The more you do with real estate, the more you will realize that time is money. So many of the things that you will need to do take up your precious time. Anything you can do to speed up the process ( and hopefully simplify your life) is worth its weight in gold. I am not a particularly neat person so I need all of the help that I can get. One thing I’ve found beneficial is a way to have a business phone number without paying for an added phone line, With how expensive cellphones are nowadays, Google Voice is a godsend.
When you get a call on a property you have to do a number of things: run comps, calculate equity, go meet with the owner, estimate rehab costs, fill out a contract, research the legal description of the home, print your contract, sign it, email/fax it to the owner, submit signed contract to your title company, set up your inspection, etc.
These are all the things you don’t see on the sexy flipping shows on TV. We call this the busy/dirty work. It is not fun but it has to be done. Enter Google Voice.
Why I like Google Voice.
- I don’t have my personal cellphone on the three thousand plus mailers I’m sending out a month.
- I can receive texts from people who don’t want to talk.
- I can forward the calls to my business partner so we can both take calls from the same number.
- With the Google Voice App, it will transcribe my voicemail into text. It’s not 100% accurate but it gets the gist of the message.
- I can call them back from my cell using the Google Voice number.
- Google will automatically filter out spam.
- It lists out all of my voicemail and calls in an orderly visual list.
- When I get home for the day, I can go through and document what happened on each/every call.
- I can add notes to calls.
- I can email the call to another party. (Great tool for training)
- I can download the call. (Great for record keeping)
- I can favorite calls.
- It’s free!
Do you use Google Voice for your business? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments!