Episode 9: Technology is Your Friend

The Spouses Flipping Houses Podcast With Doug & Andrea Van Soest

Episode 9: Technology is Your Friend

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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Episode 9 Show Notes

Technology is your Friend! Don’t be afraid of it…embrace it! Today we dive into the SIX primary Tech Tools that we use every day in our business. These tools save us 100’s of hours per month and make life SOOO much easier (and thus, more fun)!

Here are a few Takeaways from this Episode:

• Technology allows us to run our business from anywhere…even Costa Rica!

SIX Tech Tools that we use everyday!

• DropBox
• Podio
• Websites
• Smart Phone (duh?)
• Websites
• VoiceMail Service
• Google (it does more than you may know)
• You don’t have to be a “techie” to use these tools. Just ask Andrea!
• Technology isn’t necessary to be successful, but we recommend it anyway.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• DropBox file collaboration software
• Podio for everything from lead management to project management to you name it!

Helpful Apps

• Redfin
• Home Snap – iPhone/Android
• Podio
• Scannable
• HelloSign
• DropBox – iPhone/Android
• Weebly.com or Wix.com for easy website creation!

Autoresponders and email list management

• Aweber.com
• MailChimp.com
• ConstantContact.com

Virtual assistants can be found at

• UpWork.com
• Fiverr.com

Voice Mail Services

• CallRail.com
• FreedomVoice.com
• Grasshopper.com
• RingCentral.com

Google.com has many different features that are super helpful!

• Gmail for email
• Google Voice
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs (less powerful but free version of file / folder sharing)
• Picasa for online photo storage

Episode 9 Transcript

Download Episode 9 Transcript

Andrea: Welcome to Spouses Flipping Houses, Episode Nine! Today, we are talking about the fact that technology is your friend, and how we use the latest tech tools to help us in our investing business.

Doug: Which is really ironic, those of you who know Andrea– let’s just say, she doesn’t embrace technology like– I don’t know, like most of us do.

Andrea: That’s what makes this podcast episode so perfect, because it’s coming at you from two sides of the coin; one person who is very much tech-savvy and that would be Doug, and one person who is very much a tech bozo, and that would be me!

Doug: And I’m not even– you may think I’m very much tech-savvy just because of maybe where you’re at! But I’m not even– I don’t consider myself a techie. I like technology, I dig in to what I need to know and learn it because I like it and it helps me, but I’m not a techie- like I can’t do code, I don’t really know a lot of stuff, just I know how to do website stuff and–

Andrea: Well, I still have my Yahoo e-mail account from college so–

Doug: Yeah, that could be a problem.

Andrea: To me, you’re tech-savvy!

Doug: Yeah, how many unread e-mails do you have right now?

Andrea: Oh, it’s in the multiple thousands! Friends of ours laugh at us and we drive them crazy — well, I drive them crazy, because my little inbox on my phone shows, you know, twelve thousand nine hundred e-mails and it doesn’t bother me a bit. I just scroll to the next page and ignore the e-mails that are not important, and respond to the ones that are.

Doug: So the moral of the story is don’t e-mail Andrea if you want to get in touch with her.

Andrea: I respond to the good ones, don’t worry.

Doug: So yeah, technology is your friend. But, before we get into that, we just got home a couple of days ago– if you remember, we mentioned that I was gonna be going to go on a surprise birthday trip.

Andrea and some of our best friends took us, took me, on a birthday trip and had me fully convinced through carefully planned and dropped hints along the way for the past several months that I was going on a road trip. And I assumed it was somewhere out in the Rocky Mountain states — Colorado, or somewhere around there, which I love those states and would love to visit that area.

Andrea: We even made him pack his suitcase full of sweaters and jackets and coats and pants, and then when he wasn’t looking, I swapped out all his clothes for what he actually needed.

Doug: And little did I know, we got in the car and headed straight to LAX. We went to Costa Rica! For a tropical vacation.

Andrea: It was so cool.

Doug: Amazing! So I pretty much have the most awesome wife in the world, to surprise me on my fortieth birthday with an adventure trip in Costa Rica. We had the best time, ziplining and surfing and seeing lizards and monkeys and just having great food, and it was just an awesome, awesome trip. We are back.

Andrea: Yes. So what was your favorite thing we did in Costa Rica?

Doug: Oh, I have to say surfing. The water was bath water, like eighty degrees, and it was just- I’m not an expert surfer by any means, so it was nice gentle waves where we were, and we could catch them and just– oh, so fun.

Andrea: Me too– actually, surfing was my favorite even though I got a bunch of bruises and I’m almost too old for that! So much fun, I loved it! I also loved the zip line thing that we did.

Doug: Yeah, we did one zip line that, one leg of it was a half-mile long.

Andrea: And you’re literally over the jungle, like from peak of a mountain to peak of a mountain, it felt like.

Doug: Yeah, and you’re looking at a volcano on your right.

Andrea: And a big lake to the other side.

Doug: Yeah, it took fifty seconds for that one section of the zip line to get down, and you’re going about, I don’t know, forty or fifty miles an hour, or so. Really awesome time. But anyway, just wanted to fill you in on where we were. And now I kinda feel– you think, oh, I’m rested and ready to go, but we sorta jumped back into life with two feet and realized all the stuff that we have to get done in the next couple weeks, and now I need a vacation from the vacation!

Andrea: So true!

Doug: Kinda feelin’ that way, but, anyway.

Andrea: No, it’s okay, we’re good, we’re refreshed and ready to go.

Doug: Fresh and ready to go! And we wanted to thank anyone who’s left us a rating and review on iTunes, we are so grateful for that. I wanted to read one that we just got here recently. Five star rating from Photosteve2003, whoever you are– title is “Great House Flipping Resource.” “Thanks for creating this podcast. As a full time real estate investor, I’m constantly looking for good education on flipping houses. I’m looking forward to future episodes.”

And that’s just one of many five star reviews we’ve had. Thank you so much, it really helps us! If you haven’t left us a rating and review, please do so; head over to iTunes, and just leave us a quick rating and review.

Andrea: You can also subscribe to our podcast by going to our website, SpousesFlippingHouses.com, and enter your e-mail, hit subscribe, and you’ll be notified of all future episodes.

Doug: Plus you get two awesome gifts that we really worked hard to create for you. You get an e-book that Andrea created on twelve tips for working with your spouse–

Andrea: Eleven, but that’s okay.

Doug: Eleven! I’ve been gone, out of the country, so… and then I created a video course on deal analyzation. I put a lot of thought into it, so I hope you’ll really enjoy those. Grab those two absolutely free gifts by heading over to our website. So, enough of that! Let’s get into our main topic today, which is technology. Andrea, why don’t you start us off?

Andrea: Okay, well I’m going to be talking about the few basic things that I know anything about! First one is Dropbox, and we love Dropbox. We use it for our business, we use it in our personal life. The cool thing about Dropbox– it’s basically a file-sharing service. Fill in the gaps…

Doug: Yeah, no that’s exactly what it is. You know how you have folders and files on your computer? Well, Dropbox, it’s one of those, it’s just a folder on your computer, but it syncs to the Cloud. You know what the Cloud is, obviously, everybody’s heard of the Cloud. Basically it syncs over the Internet to other devices, other people, whoever you invite to it, so that your little file–

Say you save an Excel spreadsheet into one of the folders, it automatically syncs to the Cloud, syncs directly to that other person’s computer, or phone, or tablet or what have you. This is not new, but some people may not have heard of Dropbox, and we absolutely love it.

Andrea: We use it in so many ways. And the cool thing is that you can invite certain people to specific files; they don’t have to be a part of every file within your Dropbox, so– like the personal ones that we have is just between the two of us, for our family photos and stuff like that; but then for each property that we do, we have a whole separate category for our real estate business and then separate categories for each property, and then what’s going on within that property.

There’s folders within folders; it’s just such a great way to organize things. And so we’ll have our assistant and our contractor invited to certain folders that are for each property so that we all have access to the same stuff.

And one thing I wanted to point out was the fact that all of these different tech tools that we’re going to be talking about today can help you to manage your business from anywhere that you are. You don’t have to be in front of your computer in your office, and that’s the cool thing.

So we were just, for example, in Costa Rica this last week, and we could pretty much take care of anything that we needed to, because we had access to everything through Dropbox and the Cloud and all these other different things that we’re going to be talking about.

Doug: You literally can run your business virtually.

Andrea: Yes.

Doug: From anywhere if you wanted to.

Andrea: Totally.

Doug: And if you’ve ever been the person who has had your hard drive crash, or your computer crash, rather, and you’ve lost your information– raise your hand, me— if you’ve ever had that happen, this is another great thing to have just for that reason. It automatically backs up every folder or file you want to, instantly, to the Cloud, so that if your computer explodes and catches on fire in the next five minutes, your stuff is saved.

Andrea: Yeah, and we save all of our family photos now on Dropbox because of that very thing. We had a bunch of just priceless treasure photos of our children as babies on a hard drive, a computer that fried out, and we still have it sitting in our garage, hoping that someday, someone can recover those photos.

Doug: If you know an expert on recovery on a hard drive that was physically damaged, let us know, because it’s sitting in our garage with baby photos on it! So, that’s Dropbox.

The next resource, tech tool that we use, and we’ve mentioned it before, and we’ll probably have a full episode coming up here on it, but it’s Podio, Podio.com.

This software, this resource completely revolutionized our business about a year and a half ago when we started using it. It is a complete lead management customer relations management system, and this is where we primarily manage all of our seller leads that come in.

And right now, currently we have around 2500 leads in there. So if you can imagine having pieces of paper for each lead, or a file, or whatever something physical that you might be using, and it starts stacking up where you have hundreds and then thousands of these things, how in the world can you possibly manage that and keep track of those things, and what you need to do in the next step of managing that lead?

Podio, and there are a lot of other resources that do this, but Podio seems to be the best for a lot of reasons, but we love using it. And the best thing about it is it is free. Free, absolutely free, up to five users. Which, until recently, like a month ago, we used the free version, all the way ‘til then, so it cost nothing. You can get it on your phone and run everything from your phone as well, or your iPad, or whatever– it’s an amazing resource.

So we use that for lead management, we also talked about before that we manage our contractor through there, different projects, there’s a whole system that we’ve built for that and again, you don’t have to be super techy, you don’t have to know how to speak computer language, if you will, it’s all drag-and-drop click stuff, that once you kind of get the feel for how it works, it’s really easy to create and customize whatever you want.

Andrea: It really is user-friendly, because Doug has even taught me how to use it! I fought him a little bit at first, a little bit of pushback because I hate learning new things, for some reason! But anyways, I’m so glad that I know how to do it now, it really is user-friendly.

He uses it to manage our marketing as well, track our marketing, and also we used to pay for a rental management software, and now we manage all of our rentals through Podio because Doug’s created like a whole separate category for that and all the different things that we have–

Doug: Which saves us, like, sixty bucks a month, which is what that software used to cost. I was just able to create a similar system, but one more customized to what we needed– to manage rents, deposits, all the different tenants and their information that we need and repairs and maintenance tracking and all that kind of stuff, to be able to see it at a glance easily– we create that stuff in here.

Andrea: We also have our goals tracked through there, too. So we’ll have our yearly goals that we put in there, we can go throughout the year and revise them, update them, see how we’re doing in certain, you know–

Doug: Yeah, goals are on there, also as far as running the business, we can send offers at the click of a button. I mean, really, we can get into this in another episode, but it has just saved us– it’s saved us hundreds of hours a month, no joke.

Just in normal tasks that you would do that take time, like writing up an offer and signing things, and stuff like that. It’s just so much faster. And the follow-up systems that we use it for are unbelievable. So Podio, check it out, definitely worth it.

Andrea: So the next tech tool we’re going to talk about is your smart phone, which is a pretty obvious one, everybody these days has a smart phone, but you can actually use your smart phone in some pretty incredible ways these days to help with your investing business.

First one, actually is Dropbox. You can have it right there on your phone, photos in front of a house or walked through a house with a prospective seller and you took pictures of all the rooms– you can save them right there, directly to a folder for that property in Dropbox, directly from your phone. There’s also tons of apps that are super helpful.

One app that we love is Redfin. And so, everybody’s probably heard about Redfin, and you may or may not know that they have an app for your phone so you could be driving through a neighborhood and you see a house that looks a little bit run down, you want to know some more information on that house or possibly what the value could be.

So you can pull up your Redfin app and it will tell you which houses are for sale near that property, which houses have recently sold near that property, you can actually get lots of information just being right out in front of it and not having to actually look up too much stuff. What other good pieces of info can you give about the Redfin app, Doug?

Doug: Yeah, you can customize your– just like when you’re going to search for comps for a house, you can customize your parameters, so let’s say you don’t want to see everything, you just wanted to see once you found out about that house and it was 2000 square feet, you just wanted to find everything that was 1500 square feet to 2500 square feet, and eliminate everything else, because that’s what you’re looking for.

And it’s really easy to do that with the click of a button. You can find sold houses that are recent, or a long time ago, there’s lots of different ways you can search it.

Andrea: And the next app is called Scannable.

Doug: Love this one!

Andrea: This one is so cool! So what you do is you can line up certain documents– let’s say you need to send documents to somebody really fast and you’re not near a scanner or fax machine. You can literally use the Scannable app– you hover your phone over each page, and it will essentially take a photo of that page and turn it into a PDF. But it removes all the shadows– it literally looks like a scanned copy of each page, and it zeroes in, you know–

Doug: It trims it, it trims the edges.

Andrea: It is so cool, I love it, it totally looks like a scan, and so, for however many pages you’re willing to sit and do that for, it’s great! We’ve used it to send whole offers, twelve pages, you know, really quickly, you just hover it over each page and it puts it all together, like a beautiful PDF. You’d never know.

Doug: You’d never know. And I’ve had apps that kinda did similar things in the past, but they were cumbersome, they didn’t take, just more like it was just a photo of the page, didn’t look good– this one’s way different, it’s high-quality, it’s free.

Andrea: You can immediately e-mail it to a person, you can text it, you can save it to Dropbox, there’s tons of options of what you can do with it once you’ve then created that little PDF, so it’s very cool. Another app we love is called HelloSign. Is it called HelloSign?

Doug: It’s HelloSign, yeah.

Andrea: HelloSign, okay.

Doug: It’s actually a Google app, I think, but it’s for signing documents.

Andrea: So you basically create, let’s say it’s an offer or whatever it is that you’re going to send to somebody, and then you can mark where it is you want that person to sign. And then you e-mail them and when they open it, it goes directly to the spots they have to sign, and they can digitally sign it on their phone. It makes it so easy for a prospective seller who might be overwhelmed by paperwork, or that seems cumbersome to them, that they can sign it so easily, right from their cell phone.

Doug: Yeah, it’s similar to DocuSign, if you’ve seen that, but it’s just more user-friendly. It’s simple, I think it’s cheaper. And plus you can sign your own documents; you can pull ‘em up and sign ‘em with your real signature right there on the phone. It’s great, yeah, great resource, we use that all the time.

Andrea: And the other app we wanted to talked about was called Homesnap— I’ve actually never used it, just seen Doug use it, it looks pretty cool, so you can go ahead and talk about that.

Doug: Yeah, similar to Redfin, but maybe a little bit quicker and easier if you’re just in the neighborhood or in front of a house, you can pull up Homesnap, and it will find where you are and it will pull up the house that you are in front of, and you can take a picture of it, and all the other users in the world who are using Homesnap also do this when they’re around houses, or other agents do this, and there’s usually a recent photo of that house and it will have all the information on it– when it last sold, or if it’s listed, what it’s listed for.

As well as neighboring properties, you can kind of see the little map and you can look down the street and five houses up there’ll be a house that’s a different color, and you can click on that, and it’ll tell you if it was a recent sale, if it was a house that’s listed or pending, all the information, there’ll be pictures of that.

So, similar to Redfin, but just maybe quicker, easier. It also does other things but that’s what I use it for, is when I’m out in the field and I just wanna know about a property that I’m in front of at that given time.

Andrea: So it’s pretty incredible that this little device that you can fit in your pocket can literally run your business.

Doug: Yeah, it can do so much. And there’s new apps being developed all the time, and there’s so many more that we didn’t mention here. These are just a few of the ones that we use a lot that we recommend.

So the next tech tool that can help you is website for lead generation. Now I don’t know how to build a website. I don’t. I can’t get on WordPress, which is a popular format for people who develop websites. There’s other ones– I can’t do that, it’s just too much work, I don’t wanna learn it. So, we didn’t have a website for a lot of years, but then we discovered a quick and easy website builder that is also free, that we are able to create websites– even Andrea has created several websites!

Andrea: I have, and it’s fun!

Doug: And it’s fun! It’s drag-and-drop, click, drag-click-drop, whatever, it’s very simple– it’s called Weebly.com.

Andrea: It is very user-friendly, and believe me, if I can do it, anyone can do it!

Doug: If you’re looking for a basic website that you want to put out there, that you can have a little form where people can put their information in about their property and you can contact them back and see if they want to sell it, or other reasons– maybe you’re looking for buyers– whatever the reason, you can easily create that in Weebly.com.

There’s another website out there called Wix.com— I’ve not used it, but I think it’s very similar. And we had a Weebly website as our lead generating website for probably a year before we actually had a better one built, but definitely it’s possible to do it, even for the least techy of people, and who are on a budget.

Andrea: It’s a great place to start, yeah, and everybody needs a web presence, I think. It just gives you some validity, to tell people, hey, this is where you can go on the Internet to find me. People want to see that you are there, and that builds trust.

Doug: Good point! It’s good to have, even if you’re going to create like a brochure website about your company, about yourself and what you do. Because when you’re dealing– we find when we’re dealing with people in negotiations, looking to buy their house or they receive an offer from us, they don’t know who we are. What do they do? They go to Google and they look up our name.

Andrea: Most of the time they’re like, you have three kids, I saw, I saw your Facebook account!

Doug: Yeah, we get that classic, oh, you have a beautiful family! Ooh, creepy… They tell us I saw you online, I saw you on your website, saw you here or there Facebook… they will find you, they will do their research. More and more people are doing that. So yeah, great to have a web presence, it shows you’re professional. So you can do that easily on Weebly.

Also, if you’re going to be managing people who put their information in your website, you want an auto-responder. Again, don’t freak out when I’m using these tech terms, it’s not that big a deal. All an auto-responder is, is a tool that will automatically respond to that person for you. So if you’ve ever gone to a website for any reason, and put your name and e-mail address, phone number, like people do when they come to Spousesflippinghouses.com, we use an auto-responder.

It kicks back an e-mail quickly to them that says thank you and some other things, and then it sets them up on a system where if you’re gonna be e-mailing a few things to them over the next week or month, it will automatically do that; you don’t have to think about it. Gotta have that tool if you’re going to be managing any kind of leads that come in.

One of the auto-responders– there’s several of them– but you can use AWeber.com, that’s what we use. There’s also MailChimp, Constant Contact–those are the three of the main auto-responders that I know of. I think they’re, like, twenty bucks a month, it’s not too much.

Another thing you can do– and this is sort of its own category, but– is hiring a virtual assistant. So a VA is the slang for this– virtual assistant– if you’ve never heard of that, or what that is, you’re basically just hiring somebody who doesn’t live near you to do some tasks. And you’re usually hiring them on a per job basis.

So, again, a whole other episode dedicated to this, but we use virtual assistants for things like having a website built, if you want to hire someone to do that, or doing some research on a certain area, or data entry if you need a bunch of stuff entered into an Excel spreadsheet, hire somebody to do that.

Why would you do this virtually? Well, lots of reasons, but the main being: there are experts out there that specialize in these specific fields that you’re probably looking for, and you can hire them for a fraction of what it may cost you to actually hire someone locally, live, because these people are located all over the world.

Andrea: And usually it’s freeing up your time to do more important tasks. So we have found VAs to be really, really invaluable.

Doug: Yeah, in fact we just hired– I just hired somebody, he just entered in about 450 names from a website that I wanted him to go through and get all those potential leads out there for me, and I think it was $5.50 an hour, and he did an awesome job while we were in Costa Rica, and I get home and we have this document full of names that we can now go through and call all these people and reach out to them.

So, how do you find a VA? There used to be a site called Elance.com, and oDesk; those have merged into a website called Upwork.com. That’s where I would recommend you go. There’s other places, of course, but that’s a good one.

Another place is Fiverr.com. That’s known for having people do a job for five bucks! That’s why it’s called Fiverr. There’s usually add-ons, depending on what you want to do and it costs a little more than five bucks.

Andrea: You can have graphic design work done, you can have so many different things, just simple basic things, having lists scrubbed, or, all the way down to artwork and anything you can think of, pretty much. You can have somebody do it for you.

Doug: Very reasonable cost.

Andrea: And some things are more expensive, you know, if you want something done a little bit better quality, then you might look for a different person that specializes in what you’re looking for and it might cost more, but you have tons of options on there.

Doug: But look, you could spend hours of your own time and frustrations and do this and not pay what you’re going to pay, but what’s your time worth, really, and your headaches worth, when you can get some video editing or website built for really a very minimal cost and it’s done, you won’t have to worry about it? So, virtual assistants: great resource.

Andrea: So the next thing is voicemail services. And there are a number of different options that you can use and different companies for voicemail services, but basically what it is, is that you pay a subscription fee to them– a monthly fee and within that you get a certain number of phone numbers.

So, the way we like to use this is that you can assign each mailing campaign a different phone number, and you can track how that mailing campaign is doing. So people will call into that phone number and you can have it go to a live person, or you can have it go to a recorded message, however you want to do that. We use a recorded message, and then when the prospective seller calls and leaves a message, it’s e-mailed directly to whoever that number is assigned to, whether it be Doug or other sales people.

Another way you can use it is to assign certain numbers to certain salespeople, so you want, let’s say you have a couple salespeople, then maybe all of the calls that come in from one neighborhood go to salesperson number one, all the calls from this other town go to salesperson number two.

But if it’s just you and you don’t have other salespeople on your team, you can then have all the calls come directly to your cell phone if you want, or to different voicemails and just track based on mailing campaigns. That way it doesn’t fill up your personal voicemail and you can have it go to these different messaging systems.

Doug: Yeah and if you have turnover in your salespeople, you don’t have to change the number. You still have a number that you’re using; you can just direct it to the new person’s cell phone number, so people don’t actually have their personal cell phone number, either.

Andrea: Right, it’s also a privacy kind of screen, which is great. So we use CallRail, because it integrates with Podio, that’s CallRail.com. We really like that one. We have also used FreedomVoice.com, I think we still use that one a little bit.

Doug: Yeah, we still use it. That’s the one we started with a few years ago, when we started our own voicemail system, we still have it. Both of those are between thirty and fifty bucks a month, depending on what level you want, what services you want there.

Andrea: There’s also Grasshopper.com and RingCentral.com, are two other options out there.

Doug: Never used those, but I know those are popular services as well. So, the last tech tool, if you will, that is super helpful may seem obvious, but it’s Google. So, everybody’s heard of Google, but the company itself has so many different apps and different companies they’ve acquired that do different things that really make life easy. So first of all Gmail, which is the Google e-mail service, is awesome, and I’m still trying to convert Andrea over here from Yahoo to Gmail–

Andrea: I’m working on it, I’m working on it!

Doug: She’s working on it! She does have a Gmail account, we’re trying to convert everything over there, but it’s very simple. There’s a lot of reasons why I like Gmail, but one the main reasons is you can do– and other services may have this as well– but you can do what’s called a canned response. So you can save an unlimited amount of canned responses.

Let’s say, for example, here’s how I would use this: if I was going to be e-mailing people on Craigslist who put an ad that they have a house for sale, and I’m going to be e-mailing thirty people that day– instead of writing the same thing like hey, I saw your ad, I’m interested, what do you want for it?– I can write sort of a template e-mail and save that as a canned response, and then when I pull up the e-mail, I just hover over the little arrow button, go to that canned response, whatever I called it, and it populates right in my e-mail.

So you don’t have to re-type that over and over and over again. Super helpful tool, there’s lots of other reasons why I like Gmail, but that’s one of them.

Another Google tool that I still use a lot, and used to run our whole business, is Google Calendar. I use this for life, for time blocking, scheduling appointments, other things; it syncs well with Podio, it syncs with a lot of other services you have as well. But it’s a good online calendar to use and it’s free, Google Calendar.

Google Docs is another version, sort of, of Dropbox, which Andrea talked about earlier, very similar, not as robust, not as awesome in my opinion, because it converts every file to a Google Doc format and I don’t want to get too techy on you here, but– boring!

Andrea: I’m looking at him, giving him the all right, wrap it up!

Doug: But it’s free, you can use it for specific things– I do use Google Docs just to share one particular file with somebody, rather than a whole folder that they don’t need to know. So I still use that. Also Google has free photo album storage called Picasa— Picasa! — if you want to use that, I used to use that.

Another Google service, which is a must, is a Google Voice number. Free to get– you can get a free Google phone number, and you can direct that to your cell phone if you want. It has its own voicemail if you just want it to go to voicemail, you can make calls from it so that people only see your Google Voice number as their Caller ID. You can keep it forever, it’s free. I use my Google Voice number as my business number. It’s also got a call screening feature– really cool stuff.

Andrea: And if there’s any of these tech concepts that we’ve talked about that you would be interested in implementing in your business and maybe we didn’t go into it in detail enough, and I know we sure didn’t explain how to do certain things like, especially auto-responder and things like that– if there’s anything you would like to know exactly how to do it, you can literally go look up a YouTube video.

They have step-by-step guides on almost anything. That’s how we’ve taught ourselves lots of different tech things, by just watching YouTube videos. So definitely check that out if you want to know more in depth.

Doug: Yeah, definitely. Check out YouTube for any of this stuff. There are lots of other resources that Google has. Great company, good resource, good tech tool that we use every day. So, let’s recap!

Andrea: If you’re all still awake–if you’re like me and you’re still awake, let’s recap!

Doug: Hopefully you found this helpful. You know, one thing I wanted to say about technology is it is not essential to do this business. In fact, one of our mentors, a friend of ours, Mike Cantu, doesn’t have a computer at his desk. He doesn’t really use e-mail, I think his assistant does but he doesn’t really know how to do it–

Andrea: He still uses yellow notepads for just about everything.

Doug: He uses file folders, yellow notepads, and a landline phone and an old answering machine.

Andrea: And he’s super successful.

Doug: And he is super successful. Buys a lot of houses. And that’s what works for him, that’s his style. I’d say he’s probably in the minority, most people do use technology, but it’s not essential, you don’t have to. But we find it super helpful for a lot of different reasons.

Just to recap, the main technology tools were Dropbox, check that one out; Podio, love it; your smart phone, you can do so much with that; websites, gotta have a web presence out there; voicemail services; and Google.

Andrea: So that is it for today. Go ahead and if you would like to know how to value a deal like an appraiser, head on over to our website, Spousesflippinghouses.com, and we have a free gift for you there. Doug, who is a former certified residential appraiser, has created a three-part video series on how to analyze a deal, to know if it’s a deal or if it’s a dud.

So go check out this video, and also on our website, we’ve got some great before-and-after videos of projects that we’ve done, other blog posts, some cool different speaking events that Doug’s got coming up soon, so you can check that out.

If you haven’t left us a rating or review on iTunes, we would so appreciate that! It really helps with our rankings on iTunes. And we also appreciate the feedback.

Doug: So that’s it for this week, we hope you enjoyed it, and we will catch you next time!

Andrea: Have a great week!

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The post Episode 9: Technology is Your Friend appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.