Dianne Bartlett's Lakeway Lake Travis Real Estate Blog

The most essential real estate tool is the least expensive.  In fact, you may still be able to find it on sale amongst Walmart's back to school supplies.  The most essential real estate tool is a simple, spiral-bound notebook.  (If you don't like the metal spiral binding, you can use the cloth-bound - whatever will hold those pages together forever).

I am married to the "absent-minded professor."  My husband does not appear to be an organized person and still doesn't think about cleaning up after himself.  He has many other wonderful qualities but you just wouldn't want him to be in charge of re-organizing your closet.  However, I learned the most valuable organizational tool from this man right at the beginning of my real estate career.

I think of myself as fairly organized, and I'm very good at writing things down to help.  In real estate, we have to do a lot of remembering and a lot of writing down.  Well, I did what the typical agent does.  I wrote phone messages on sticky notes.  Isn't that what they are for??  I used separate file folders for each client and kept my notes on the clients in each folder.  It made logical sense to me.  BUT, it drove me crazy.

Here's what happened.  In real estate, you don't sit at the same desk every day from 9 to 5.  You drive around, you sit down at the title company and do some work, you go to the office and sit at a desk there and you come back home and sit in your home office.  It's when you are away from those files and sticky notes that the phone call comes in from a client who has a question - and the answer is at home in your files.  Or, you need to call someone who just left you a message that you wrote on that sticky note and hadn't had a chance to input it in your phone yet.

I guess if you're a super fast typist on a tiny keyboard, you could ditch the paper files and notes alltogether and always take your notes on your smart phone.  In fact, I'm pretty diligent about going straight to an electronic format.  Still, I get busy.  Maybe I'm talking on my smart phone when I need to jot down some notes!  I don't know about you... but I'm not paperless, yet!

In comes the most essential real estate tool.  My husband said:  Keep all your notes in one place.

You will find that the most essential real estate tool is a simple, spiral-bound (or cloth-bound) notebook.  Because we are open to a lot of legal liability in real estate, it is imperative that we keep very good documentation at all times.  In addition, this documentation will help you stay organized!  Get in the habit of writing down everything in ONE PLACE.  This one place should be a bound spiral or notebook that you can label with a date range once you have used it up and go on to another blank spiral.  Write EVERYTHING in this notebook.  Avoid sticky notes and phone message pads.  Instead, write phone numbers and notes in your ONE notebook.  Carry this notebook with you everywhere, and do not lose it.

I have 10 years worth of spiral notebooks in my file cabinet.  Boy have they come in handy!  I write all my "to-do" lists in these.  I can find any old phone number simply by remembering the approximate date I last used it.  I can find any old notes on a house I listed because it's all in one place.  I jot down notes during phone calls that turn contentious - just in case.  I've even saved my clients money at the closing table or cleared up potential confusion when I've been able to pull out my notebook and read my notes from phone calls where agents said certain things would happen before closing.

While I don't carry all my notebooks with me, I have found that just having the latest one in my possession at all times keeps me super organized.  I seldom need the older notebooks but have them just in case.  Of course I still keep an electronic database of contact information, and I have client folders.  But, the initial information usually starts out in my most essential real estate tool - the spiral notebook.