Taking notes on a yellow note-pad is so 1990s. No more fumbling through multiple notebooks to find a note you took last week, or thumbing through a notepad like you’re making a flipbook animation. It’s time to take advantage of the cloud, multi-device syncing and digital searching.
Introducing Evernote.

Evernote eliminates the need for that yellow notepad and allows you to search, find, organize and map (yes, map) all of your notes in one location. Best of all, it syncs between your entire device collection (ie: iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, PC, Mac, etc.).

This app may not constitute as a “Commercial Real Estate” specific app, but wait a minute before you think it can’t fit into the CRE industry.

As a commercial real estate broker, being on the road is the norm. Showing space, touring with clients, prospecting, etc. And taking notes runs parallel with all these events (most of you reading this probably have a stack of notepads on your desk from years of scribbling!).

With Evernote, you can take notes on the go from your iPad or other mobile devices. As soon as you return to the office, the notes are waiting for you on your desktop computer. You can even start a note while on the go and finish it on your desktop or other mobile device.

The best part is the mapping feature directly built into Evernote. All notes created on a mobile device take advantage of the built in GPS capability and geo-tag the notes. You can then view all your notes ever taken on a Google Map for easy referencing. This can come in handy when a client asks ‘What’s the latest on my building?’ Now you can pull up the map, zoom down to the building your client owns and then see every note ever taken while you were at the building.

How Evernote works…

Users of Evernote install a small program onto their desktop computer and download the app onto however many devices they possess. You then create an account (free) and login on all your devices with those credentials. Evernote stores all the notes you take in the “cloud” so that you can access them from anywhere and on any device. For free accounts, you are limited to a certain amount of data transfer per month to sync and you have other limitations such as viewing files offline.

CRE Usage Tips…

Create a notebook for every assignment you manage. Any note you take regarding that assignment sits within this notebook and is easily searchable.
Tag every note with the clients/contact name. That way if you show a prospect multiple buildings for different assignments, you can search for the tag that is the clients name and see all notes every made regarding that prospect. You are basically creating a mini-CRM.
Take notes while at the building, or immediately after a tour. Since every note is geo-referenced with a latitude and longitude, you can look on a map and see the notes associated with the building.
Record seminars or conference sessions using the recording feature in Evernote. This helps if it’s hard to keep up with the notes on your iPad. You can just record the entire session and revisit at your leisure.
In a meeting with a client and can’t remember who you showed their property to? Pull up Evernote on your iPhone and get access to all your notes remotely.

Download this app: Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad