Best Phone System

[Robert Burns]

I am currently using Ring Central for my real estate investing phone system and want to change. I would appreciate any recommendations for phone systems being using by other investors.

Thanks,

Bob Burns

[Jesse Tsai]

We use our own hosted asterisk server.

The cost is around $20 per month +$1.5 per phone number. We have 7 extensions on our system. It comes out to about a 85% savings off what we would pay for ringcentral, and we get an infinitely customizable system.

The upside is we can add a relatively large number of extensions, and still pay the same amount for hosting. On ring central, I think they charge around $20 per extension.

You can also program just about anything you can think of into it. Its just a matter of communicating your idea to a programmer, and their ability to code it.

The downside is when you have an outage, you're either on your own, or at the mercy of your ability to get a asterisk programmer to fix it.

Heres the process:

Rent a pbx server from rentpbx.com or any other provider. (~$50 per quarter)

Get a SIP trunk from Vitelity or any other provider. Use that to get a DID (phone number) and SIP trunk. ($8 per month or $0.01 per minute + $1.5 for DID or $3 for toll free)

Hire voiceover talent to record your greeting and messages. ($.75-$1 per word)

Hire a programmer off elance to configure it all the way we want. ($33 per hour. We had about 3.5 hours for 5 lines, time conditions, multiple greetings, and a few custom scripts written)

Buy SIP phones off ebay. We use Aastra 6757i. They run about $50 each.