Online Real Estate Investment Tools to Manage Your Portfolio
It can take tremendous effort to balance your investment activities with your career, business, and personal life. Fortunately, the modern online real estate investment field offers many tools to help you coordinate your tasks. As an accredited investor, it’s vital to track projects, monitor performance, and manage employees and stakeholders. This guide will discuss a variety of options to reduce your workload and keep your efforts focused.
Market Data Tools for Online Real Estate Investment
When is the best time to exit an investment? What is the prevailing cap rate? What is the direction of the labor market, and how will interest rates affect the value of your project?
The only reliable way to determine the answers to these questions is by conducting your own due diligence. Researching potential acquisitions and optimizing your current online real estate investment projects can also take a fair amount time. Thankfully, there are many online publications that specialize in the commercial real estate market. There are also niche media outlets in most medium to large metropolitan markets that will provide data regarding the performance of various industries. This includes labor market statistics, population growth, lease rates, and regulatory factors specific to the market.
Another option are online data providers that aggregate real estate data and allow you to run reports on various statistics the get a better picture of the direction of the market, and the value of specific properties. Even if you’re utilizing data provided by a project sponsor or investment platform, it’s best to confirm conclusions with your own independent research. Always question the source of data and look for any underlying bias that could skew the assertions. We don’t endorse any particular provider; however, you can do a simple search or ask other investors and real estate professionals for reliable data sources.
CRM and EAS
Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise application software (EAS) are digital solutions that can allow you to manage all aspects of your operation. When your portfolio is well diversified though online real estate investment, it can be difficult to keep track of the many properties and processes associated with each. A well-designed CRM helps you categorize and maintain detailed records for each of your prospects, clients, and associates. In the fast-paced online real estate investment business, it pays handsome dividends to have the information you need readily available.
As an example, when the closing of a profitable deal is imminent, and last-minute funding or other help is needed, a CRM will provide the contact information and data you need to find the people to help get it done. In addition, if you’re working with numerous prospects for acquisition, your CRM will help by providing timely reminders. They can also promptly deliver key information required to get contracts signed. Follow-up is typically the greatest challenge in the investment business. Correspondingly, CRMs help bridge that operational weakness.
Enterprise Application Software is a broad category of applications that support all the functional areas of business. This includes CRM, accounting, human resources, inventory, production, legal, marketing, analysis, and more. EAS allows you to view your entire operation from a dashboard. From there you can view key metrics to monitor and evaluate the performance of your business. For online real estate investment operations, this can mean improved efficiency, less wasted labor, and faster processes. The key result being improvements in your bottom-line and amount of free time for personal and family goals.
Integrated Online Real Estate Investment Management
Depending on what online real estate investment platform you invest with, there may be much less management responsibility required. For both new and experienced accredited investors, it is more efficient to focus on researching projects and making contributions. Directly managing investment properties and dealing with property management can be very time consuming and stressful. Part of the appeal of online real estate investment, especially crowdfunding, is that it allows investors to pass management responsibility to dedicated professionals that take pride in optimizing investment properties and ensuring appropriate returns.
With the right online platform, you can view all your investments in one place, as well as monitor your earnings and the performance of each property. Another important aspect of crowdfunding is that platforms will typically conduct due diligence tasks for you. The will provide all the necessary documentation to make an informed and confident decision. Acquisitions specialist review potential projects and vet them based on comprehensive criteria. A reputable investment organization will only present the most viable investment opportunities. As previous mentioned, be sure to verify with your own market and property research.
Wealth Building Strategy
In summary, online real estate investment is an excellent option for busy accredited investors. For those that want to participate more in the investment process, there are numerous tools available. Taking advantage of these will allow you to improve the efficiency of investment operations. Whichever route you take in your investment journey, partnering with investment professionals in developing your wealth building strategy is a wise decision. Contact us at Sharestates to talk more about your investment objectives and what tools and strategies will best support your goals.
