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Podcast Hard Money Lenders Books New York
BlogArrowBusiness ManagementArrowTwo Powerful Texting Tools to Help Simplify Your Real Estate Business
Business Management

Two Powerful Texting Tools to Help Simplify Your Real Estate Business

Aaron Kinney
Expertise: Mortgages & Creative Financing, Landlording & Rental Properties, Business Management
26 Articles Written
texting-tools-real-estate

In today’s post, I’d like to review a couple of texting tools that I use in my real estate investing business: MightyText.net and CheapestTexting.com.

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For one-on-one texting conversations or texting a group of people in a one-time conversation, MightyText works great. However, I’d recommend a service like CheapestTexting to handle your text message marketing campaigns (such as alerting potential tenants of a newly available property).

Computer-to-Text: MightyText.net

Screen Shot 2016-01-12 at 3.22.45 PM

I’m slow typing text messages into my phone, and even though voice-to-text recognition has gotten a lot better, I find that I’m way faster and more accurate typing on a keyboard.

I’ve been using MightyText since 2014. Back then, I was doing all of the tenant management and would typically be contacted a few times a day, mostly via phone calls. Most of the time, I would text the tenant using MightyText that I was busy but would try to answer their question by text. The majority of the time, I could answer their question within two or three texts. Phone calls are terribly distracting when you’re working on something else, and even though texts are still disruptive, I find that I can quickly go back and forth.

I’m no longer handling the tenant management (my assistant does and uses MightyText as well) but still like to use MightyText for messages with my team or friends and family.

Related: Personal Finance Software: 7 Top-Notch Tools to Help You Grow Wealth

A few other cool features:

  • Desktop Notifications: With the MightyText Chrome extension, the text messages pop up on your screen regardless of whether or not you’re logged into the MightyText Web app. No more reaching into my pocket to find my phone when I’m logged into my computer.
  • Gmail Integration: You can send and receive text messages from within Gmail. Pretty useful if you keep your email open all day.
  • Schedule Messages: I believe that everything I’ve mentioned previously is available in the free version of the app. For $40 per year, you can upgrade to the pro version that includes several other features, including scheduling messages. I don’t like to send texts before 9:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m. so I use the scheduling feature regularly, which makes the pro upgrade worthwhile.

One downside with MightyText is that it only works for Android phones. For iPhone users, I’m sure you can find a similar tool.

Keeping Potential Tenants Updated: CheapestTexting.com

Screen Shot 2016-01-12 at 3.23.04 PM

Once potential tenants see one of our advertisements, our goal is to keep them in our sales funnel so that they or someone that they know will eventually rent one of our homes.

From early on, we’ve kept these potential tenants updated through email. I first had an email list through Gmail and eventually moved it to Mailchimp, which is where it’s at now.  

Our open rates average 15-20 percent. With a list size that’s grown to around 525 people, only about 100 people even open our emails.

Facebook has played a big role for us, especially in the past year, as the page now has over 3,000 likes. We do quite a bit of advertising on it and have had several current tenants find us through Facebook.

For people who don’t find us through Facebook, I wanted a solution with better open rates than email. Texting was an obvious solution, as people almost always check text messages on their phone. They’re tough to ignore since they interrupt whatever you’re doing. However, the cost of texting services had been an obstacle for a while. It’s common to see plans that charge three and five cents per text message.

We’ve used Ez Texting’s free plan for several months to remind current tenants that rent is due, but this plan is limited to 500 texts, and the paid plans were expensive.  

I stumbled upon CheapestTexting a couple months ago, and they have a $49 per month plan that gives you 5,000 messages and two custom keywords. They also have a $99 plan for 50,000 messages and four keywords.

Related: 4 Brilliant (Low or No Cost!) Online Tools for Real Estate Professionals

We began to advertise that potential tenants can stay updated with properties through texting in early November, and within a month, we had grown the list by 350 numbers. Way faster growth rate than email!

The keywords have had an added unforeseen benefit. We can set a different keyword for each vacant property so that potential tenants can get specific property info and even the lockbox code. We can track how many people have texted which keywords. The keywords have also cut down on the amount of time my assistant spends on the phone, as the automated messages answer the large majority of a caller’s questions.

This has been a fantastic tool that I wish we had started using sooner.

Can you recommend any similar texting services?

Let me know with a comment!

By Aaron Kinney
Aaron Kinney has been investing in mobile home and land properties since 2011. He writes about this occasionally at MobileHomeEbook.com and helps real estate businesses implement automation at SelahSoftware.com.
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9 Replies
    Account Closed from Frederick, Maryland
    Replied about 5 years ago
    Here, here for MightyText – I’m a long time user and big fan! I just wish there was a setting that would mark messages “read” on phone, when sent from computer…

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    Aaron Kinney Real Estate Investor from Lexington, South Carolina
    Replied about 5 years ago
    Agreed Michael. That would be useful! I’m going to check with them and see if that’s a feature that they’re working on.

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    Aaron Kinney Real Estate Investor from Lexington, South Carolina
    Replied about 5 years ago
    Agreed Michael. That would be useful! I’m going to check with them and see if that’s a feature that they’re working on.

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    Curt Smith Rental Property Investor from Clarkston, GA
    Replied about 5 years ago
    Thanks for more tools to choose from. Can anyone compare these two tools to callfire? cost / features vs cheapesttexting? Mightytext.net is interesting! Tell me if this would work: you give your phone to a PM for a vacation. Renters text to the phone in the PMs hands. From a cruise ship I can watch the text stream on the web site to keep tabs? There’s all sorts of “managment” uses for such a feature. Buy cell phones for remote PMs of MFs or mobile home parks, they intereact with contractors, tenants, you can see everything when you want to. If this works?

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    Aaron Kinney Real Estate Investor from Lexington, South Carolina
    Replied about 5 years ago
    Hey Curt, Not sure about Call Fire. I’ll leave that to somebody else. Just to give you an idea of my set up, our business phone (a $100 Moto G phone that I purchased and a $10 per month plan through Republic Wireless that includes unlimited talk and text) is answered by my virtual assistant. All calls from sellers and potential and current tenants come through this number. Like you mentioned, I can see all of the texts that she sends from the MightyText log regardless if she sends them through MightyText on her computer or through her phone.

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    Saul L. Specialist from Kiryat Motzkin, Israel
    Replied about 5 years ago
    Not sure if “Whatsapp” is in common use in the US, but it is in my opinion by far and away the best messaging app. It is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS at all, It can be accessed from your laptop or computer, allows group messaging, and group broadcasts (unlimited I think), video and picture attachments, voice messages and even VoiP calls (similar to Skype) – according to their website first year is free and thereafter $0.99 (99 cents) per year ! I have been using for a few years and never been charged.

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    Frankie Woods Investor from Arlington, Virginia
    Replied about 5 years ago
    This was awesome!

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    Peter Mckernan Residential Real Estate Agent from Irvine, CA
    Replied almost 5 years ago
    Hello Aaron, this is a great article since I had no idea that these were options and it sounds like you have been having a good amount of productivity success with the applications. To be honest I still text before 9:00 a.m. and sometimes there will be a matter that I will need to text after 9:00 p.m.; however, I need to monitor that a little more while working with tenants and other clients. Thank you for writing this up!

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    Cornelius Charles Investor from Oxnard, California
    Replied almost 5 years ago
    Great article Aaron. I’m going to check out both mightytext and mailchimp.

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