Last Friday (9 Oct), Estate123 had its second event at Hangout123. This time around, it was an “Essential Apps for Realtors” talk, which can help real estate agents and negotiators increase their business deals by effectively managing their contacts and appointments with free cloud technology, which is accessible from multiple devices.

Our speaker for the day, Edmend Chua, was an IT specialist for 20 years before he entered the property industry as a real estate agent. It took him the better part of 3 years – after facing many difficulties in obtaining listings and closing deals – before he finally put his IT knowledge to good use and came up with a way to work more efficiently.

Right at the start of his talk, Edmend asked the real estate agents what were the challenges they faced, and most of them replied that they either had problems getting listings, or weren’t able to close deals on the listings that they had. He pointed out that having an organized system in place – with the help of cloud storage technology – that was easily accessible from different devices not only made working easier and hassle-free, it also doubled as a backup plan. Keeping records was also vital in noting down client requests and kept as proof in case of legal issues.

Here’s a quick review of the 6 essential apps that were shared during the talk:

Hotmail Contacts – access all your contacts anywhere, anytime
Hotmail Calendar – never miss a viewing or meeting
SmarterSMB – auto call recording
CallApp – identify caller’s identity
Skype – for international calls
Dropbox – for photo storage

Besides the essential apps mentioned above, Edmend also shared some other apps that were not used for managing information, but are very much handy for professional use, including:

MS Power Point – design a business card that is easily customisable and eco-friendly
Whatsapp for Web – no need to switch between devices while working
Postcron – to schedule social media (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc) posts

Photo taken by our photographer

Photo taken on the spot during the talk by Edmend to demonstrate the use of apps

To demonstrate how easily photos could be taken, uploaded, stored and accessed using cloud storage, Edmend took a photo during the session and instantly showed it on his presentation screen, thereby enforcing the conviction that cloud storage was indeed the way to go in order to get work done more quickly and efficiently. Everybody was really fascinated and amazed by how easily the apps’ functions could be integrated using different devices.

The talk ended at approximately 1pm and all the guests chilled and mingled around at Hangout123 for a while after that.

We hope our guests managed to bring back some useful tips on how to utilise these essential (and free-to-use) apps to help them better manage their contacts, appointments, photos and documents. Being able to access important data from multiple devices anytime, anywhere is extremely important is maximising work productivity, and can ensure nothing is lost even if something unfortunate happens to one or more of your devices. After all, technology is all around us; it’s time to make the most out of the things available to us. 😀

A big thank you to all the guests who took the time to attend the talk, and we look forward to organizing more events for our members and subscribers! Head over to our Facebook page for more pictures from the event. 🙂