There are a few great apps that can help agents streamline their real estate businessesThe importance of the advent of the smartphone and its cousin, the tablet, cannot be overstated. The power of the World Wide Web is now as portable as a pocket watch, and this is changing the way real estate is bought and sold. Agents who don’t change with technology will soon be left behind, as wider and wider swathes of their market embrace new methods of communication.

How can you keep up? It’s important to become more modern in your methods and more responsive to communications. Technology is a vital part of that effort. With that in mind, here are a number of tools that may help you become a more productive and successful agent.

1. FullContact Card Reader

If you’re like me, you’ve driven around with piles and boxes full of business cards from people you’ve been planning to call when you get to your phone. But it takes time and effort to key all those contacts into Outlook or your CRM.

The FullContact Card Reader app scans and records business card informationCard Reader lets you take a quick scan of a business card and upload the information to the cloud in a snap. From there, a team of actual human employees – not robots or computers, transcribes the information on the cards into a fully searchable database. The fact that it’s humans entering the data addresses a flaw from earlier versions of the technology – computers would do strange things with the data, making it tough to work with later.

A couple of taps on a newly scanned card invites your new contact to LinkedIn, further solidifying the contact. And Card Reader backs up and synchs your contacts to your SalesForce, FullContract address book and your iPhone/Android contacts. Data is ISV-Certified secure. Plans start at $9.99 per month. It’s not quite a full-time personal assistant, but it goes a long way.

2. MagicPlan

Imagine an app that actually measures rooms and draws a floor plan just from you walking around taking pictures. That’s what MagicPlan does. Walk around a house snapping pictures, and MagicPlan will create an interactive floor plan for you. From there, a few clicks will export that floor plan in PDF, JPG, or DPX format, or you can actually publish an interactive floor plan on the Web – all with no drafting skills, and all within a few minutes.

Screenshots of the MagicPlan app, which quickly creates floor plans

3. Property Evaluator

The Property Evaluator App lets users quickly evaluate the investment potential of a homeIdeal for agents who often work with real estate investor clients, the Property Evaluator app, by Wasatch Digital Media in Ogden, Utah, helps you quickly and accurately analyze a property for investment potential. It then allows you to email a professional-looking PDF, branded with your information, right from your car outside a property or office.

The software will do an instant cash-flow analysis for you, and generate an estimate of cash-on-cash returns and IRRs (internal rate of return) for any given property – subject, of course, to your being able to make reasonable assumptions about an unknowable future.

4. Real Estate Agent Assistant

Got tasking overload? Real Estate Assistant is an ace at keeping you organized with all the different projects, meetings, documents, paperwork and signatures you need to keep the deal moving to the closing table. This iPhone app lets you view upcoming tasks in a to-do list, sorting your (hopefully) many deals and the subtasks in them by deadline to give to a to-do list for any given day.

Real Estate Agent Assistant is a mobile app to help agents stay organized and increase productivity

Picture via appezzy.com

The old version of this app was called Realtor Assistant, but it’s been updated with new functionality.

A few taps on your phone creates a task and deadline. You start with a standard listing of tasks or a workflow for a given deal, and assign deadlines to it. The app will populate your calendar with the deadlines and key events, and keep you on task.