iPad Toolkit for Real Estate Agents

Enter the iPad

The iPad is certainly Steve Job’s gift to the real estate industry. It’s brought an entirely new level of tools that I can provide to my clients and to assist me with being more efficient as a Realtor. When I first got the iPad I did a post on a few apps that I found useful. This post will explorer several more, plus a few tools to help you get the most out of your iPad.

What the Heck is Jail Breaking?

I’m not going to cover how to jailbreak the iPad in this post, because I don’t think it’s for everyone. However there are number of limitations to the iPad that are by design. Because of the digital rights of content creators for videos and music, iPads have very limited video out features. You can buy a $30 VGA cable for video out, but it’s mainly good for using Keynote to do a presentation, but not to connect to a projector for showing videos. However, there are hacking techniques that will allow one to bypass the Apple limitations. The problem is that you could “brick” your iPad (make it useless) and void the warranty.

Resources

Aside from a large variety apps, there area a few tools that will make your iPad experience a lot more enjoyable.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a site of countless free ebooks. Some classics and independent work. Great resources for the casual reader!

Calibre

iBooks will read PDF files, but to get the most out of your ebook or PDF, it’s best that it be converted to the iBook format. Calibre is a free tool that will convert that boring old PDF into a great iBook with all the functionality.

Air Video Server

If you’re like me, you have a ton of Digital Copy movies on your Mac or PC. Air Video allows you to stream the videos from your computer to our iPad if you’re on the same network. It’s pretty cool to watch movies on your IPad, without having to load down your iPad with more files.

Senuti

Senuti is a tool for creating a backup of your Itunes library from your iPod. I’m constantly worried that I might lose all those files, apps and songs that I’ve paid for, so this tool gives me just a little bit of security.

Send to Dropbox

Dropbox is an essential tool in my use of the iPad. As cool as the iPad is, one of the setbacks to the device is the limitations to share a document between various applications on the iPad. To get around this, we use Send To Dropbox to work on the document in one app and then email it from that app back to Dropbox, so that we can open it elsewhere.

QuickTime for Video Editing

There are a number of videos that I like to use in classes and to just watch from time to time. Often I’ll find a particularly useful video on YouTube.com. Once found, I can download it with www.SaveVid.com. In order to get it on your iPad, you need to convert it to a usable file format. Quicktime is a free tool that allows you to open the video and then use the “save as…” feature to save as a iPod file.