All Forum Posts by: Roger Rustad

@Liz Brumer-Smith, once I moved from Upwork (previously Elance) to PeoplePerHour, I started getting better deals on my jobs (maybe 20% savings or so).  I'm using these guys for mostly lead generation and data input, not anything accounting-wise.

Here are some of the tools I use to keep us working together virtually.

• Slack / Skype (Slack does voice now)
• Zapier (for automating leads that come in from Unbounce -- put them into our CRMs, txt via Twilio, etc)
• Zendesk / Freshdesk (for important things that need a ticket)
• Google services (easy collaboration) 

Also, another way to do this is to simply use Twilio.  Sign up, buy numbers in your areas, and then set up Twimlets with those phone numbers.

Super easy.  Your IT guy can figure this out in like an hour.

https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets/voicemail

Rog

"Best" I've seen (and I've used several) is really just Google Voice.  Set it up to a throwaway number and then just turn off the forwarding.  Set a rule in your Gmail account to forward it to your biz address and/or text you. It works like a charm IMO. 

BEWARE! Once you switch to Google Project Fi (cellular service) on this number, you will lose all the "cool" features that you are likely to need as a real estate agent. 

Personally, I just use Property Shark.  I'm not looking up things in bulk while driving, so this works quite well.

Rog 

Thanks for sharing, @Andrew Ware. That's helpful.

@Todd Uttapa, just curious -- where are you going to get VAs?  I just switched to PeoplePerHour.com.  Before that I used Elance/Upwork but am moving now that they up'd the rates.  

Personally, I use SugarCRM and SalesForce.  Salesforce when I have the budget and SugarCRM when I have no budget.

For real estate, best is to probably get something that syncs easily with gmail and then includes that email trail in your CRM.  The one I use for that is Salesforce's tool, RelateIQ (which they acquired). It works good and is very "hackable" to let you sort through the hottest leads.

HTH...

Here is a CNBC story on using Pokemon to try to drive foot traffic. 

(I'm not convinced that this will make much of a difference.)

Google Voice might be a good pick here -- ring all phones at once.

If not that, then check out the "Twimlets" on Twilio. I've used several of these, and they work extremely well. See below:

******************

Forward: will forward a call to another phone, and optionally forward to a new URL if the call isn't answered or the line is busy.

Find Me: will ring up to 10 phone numbers in order, until somebody answers the call, and forward to another URL (or Twimlet) if none of the numbers are answered.

Simulring will dial 2 or more (up to 5) phone numbers simultaneously, and the first person to answer is connected to the caller, and forward to another URL (or Twimlet) if nobody answers.

Voicemail will ask the user to leave a message, and will email the audio recording to a specified email address.

Simple Menu will play a message for the caller, and wait for them to press one or more digits, launching them to a new URL (or twimlet!) based on what they press.

Simple Message will play one or more audio files, say one or more text blocks, or any combination of both.

Call Me is a simple version of Simulring or Find Me that only rings one number, and forward to another URL (or Twimlet) if nobody answers.

Echo simply outputs TwiML passed in via the URL. Useful for building completely stateless apps that place outbound calls.

Conference allows you to build a simple conference line. The conference may be moderated, or may be open.

Hold Music plays hold music indefinitely, based on music stored in an S3 bucket.

More than half of the homes in San Francisco cost $1 million or more. While million-dollar-housing creep is happening nationwide, it’s nowhere more prevalent than in San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland.

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/05/the-rise-of...