This lesson will showcase two apps that show how far real estate technology has advanced, and one app that shows how far outside of the box you’ll need to think when it comes to which apps to include in your CRE folder.

Transcript

Hello, I’m Bucky Beeman, commercial real estate agent in Rochester, Minnesota, and I want to tell you about my three favorite apps on my iPhone.

RESOURCE #1: Landglide

Landglide is an app that I found, probably a year ago, and what I love about it is it shows property owners’ names. And I’ve not had it ever fail me, right? Every once in awhile some of the sales aren’t updated, so it won’t show necessarily the most recent; it takes a little bit to adjust it. But it is, no matter where I’m at – I can be out in the country, I can be in a big metro area, I can be in our community, and it shows me who the owner’s names are. If it’s set up in an LLC, the next step I have to do is go to the Minnesota business name lookup, type in that LLC, and then I can track back who actually owns or is the managing member of that LLC.

But, it is a great app. I really do like it. You have the ability to change to Satellite view, to Topo view… I usually use Satellite view if I’m guessing, “Okay, am I on the right property, or not?” You can mark pins of properties, and make a little note within that property. It does show market value according to the county. All this data is coming in from county property taxes. That’s where they get it from. They just bring it on into a nice, clean app for everybody to check out.

So, Landslide, I want to say it’s about $100 a year, I could be wrong on that. But it’s well worth the money that I have spent on the app itself.

RESOURCE #2: LoopNet

My next favorite app, and it just is, whether or not you like LoopNet because their fees continually climb, their app is slick. Their app is real fast. You go in, you see all of the listings. I use this a lot as a commercial real estate agent, where I’ll go into a listing such as this one as my own, I’ll share it with somebody by hitting the Share button. I can text it, I can email it, I can be on a showing, pull up the property data, and it’s summarized and it’s quick, and it’s all right there. So, I use this app a lot, and it’s one that is definitely one of my favorites.

RESOURCE #3: VSCO

And then, if we go to my next favorite app… and this is in no specific order. You know, I have all of my popular social media platforms that everybody is used to, but I want to share about an app that, probably, people are not used to that I really use quite often, and it’s VSCO. And the reason I use VSCO is because you can really add some edits to your pictures that make them look nice. And so, for example, this was somebody else’s listing I just took a photo of because the light was awesome, and I can’t get these same filters in Instagram.

I have these mobile advertising signs, and I take pictures of those quite often. And often when I took the photos just from my phone with the limited editing I could do on Instagram, it didn’t look very nice. So this added a little bit extra functions, if you will.

And so, I’ve really enjoyed working with VSCO. This is a Minneapolis property I was in, and just that, you know, look of the windows and sun coming through them was something I wanted to capture. You then can – I don’t use VSCO as something where I meet other commercial real estate agents, because there just isn’t a lot on there, or get leads from it, for example. But what I do is, so here for example, I didn’t even… I haven’t seen anybody use the hashtag #commercialrealestateagent. There is somebody that did, so I’ll follow them.

But here, for example, you get a nice looking picture, and you can save it to your camera roll and then repurpose it for Instagram. So I’ll show you on Instagram one of my VSCO repurposed photos, one and two. And so, it just gives it a nicer, different look than what Instagram might provide. And if you know me already, I am big on repurposing. I like to share from other platforms to another platform. So, for example, this is from Snapchat to Instagram. For example, this is from VSCO to Instagram, because it just helps make your content on these platforms different from everybody else’s. This is from TikTok, to Instagram.

And so, those are my three favorite apps I just wanted to share with you. Again, no specific order, they are just ones that I find very useful as a commercial real estate agent and doing my business.