Keeping up with the latest and greatest apps to keep your business going and to increase your productivity can be a daunting task.  I am constantly testing and evaluating various apps and tools to make sure that I have the best damn apps that I can.

One of the most memorable advertising tag lines has been “There’s an app for that!” and recently I was in a non-business-related group and every time someone mentioned a need, I reflexively volunteered a cool iPhone app.  I didn’t mean to do it – I just love sharing things I’ve found to be useful with people.

And that’s how this list got born – out of my love of sharing something cool I’ve found.  And yes, there is an “app for that”, but often there are many apps for that, and which one is the best is a matter of personal opinion. Hopefully, you’ll find a few on this list that where our personal opinions match!

Real Estate Specific

NARRPR

The Realtor Property Resource www.narrpr.com is one of the best tools that our Association dues has ever given us.  The app version is a strong partner for agents.  Gather all known information about a given market or piece of property right in the palm of your hand.  You can easily create a neighborhood, a buyer tour or market report and send it right to a client from your iPhone.  

Zillow Mortgage App

There are a lot of mortgage apps out there, but hands down the Zillow Mortgage App is the best.  The graphic user interface, stylish reports and ease-of-use makes it my go-to app for mortgage questions.  The breakdown of payments and ability to add things like HOA fees and others makes it easy to show your client what a payment really looks like.  I use this when I’m showing a buyer the monthly payment difference between their offer and seller’s counter offer. The visual impact that shows how the monthly payment moves with some of the counter offers has helped show the buyers what those negotiated costs would be down to a monthly level. 

Karl’s Mortgage App

Where as the Zillow Mortgage app is a strong app for residential mortgages, Karl’s Mortgage Calculator is a more traditional and in depth mortgage and financial app.  Its handy to have when you can’t contact that loan officer and your client is looking for answers. 

Magicplan

Magicplan is well… magic.  Magicplan has been around for a long time and they just keep getting better. The app allows you to use your phone to scan a room and ascertain the size and dimensions of the room, including ceiling heights. You can build complete floor plans and save the dimensions to PDF.  It’s the quickest way I’ve found to measure a room and it’s really accurate.  

Homesnap has always been a cool app, but admittedly I didn’t see it becoming the powerhouse that it is today.  The HomeSnap Pro is awesome and has some cool features to help promote your business, engage your sphere, create listing opportunities with predictive analytics and AI suggestions for which homes may list next in your marketplace.

Colorsnap

Colorsnap allows you to use your phone’s camera to get the color match for wall paint.  It also allows you to see a room through your camera’s lens and “paint” the room desired colors to see how they would look before you run out and buy a few gallons.  I typically share this app with my seller clients so that they can scan the wall and get touchup paint for wall surfaces or for buyers to use the augmented reality function to the potential of a given room. 

Keyme

Keyme is simple. Take a picture of a key and use your phone to order a replacement key.  No more running around with the seller’s master keys and having to make copies. What should worry you about this app is how quickly someone can take a picture of your personal keys and get copies sent to them quickly and for a low price.  This is yet another good reason to move over to smart door locks on your house. 

Marketing

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another oldie, but goodie that has really grown over the years.  Hootsuite allows you to setup standard searches on key phrases, use one platform to post on various social media accounts at the same time, schedule posts in advance and much more.  Buffer is a great app, but requires a subscription account to get the most out of it and my goal was to share mostly free tools here.  I use both and you really can’t go wrong with either option.  

Unfold

Unfold is an absolutely beautiful app for creating engaging Instagram photos and stories (which can of course be posted elsewhere).  Unfold has some amazing templates for creating photos, collages and IG stories.  It’s just a lot of fun to use and has a variety of easily utilized tools to give you graphics a professional look. The App is created by Squarespace and delivers a lot of options that I haven’t seen elsewhere. 

 Planoly

Any good marketer knows that you have to plan your content to tell the story you want told about your brand.  Planoly is a visual planner for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.  Planoly has an appealing user interface that is easy to use.  Not only can you plan and deliver your content months in advance, you can monitor analytics for each post.  

Facebook Business Suite

Facebook is a mainstay for most marketers and a good spoke for most marketing hubs.  Maintaining, engaging and monitoring your success are essential to get the most of your Facebook Business page.  I find the Facebook Business app easier to use for engagement than the website interface. 

Canva

Who doesn’t love Canva?  Canva is one of the most valuable tools on the internet for agents and marketers.  I still find it unbelievable that you get so much power for free (I do pay for it personally, because I love the features and their mission).  Canva allows you to quickly create engaging graphics, stories and other marketing resources and their app is awesomely easy to use.  Thousands of templates makes every marketer, regardless of skillset, look like a master designer.  

Snapseed

There are A LOT of photo editing apps in the app-world, but I’ve found that Snapseed does a great job and the fact that its free, developed by Google and robust are compelling reasons to use this app for your photo editing and fine tuning. There are a number of presets and editing tools that are unique to Snapseed.  If you’re a little more experienced you can also try out Adobe Lightroom editing app. 

Felt

I LOVE hand written notes as a way to say thank you, start conversations or just to congratulate someone on a life achievement.  In general I prefer a quality note card, like what you can find on Vonne.co (which specializes in high-end quality cards for real estate folks), but sometimes I’m on the run or on travel and a good substitute is Felt.  Felt is a mobile app that allows you to find an appropriate card template, write a note on your screen using your finger of Apple pencil and then with a click of a button send that card to someone through the app. There is a cost for this service, but it’s affordable and covers postage. 

Google Analytics

Every business person should be tracking the efficacy of their marketing efforts.  Google Analytics is free and helps website owners know where traffic is coming from, what the person is doing while they’re on your website and some areas you can address to increase SEO and consumer engagement.  Its super convenient to have it all in the palm of your hand. 

 

Google Primer

 I am an avid learner and I am always looking to understanding more about  business and marketing among everything. Google Primer is a wealth of knowledge and easy to follow, short classes by Google to help you become a better marketer and business leader.  These are core traits of real estate agents.  This is a fun app and is certainly a worthy use of your time.  

Musecam

Musecam allows you to have DSLR like features when you are taking photos.  It’s a solid replacement for the iPhone camera app and gives you far more control over the photos you’re taking. Whereas Snapseed is a handy free app for editing photos, Musecam is a much stronger app with better templates and tools – but it will set you back a few bucks.  

 

Video Creation and Editing

YouTube Studio

YouTube is a powerhouse for marketers as consumers lean into more watching and less reading. Agents can build a great tribe on YouTube and to do so you’ll need an easy way to manage your videos, respond to comments and monitor the engagement.  YouTube Studio is a great tool for YouTube users. 

Filmic

In this list of apps I’ve tried hard to stick with free apps and FilMic is the exception.  FilMic is the best tool I’ve found for recording video and editing it.  FilMic allows you to do a lot that the standard iPhone video app will not, including using bluetooth microphones.  Using the app is pretty easy and everyone from newbies to advanced videographers can use the features in the app to create some incredible videos. 

Quik

If you’re not quite ready for something as robust as FilMic to edit your videos, than Quik is your new best friend for editing videos and telling a story.  Quik is insanely easy to use, has a variety of fantastic templates and includes a library of music you can use.  Even the most novice user can make some pretty awesome videos with Quik. 

Loom

Loom is the BombBomb killer in my opinion.  Loom is super easy to use, versatile and allows you to do a ton of things that BombBomb can’t.  Loom doesn’t have the email lists and management that BombBomb does, but it does allow you to quickly record videos, with screen sharing and post wherever you need to share.  

Productivity

Todoist

Our lives are filled with action items and tasks that need to be done every day, as well as projects that we want to get done in the future and since our brains are designed to create ideas and not to store them we need a central place to organize all of these tasks.  Todoist is, by far, my favorite action item management system.  I’ve been using it for years and each time I try something different I find myself coming right back to Todoist.  Todoist is incredibly versatile and seems to plug into every application that I need it to. 

Grammarly

Marketers and real estate agents write a lot of content.  We create ad copy, write addendums and fashion emails that could help defend our client’s interest.  Grammar is an essential part of being considered a professional and being taken seriously.  I tend to do most of my drafting in Grammarly now-a-days as I just don’t trust my own eyes to catch my grammar mistakes as easily as I catch others.  Grammarly on iPhone not only creates an app where you can draft your writings, it also has a keyboard option to edit your writing in real time. 

Lastpass

Getting stopped in the middle of a process because of a forgotten password is the WORST and can be a huge obstacle in a productive day.  Lets face it, the world is a password-crazy place and the demands for uniqueness and complexity in passwords is just increasing every day. Lastpass stores your passwords in a central location and allows you to use face ID to access those passwords.  The app is free, but if you want the full value it’s totally worth the fee to get the subscription which allows you to sync passwords across various devices. 

Evernote

I take notes at every meeting, webinar, new idea or useful thought that pops into my mind (including recipes, shopping lists, wish lists and more).  Evernote is a workhorse in the notetaking app world.  It has been totally reengineered since I first starting using it about 12 years ago.  Like Todoist I keep trying new note taking and organizer apps and nothing has come close to the tools, systems and easy of use that Evernote delivers.  Every business person needs a solid place to easily take notes and be able to quickly recall them as needed. 

Cardhop

Over the years I’ve had a lot of glitchyness with the Apple Contacts app. I use Google Contacts as my primary address book, but have also used Cardhop flawlessly with Office 365.  Cardhop is not only stylish and easy to use, it allows you to quickly scan business cards right into your contacts and making notes, tracking birthdays and engaging on social media is seamless.  Cardhop also allows you to create groups so if you regularly email a group of people who aren’t on a business distribution group, this is a super useful feature.  Cardhop is from the kickass group of developers over a Flexibits which also creates Fantastical which I reference a little further down.  The apps are free, but to get the most out of them there is a small subscription fee. (It’s totally worth it)

Waze

If you’re not already using Waze on your iPhone, it’s time to climb out from under the rock.  Waze has the best map features of any system out there.  Using a variety of tools, including collaborative sharing Waze helps you get where you need to get to fast.  Waze is future rich and if you haven’t used it in awhile it’s time to go back as they just keep improving it. 

Scanner Pro

Readdle is another amazing app developer who just keeps delivering awesomeness.  Scanner Pro rivals CamScanner in my opinion in a variety of ways, but primarily in that Scanner Pro doesn’t have a subscription fee attached to it.  Scanner is a great way to scan any document into your phone and make it the perfect PDF size to include in an offer, contract or marketing.  I love this app and being a paperless agent, I use it a lot.  It’s always been a solid tool.  

Be Focused

I am a huge fan of the pomodora time management technique. The idea of 25 minute bursts of interrupted, focused work has been a huge productivity game changer for me.  The Be Focused timer app is such more more than just a focused work timer, but it’s a good place to start.  

Trello

Trello is a mainstay for agents and teams to create workflows, assign tasks (even to clients) and make sure that your checklists are being useful and followed.  You can check out a quick how-to video I created on the Trello app on my YouTube channel.  It’s hard to believe how much Trello delivers for free and this should be a core tool for every business person. 

PDF Expert

We live in a PDF world.  Everything we work with each day seems to be in PDF format and Previews just isn’t good enough and even the paid Adobe Acrobat reader seems to intentionally limiting you.  Readdle has delivered once again with this best in class app.  PDF Expert has a ton of features, including the ability create Word documents from a PDF, annotation, editing, complete forms and sign contracts and more.  It also has unique features that you can utilize when sharing from your iPhone or iPad via Zoom.

Fantastical

Lifestyle

iScape

 Ikea Virtual Reality 

Airr Podcast

Calm