When it comes to real estate investing and scaling your portfolio, it is extremely important to create systems and processes to help streamline your business. One way to gain a competitive edge is by harnessing the power of technology and leveraging automation tools. In this article, we'll explore how these 5 innovative apps can transform the way you acquire properties, analyze deals, track expenses, manage tenants, and optimize your bookkeeping and reporting. I've been using these apps for years to automate my Real Estate Investing, but it took a lot of research and guesswork to see which ones were best. Hopefully this will serve as guide to others out there looking to shortcut this learning curve.
Lead Generation
Before you purchase any piece of Real estate, you need to make sure you are getting a good deal, which means purchasing a property at below market value for some built-in equity and making sure the property cash flows.
To find properties, everyone knows that they can use MLS or even Zillow/Redfin to find properties that meet certain criteria. However, finding off-market properties gives you a better chance to find distressed properties and/or motivated sellers based. Enter: DealMachine.
DealMachine is a site/app that allows you to identify those homes their owners who may have reason to sell quickly. They have a multitude of filters that are geared towards finding these potential motivated sellers such as owners who may have adjustable loans, absentee owners, or who are delinquent on their payments.
Best of all, once you have identified a list of homes and their owners, called Leads, it also provides automation capabilities to send direct mail marketing to these Leads with their mailing address and contact information already entered. They provide sample postcards that you can use, and in several clicks you could be sending out flyers to prospective buyers.
DealMachine is a very powerful tool and there are many customization options, but I've personally used it to send direct mail marketing flyers in under an hour.
Acquisition
Once you've identified a property, whether it is sourced from DealMachine, Zillow, or even your Real Estate agent, you've got to identify if it's a truly good deal. This means you should be tracking what the cash flows looks like and the Return on Investment is. There is no better tool than using the BiggerPockets calculators. BiggerPockets has been around for years and if you're a serious investor, you should be using it on a daily or weekly basis to analyze deals and use its forums to make connections with other real estate investors, lenders, agents, contractors, etc.
The BiggerPockets calculators make it dummy proof to analyze deals and will give you the confidence to make offers when it meets your criteria. it will give you the most important metrics such as cash flow, annualized returns, after entering in the purchase price, loan details, rental rate, and maintenance expenses. BP also has a very useful rent estimator as well. BP has a lot of free webinars on how to use these calculators and will walk you step by step through this process, so there is no excuse not to use them.
Rehab and Project Management
One of the biggest pitfalls that new real estate investors make is going over budget and estimated time to complete their rehab. This step in the process could literally make or break your deal. After speaking to many real estate investors about rehabs, I discovered that most of them still used good old fashioned spreadsheets and there wasn't a real good way to estimate rehab costs beforehand other than using their experience in previous flips/renos. I couldn't go into a flip with any sort of confidence. That is, until I found FlipperForce. This nifty site gives you a great way to estimate rehabs and lets you get as granular or generic as your choose to be in terms of the work that needs to be done. For example, let's say you need to get some painting done but aren't sure how much it will cost. If you just want a quick estimate, the interface gives you an estimate for the labor cost and all you have to do is input the square footage of the home or rooms you are getting done. On the other hand, if you need are painting things like kitchen or vanity cabinets, there is more detailed tab for this.
It's also a great way to make sure as a new investor that you haven't missed any big ticket items as it categorizes all the potential rehab costs into Exterior, Interior, Mechanicals (HVAC, plumbing), and even has line items for easily missed items like contingencies and contractor overheads.
Once you have entered in all your costs, FlipperForce has built-in deal analysis tools letting you know if this is a good deal given the purchase price you input and what your expected profit will be based on the rehab budget you created.
Rental Management
For all those self-managed property owners, you will absolutely love these last three apps that will make your life so much easier. The first one up is Zillow Rental Manager. It is an extremely easy to use to not only market your newly acquired and rehabbed property to tenants, but also has built-in tools for tenant screening and applications. And it's free! I also very much like using Zillow Rental Manager to validate my asking rent using their rent estimate algorithm.
Bookkeeping and Reporting
While marketing and screening tenants can be a time-consuming task, there is none more laborious than creating a lease and having effective communication with tenants for maintenance requests. My favorite tool for this is TurboTenant.
TurboTenant  is an absolutely game-changer for landlords looking to streamline tenant management to include creating state-specific leases, move-in/move-out checklists, and managing maintenance requests. Like Zillow Rental Manager, it also offers features like online rental applications, background checks, and digital lease signing. Additionally, TurboTenant provides a secure portal for tenants to pay rent electronically, reducing the need for manual collection and increasing efficiency. With automated reminders and tenant screening tools, you can find and manage reliable tenants with ease.
Finally, while not the most exciting part of the real estate investing, bookkeeping and tracking the performance of your REI assets may be the most important task that you do. A tool that I've been using for years (even before being acquired by Roofstock) is an app called Stessa. Stessa is a powerful property management software that simplifies the process of tracking rental property finances. With Stessa, you can automate your bookkeeping, track income and expenses, and generate detailed financial reports. It works by connecting to your bank accounts and mortgage lenders to automatically pull in your transactions so you can easily track your profit/loss and actual cashflows. The platform also integrates with popular accounting software, making tax time a breeze. Stessa's intuitive interface and user-friendly design ensure that even those without a financial background can efficiently manage their real estate portfolio.
Technology has revolutionized the way real estate investors operate, allowing for increased efficiency and improved productivity. By incorporating these top 5 apps to automate your real estate investing, you can easily cut down on the time essential tasks like analyzing deals, tracking expenses, and managing tenants and payments. It is important to not only embrace the power of technology to stay ahead in the competitive real estate market, but also essential for you to scale and operate like a business.