Rookie Reply: 19 Best Real Estate Investing Apps We Couldn’t Live Without

Ashley:
This is Real Estate Rookie, episode 194. My name is Ashley Kehr, and I’m here with my co-host, Tony Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast, where every week, twice a week, we bring you the inspiration, information and education you need to kickstart your real estate investing career. So Ashley Kehr, what is going on today. I see you don’t have your typical hip hop T-shirt on. You got some country on today. Felt like switching it up, I see.

Ashley:
Yeah. You know what? I feel like everybody knows my gangster side, so I got to show my countryside a little bit here.

Tony:
Got to represent both sides.

Ashley:
Got my Kenny Chesney, she thinks my tractor’s sexy, T-shirt on. Yeah, so I actually found the other day, this bin in our basement and it’s all my husband’s old T-shirts from when… I mean, he’s a, don’t want to brag, and I’m a lot younger than him, so he has all these ’90s T-shirts from concerts he went to. So I was going through all of them, I’m like, “Geez, some of these are cool, vintage, country T-shirts,” so I might start-

Tony:
There you go.

Ashley:
… throwing them out here on the podcast.

Tony:
You got your own thrift shop. Yeah, you got your own thrift shop in your basement.

Ashley:
Yeah.

Tony:
I love that. Well, what else is new Ash? What’s going on?

Ashley:
So my business partner, Joe, who’s actually been on the podcast before, he’s been pretty stagnant, shall I say, in his real estate investing in the past, probably, year and a half. He built his own house. He had a baby, so he’s been super busy. Well, he has been talking to me a little bit more about getting another deal, working on a project and today, I was so proud. He sent me a property and he said, “I set up the showing and we’re going at 5:30 today.” I said, “I am so proud of you for finding the deal, getting us to showing. Now, how are you going to pay for it?” He’s like, “Well, I’m poor, so you got to pay that out.” But, I was super happy for him that he is ready to get back into investing and taking some initiative after taking some time off. He has a full time landscaping business that he runs, so it is still his side hustle that he does, but yeah. Excited for him to get back into it.

Tony:
That’s awesome. What kind of property is it? Is it a single family or duplex?

Ashley:
Yeah, it’s a single family and it’s actually right near his house where we’ve also purchased a property before. This area, there’s actually a waste management dump site. I don’t even know, a landfill, I guess that’s what it’s called, and in that town… So he lives on the far end of the town and the landfill is on the other side of the town, so we purchase properties near his side because the landfill, they actually pay the majority of the property taxes.

Tony:
That’s awesome.

Ashley:
It’s something to do with, oh, because of the smell of the garbage. Well, you can’t smell it at all when you’re on the other side of the town. So the property taxes, I mean, are ridiculously cheap, especially in New York State, so we find that very attractive to purchase in this area.

Tony:
Tip for new investors, always look for the landfills. That’s where you’ll find the best deals going forward. No, cool. I’m excited for you guys. Keep us posted on how that deal turns out and I’m glad to see Joe back in the game.

Ashley:
Yeah. I don’t know. Joe was on one episode. We did a partnership. It was with Sarah too. We had her on talking about partnerships, so you guys will have to go back and find that in the one of our past episodes and take a listen.

Tony:
Yeah. Cool. Well, glad things are moving along. I mean, we’re busy, busy, busy, right now, but one of the things we did most recently that has been tremendously helpful is we hired some folks onto our teams. So we have four people that we added to our operations team.

Ashley:
Wow.

Tony:
So we’ve been ramping them up over the last couple of weeks, and it has been like a life changing experience to have some other people to manage all the different pieces of the operational aspect. We’ve got some virtual assistants that we hired for the front end guest communication, then we hired an operation’s manager that manages those VAs and deals with the bigger, more strategic issues that pop up. So me, Sarah and Omid are slowly getting some of our time back, so that way we’re not so much in the weeds and we can continue to focus on growing the business. Busy training people, but also, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel that it’s going to be one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.

Ashley:
Yeah. I remember Sarah did this Instagram reel where you guys went to Disneyland, I think. It was like, a day in the life of an investor at Disneyland, and it’s like, “Oh, got to take care of this call. Got to shoot this interview message.”

Tony:
Totally. All that was so real. People were asking, it’s like, “Oh, is that staged, where you guys…” And I’d be like, “Literally that is the life that we live.”

Ashley:
I’ve been with them places, and I know it’s real.

Tony:
Yeah, so excited to start building the team out so we can grow this into an actual business and not just a job for ourselves.

Ashley:
Awesome. Well, today we want to talk about, actually, some apps today that help manage your business easier, too. We both created a list of different apps that we use every day for different things in our business, and we thought maybe these would help you guys, be an interest of you. As real estate investors, we’re usually always on the go and we don’t always have time to sit down, at a computer, and pull up software or to go onto our computers and try different things out, so with apps, you do everything from your phone.

Ashley:
Some of the apps that I use when I am looking for deals, the first one, pretty obvious, is Zillow or realtor.com. Those apps just to scroll listings. The next is LandGlide, so this is an app that shows you parcel information, so you can input an address, or you can search, maybe if you’re driving around and you see a house, you can pull it up on the map, see who the owner is, the mailing address. PropStream is another one that is similar to that, and then there’s also onX Hunt. This is my favorite one. It’s actually a hunting app, so you can pull up information about the property too, but it also tells you, and LandGlide does this too, as to how much of the property of the parcel is maybe forest, how much is field? How much is the actual building? Are there other buildings on it? I think that’s really cool too, especially if you’re looking for vacant land deals or lots of acreage, you can find out what exactly that acreage is composed of.

Ashley:
Then there’s also DealCheck, which is just a way to analyze the property and will actually pull information from the Amalas, such as Zillow, into the calculator for you when you input the address. Then there is Homesnap, where you can actually take a picture of the property, and it will actually pull it up for you, the information on it, so it uses your GPS tracking on your phone, so you have to have all those location services turned on. But these apps also tell you too, the outline, the survey of the property. They’re not 100% accurate, but if you’re walking a property, I like to be able to see where the actual lines are, where the property ends and starts. Those are my big ones for finding deals.

Ashley:
The next ones that I use are more just to keep my head in place, and the first one is Personal Capital. So this is where I can link all of my bank accounts, all of my credit cards, even my investment accounts, and I can just open it every day and I can see just a little dashboard of what all my balances are on all of them. Then I use Easy Calculator, so this is a free app with so many different calculators. So I use it to compute interest only payments. I use it to compute principle and interest payments to pull up an amortization schedule. And then I also, sometimes when I think about, “Okay, if I put this much into my kids’ savings account, or their investment account,” and I see on average, it takes 9%, I like to see in 10 years how much money will kids have in their invested account. So those different calculators I like to use and they come handy. They’re so quick to open up.

Ashley:
Then the next thing is Google Tasks. So this links with all my other Google products, so Google Calendar, Google Docs, all these. So Google Tasks is just a really easy way to input things I need to do on the go and you can set them so they’re actually on your calendar to remind you. You just check it when you’re done and it disappears, but you can always go back and look at what you’ve actually accomplished for your day.

Ashley:
Then the last app that I’ve used is Hours Tracker. And I’ve used this two different ways, so Hours Tracker, I’ve used it as time tracking to see where my time is going, where I’ll just log in and log out as to, “Okay, I worked on my business for three hours here, and then I made lunch for an hour, and then I scrolled social media for an hour,” and it’s like, “Okay, there’s where my time is wasted. There’s where my time is productive.” But I’ve also done it to track different projects. Darrell that I work with, he’s used this too, is to like, “Okay, he’s working on managing this rehab just so we can get an idea too, of where his time is actually going.” So I found that app, Hours Tracker, very valuable. And those are the main apps that I use throughout the day, besides my text messages and my mail. Actually, I don’t even respond to text messages, so I wouldn’t even include that one.

Tony:
Well, Ash, that was like an encyclopedia of real estate investing apps, so it’ll be hard for me to top that, but I have a couple that I think are cool. The first one that I’ll talk about isn’t even about real estate investing. It’s about content creation and I’m starting with this one first because I think so many people can benefit from sharing their journey about investing on social media and other platforms. One of the apps that I was using is called Splice, so S-P-L-I-C-E, and it’s a really easy to use social media editing app, and it allows you to export in the reels or TikTok sized format. You can add captions and music and all kinds of other things, so it’s a really easy way to take your normal content, spruce it up a little bit, so it gets a little bit more love on social.

Tony:
The next one I use, similar to the Hour Tracker one, but it’s called Time, and this one directly integrates with QuickBooks, so that’s why I like that one. My CPA recommended it. I was using it more so for the real estate professional status, so you have to track your hours to show how much time you’re putting into the business, so we were using it for that reason, so time by QuickBooks. MileIQ is another one that I really like, so that one helps you track mileage on your vehicles. I can’t remember if that one integrates with QuickBooks or not, but QuickBooks has another version of a mile tracker app that’s really helpful.

Tony:
The next app that I use is the Schlage app, so at all of our short-term rentals, we have a keyless entry pad and we’re able to remotely unlock or lock that using the Schlage app, and then we can also create, delete and edit unique codes for all of our guests using that app as well, so the Schlage app is super helpful as a short term rental owner. The next app we use for the short term rentals is the Ring app. The Ring video doorbell, they have a whole suite of security devices. They also have the Ring floodlight camera, which we have at every single one of our properties, and that’s cool because you can check and see who’s coming in, who’s coming out. If you ever need to scare someone off of your property, you can make the alarms go off. We’ve had to do that once or twice, so the Ring gap is definitely a helpful one.

Tony:
Then the last one I’ll mention that’s productivity base or, probably not even productivity based, but the next one I’ll mention is the Loom mobile app, so if you guys don’t know, Loom is a screen recording website where you can go and take quick screen recordings of what you’re doing to give video instructions to someone, but they also have a mobile app. I found that to be super helpful because sometimes we’re out or we’re doing stuff on our phone and you can record a quick Loom on your phone as well, so that’s pretty cool.

Tony:
Then the last two I’ll mention, these ones are strictly productivity. First is monday.com, so we’re big on trying to have project management software for our business. We used to use Wrike, we’ve since switched over to monday.com. There’s a little bit more customization you can do there, but if we’re ever on the fly, we need to take track of something while we’re on the go, the monday.com app is super helpful.

Tony:
Then the last one is a Miro, so M-I-R-O. Miro is a brainstorming app where you can do… What are those things called? Little thing with the… Why can’t I remember what they’re called?

Ashley:
Like a-

Tony:
Anyway, it’s a brainstorming thing.

Ashley:
An organization chart?

Tony:
Or you can put-

Ashley:
Like a brain dump?

Tony:
Yeah.

Ashley:
Yeah.

Tony:
Or a chart. Yeah, exactly.

Ashley:
Basically think of a white board-

Tony:
You guys know what we’re talking about, right?

Ashley:
… with Post-it notes thrown up all over it.

Tony:
Yeah. It’s going to drive me crazy that I can’t think of what the heck that diagram with the lines. I don’t know why I can’t think of what this is called.

Ashley:
Yeah. Tony, actually just got me started using that too, when we started brain dumping ideas for the podcast. I have to say, I really enjoy it too, because right now, I actually have this huge whiteboard sitting in my living room and I think that this app is finally going to get me away from whiteboards.

Tony:
The whiteboard? Yeah, it’s a mind map.

Ashley:
Mind map.

Tony:
That’s what it’s called. A mind map.

Ashley:
Yeah. Okay.

Tony:
Yeah, so you can make mind maps, flow charts, all kinds of other things and just any brainstorming. For most people that are entrepreneurial, they have a thousand ideas a day, and it’s easy to let those ideas slip and you have this great idea and you never execute on it because it came and then it went, so for me, I love having the Miro mobile app because anytime I have an idea about any part of my business, I open up Miro. We have a board for that specific idea. I drop a little note on there, that way I can come back to it later when it’s time to execute, so the Miro app is something I use really regularly as well. So I think that’s everything on my side Ash. Those are all the big ones that we use on a regular basis.

Ashley:
Yeah. I’m definitely, pretty sure, I’m going to switch to that Time one, because I like that it integrates with QuickBooks because that’s what I use. Then I didn’t know that Loom had an app too, so I’m definitely going to download them.

Tony:
Yeah.

Ashley:
Yeah, so thanks Tony.

Tony:
There you go.

Ashley:
Thank you guys for joining us this week for this week’s Rookie Reply. I’m Ashley at Welcome Rentals and he’s Tony at Tony J Robinson on Instagram. We will see you guys on Wednesday.