If you are serious about your real estate investing career, you are going to be developing a list of useful people who can support you in your investment career - Realtors, attorneys, accountants, tradesmen, attorneys, lenders, etc. Chances are you will have more than one in many of these categories - especially the tradesmen category.
When you are just getting started, post-it notes or names/addresses in a notebook or a collection of business cards can work pretty good. But once you have talked with several people and/or completed a first deal, you will find that system unwieldy. Cards will get lost. Post-it notes get thrown out. And notes that should be kept about the quality of each contact never get recorded because it is too much effort to look for the contact name to write down your notes.
So if you are serious about your real estate investing, you need another way.
Rolodex/contact book - A rolodex is a great contact management system. It contains business sized pieces of cardboard and an alphabetic list of tabs. This lets you enter names alphabetically or by category - plumbers, carpenters, etc. Each card allows you to write quite a bit of information on it so you can record when you did business with a particular contact and your opinion of that contact. You can also easily rearrange the cards by pulling them out and moving them to an other place. If you were keeping the names by categories, this would let you put your favorites contacts in each category at the front of the section and your less favorite ones towards the back of the section. If one card gets damaged, you can just take it out, copy the contact information and put it back in. And you never need to worry about your rolodex crashing and eating up your contact list. In fact, short of a fire in your home or office, this is about the safest way to keep your contacts forever.
One final note about using a rolodex (or any contact manager) is to never remove a contact from it. You might find that you hated dealing with a contractor and want to throw the name out. It is a normal impulse but try to resist it. You might forget that person if get busy and be tempted to try that "new" person three years later because all your contacts in your rolodex are taken. If you keep the name in the rolodex with a note saying not to do business with this person, you will always know to head elsewhere if at all possible.
The only disadvantage of a rolodex is that it is not portable. That can be easily solved by getting a pocket sized address book and recording your top contacts that you may need when you are on the road. Chances are it is a small subset of the entire list so it shouldn’t take too much to create and maintain this portable contact system of your important real estate contracts. Names you would probably want in this portable book are names of contractors and tradesmen in case you run into an emergency while on the road. You may also want the names of a few trusted advisors that you could call when looking at a deal.
PC Based contact manager - PC based contact managers can be fairly simple or quite complex. Some can even dial your telephone for you. There are several nice things about PC based contact managers for your real estate business. They can be used to keep extensive dated notes about every contact. They can keep your calendar so you know when to follow up with someone. They often support exporting your contact list to a portable electronic device like a PDA. The calendar feature and limitless notes makes a PC based contact manager very powerful.
The main drawbacks of PC based contact managers is that they can be complex to install and setup and you can lose your data if your computer crashes. But if you follow a good backup program, that should not be an issue.
Note: There are also web based contact managers that you could install on your domain. These let you access your contact list anywhere you have access to a computer on the internet.
Portable electronic contact manager - PDAs and Blackberries and similar devices are a great way to keep your contacts portable if you are comfortable using these devices. Many people use them in conjunction with a PC based contact manager to reduce the somewhat tedious effort of typing in all your contacts on the tiny keyboard or touchpad offered by such devices. They often allow you to keep name and address details, a calendar function and some space for notes. And if it is integrated with your phone - like in a Blackberry - calling your contact is a one touch operation.
Backup operations on portable electronic contact managers generally require you to connect the device to your PC and upload your contact list to your PC. This is a reliable way to backup your list - or synchronize your PC based contact manager with your portable device without a lot of repetitive retyping. And as always, be sure to make a backup of your PC based copy of the list. One of the most painful things that can happen is completely losing several years of contacts.
So which system is best for the real estate investor? It all depends on your level of comfort with technology. I personally use a web based contact manager and a paper based book of important on the road contacts as I find that combination works best for me. When it is time to upgrade my cell phone, it is very likely I’ll get a Blackberry or similar phone and migrate to that for my portable contact list.
Whatever system you choose, be sure to keep it up to date. It truly becomes more valuable the bigger it gets.
Post a Comment