Keeping your mortgage leads top of mind as you go through your work day can be a challenge some days. Remembering who needs a callback, resending paperwork, scheduling meetings, fielding requests. It’s a juggling act when your in the office and even more like the circus when you’re out and about. Is there an app for that?
Fortunately, yes, there’s an app for just about everything these days. Productivity products can help you do all this and more from the phone or tablet you already bring everywhere. Here’s a rundown of some of the best apps to keep your mortgage leads top of mind.
Email Apps
For a lot of people, email is one of the first items to tackle in the morning. But those emails don’t stop at 9:30 when you’re ready to get on with your day. Customers send them at all hours of the day (and night). Being able to acknowledge a client’s question while you’re on the clock, but away from your desk, helps build that all-important client trust.
Gmail
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A go-to email client these days for work and home, Google’s Gmail apps for Android and iOS are used by hundreds of millions. The app comes pre-installed on a number of mobile devices and works with Google’s other productivity apps.
Outlook
A number of tech bloggers have been raving about the new Microsoft Outlook app for Android and iOS. The Outlook app has an easy-to-use interface and good calendar integration, making scheduling appointments a snap.
Mailbox
An alternative to the big email players, Mailbox claims its clean user interface will help you get your inbox cleaned out. Users sort through and clean up their email with a number of gestures, include a one-swipe move that works like a snooze button for an email you’ll answer at a future designated time.
Calendar Scheduling Apps
For a mortgage professional, a good deal of your email work ends up on your weekly calendar, so you need a good one of these to manage setting up and following your schedule.
Sunrise
The Sunrise calendar app is great because of how nice it plays with all your other apps. You can easily pull up the LinkedIn profile of your next appointment and sync your schedule with Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, or iCloud.
Fantastical 2
The Fantastical 2 app is a Mac-specific app, available for iPhone and Mac. The app is yet another calendar app, this time adding in the ability to set reminders and add to your calendar like your talking to a personal assistant — the user types a note about “meeting Carl for lunch on Thursday from 12 to 1pm” and the app blocks out your schedule.
Price: $4.99 (iOS)
To-Do Apps
Busy mortgage pros can end up with a big list of to-dos — referrals, lead followups, paperwork, billing, plus all your non-work responsibilities. A handy to-do list can be a lifesaver.
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Clear
The Clear app lets users manage their to-do list with simple pull-down and swipe gestures to add and tick off items. The app lets you set up multiple lists for home and office and syncs with all your devices, include the new Apple Watch.
Price: $4.99 (iOS)
Personal Assistant Apps
Sometimes you want the benefit of a personal assistant without having to add another person to your payroll. The number of personal assistant apps out there are growing and what they can do is quite impressive.
Humin
The Humin iOS app lets you find a contact in the same natural way you’d ask an assistant. The app files away personal details so that users can find a contact with searches such as “lives in Irvine” or “met last week, knows Dave.”
Price: Free (iOS)
Workflow
A different yet equally helpful personal assistant app, Workflow helps you speed up task patterns you repeat often. If you frequently order an Uber after offsite client meetings or file away a PDF version of new reports, Workflow can automate the process. The app offers boilerplate tasks, with the ability to create and customize your own workflow patterns.
Price: $3.99 (iOS)
File Management Apps
When you need files on the go, apps like Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive are a must.
Google Drive
Google Drive lets you access, edit, and share your files on the go, whether you’ve got Word documents, spreadsheets, images, or PDFs. Collaboration is another big selling point with Drive. Multiple users can work on a text or spreadsheet document remotely and see the changes applied in real time. The app is accessible from both web browsers and mobile apps for Android and iPhone.
Dropbox
If you just need access to existing files on the go, Dropbox is your key to your files in the cloud. The app works like a virtual folder. Files can be added from your office computer or mobile device, then accessed from anywhere via the web or the Dropbox app.
Microsoft OneDrive
OneDrive is Microsoft’s answer to the cloud storage problem. Since this is a Microsoft product, there’s no compatibility or readability issues to worry about when sharing Word, Excel, or Powerpoint docs with clients or colleagues. Microsoft also sweetens the deal with a relatively large 15 GB of free storage space for new users.
GoodReader
A more specialized tool, the GoodReader app lets you store, share, and retrieve files like Dropbox, but adds the ability to easily annotate your files. Users can add text boxes, sticky notes, highlights, and drawings to PDFs and other static files. A trick that could be quite helpful when you need to point out specific parts of a bigger document you send clients.
Price: $4.99 (iOS)
Note Taking Apps
Are you taking plenty of notes during your lead prospecting shifts? You should be. Using one of the many note taking apps out there could make it even more convenient to jot things down.
Evernote
Sometimes called a digital notebook, Evernote is one of the most popular productivity apps on the market. Draft memos, create to-do lists, save links and media files. Later you can access these from the app or on the web.
Letterspace
Another popular notes app, Letterspace is known for its streamlined interface. The app is for taking notes quickly and efficiently. Its most unique feature is a slider bar above the on-screen keyboard. Users can swipe in this area of the screen and quickly move the cursor around the text to make edits.
Price: $4.99 (iOS)
Sketching Apps
Mortgage brokers aren’t known for their drawing skills, but you never know when you might need to sketch something out — home details, a marketing idea, rough mortgage options comparison — and there isn’t a scrap of paper around.
Paper
Paper is a full-featured app for drawing, sketching, and diagraming. Users can also annotate photos with text and highlight areas. The app works better on the iPad’s larger screen, but can also be used on iPhone. No Android option yet.
Price: Free (iOS)
NotesPlus
Another option for iPad owners, NotesPlus can render some smart-looking sketches. The app recognizes handwriting and converts your scratches into words that can be easily stretched and manouvered around the page. Files can be saved as PDFs or JPEGs for easy sharing.
Price: $9.99 (iOS)
Team Apps
If your mortgage business has grown to the point that you’ve got several direct reports to keep up with, you know how important it is to keep everyone on the same page.
Asana
The Asana app helps teams manage their projects and communications without getting buried under a mountain of back-and-forth emails. Managers can create projects, assign tasks to team members, and set deadlines. Employees can mark tasks complete, post requests, and leave notes. The program is available through a mobile app and web browser. Teams of up to 15 can use the software for free.
Slack
The Slack app aims to go further than Asana to help work teams do away with interoffice email. The app works like a chat room, where progress and project snags can be discussed by team members. The desktop version has a notifications window to help project leaders stay in the loop.
Journaling Apps
At the end of the day, you might want to jot down your thoughts — your progress toward sales goals, ideas for next quarter, or perhaps just personal thoughts unrelated to your mortgage business. A number of journaling apps exist to meet this need, too.
Vesper
Vesper is yet another note taking app, in this case, letting you tag your entries so you can easily search for them later. Notes can be reordered or archived, if you need to move some to a back burner. Users create a Vesper cloud account which syncs with your device’s app notes.
Price: $9.99 (iOS)
Day One
Part personal journal, part digital scrapbook, Day One lets you jot down your thoughts and then some. Users can include the current weather conditions or your location along with your journal entry and that whole entry can then be shared as a web page to friends through your social media account of choice.
Price $4.99 (iOS)
Your Apps
Whatever the productivity need, you can be sure there’s at least one app for that, but that doesn’t mean you need them all. But if you’ve been looking for a solution to a problem with your mortgage lead workflow, one of these apps may be just what you need.
That does it for my list of favorite mortgage lead productivity apps. What’s yours? Let me know in the comments below.
