Mary tells you what kind of a house she wants to buy. You ask questions, you get all of the information you need to help Mary and you keep it in Evernote where you can access it from your computer, phone or iPad. The next time you see Mary you call up her notebook on your mobile phone because you forgot the name of Mary’s dog.

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As you work with Mary, documents such as disclosures, links to MLS listings and contracts can be added to her note book. The notes in Evernote are searchable and easy to find. Your notes can even include photographs that you took with your phone while you were out showing Mary houses. Your Evernote notebook for Mary is a complete record of all activity you have with Mary.

General Research

Use Evernote when you read news or do research on the internet. With the web clipper articles can be clipped and stored in Evernote with your notes and maybe some tags so they can be found later on.

Project Planning

Evernote works well for small projects like planning a vacation. Web clips with information about places that you want to see can be stored in Evernote and accessed by a mobile device on the go.

Conferences & Events

Create a notebook for a conference or educational event. Take your conference notes, photographs and even voice memos and have it all stored in one place. If travel is involved, photograph receipts and business cards so that when you get back home you have a paper trail for your tax records.

Sharing Notebook with Client, Partners or Assistants

Notebooks can be shared with colleagues or clients. Create a notebook for your sellers, use them to share information and keep them updated. Sellers can leave notes of their own if the shared notebook is through a premium account. You can also share client notebooks with team members or assistants so that everyone can assess the file.

Using Evernote

Up to 250 notebooks can be created in one account, making it easy to track multiple clients, projects and events. Notes can be moved from one notebook to another and shared among all of your electronic devices. Notebooks can also be local so that they are not on the internet or available from other Evernote enabled devices.

Notes can be emailed to your Evernote account, and they can even be sent into Evernote using Twitter. Take a picture with your phone and send it to Evernote by email. Use “@” before the name of the notebook you want it to go into, or let it go to the default notebook and move it later.

Evernote accepts handwritten and voice notes. There is an app that works on the iPhone called “Paint Note” that can be used to create handwritten notes on your phone and then saves them in Evernote. Drawings and handwritten notes can be created with a computer and a mouse or they can be written on any piece of paper and photographed with the camera in your phone and sent to Evernote.

A free account allows for a monthly upload of 60MB and a maximum note size of 25MB, the premium account allows for 1GB of monthly uploads. There is currently no limit to the total size of an Evernote account.

Interested in using Evernote? Download our complimentary How-To Tip Sheet in the box above for detailed instructions on how to use Evernote for your real estate business.

Teresa Boardman

Teresa Boardman is a practicing Realtor with Saint Paul Home Realty in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is an early adopter to online marketing and social media, an active blogger and photographer, as well as a lover of gadgets and of travel.