Basecamp is one of my favorite business tools. I use it daily to keep track of clients, their projects, my projects, and my team. I even have a project setup for my kids chores, but that’s another post! Today I want to show you how you can easily use Basecamp to organize your transactions, give others access to it, store it for later, and keep all information in one central, cloud-based location.
- Create a Basecamp account if you don’t have one already at http://Basecamp.com. You will get 1 project and 4.95 MB of storage for free, which is plenty to get you started.
- Click Projects and then New Project.
- Use the property address for the project name, add in a description if you wish. I put that it’s a short sale and that escrow should close on April 30, 2012. You can put your clients names or whatever you want here. Also add in your Transaction Coordinators email, your broker’s email, or your clients email; anyone who needs access. If you do decide to add in your clients, you’ll want to make sure that each and every property is its own project.
- Once that is done, I’m going to make sure that all of the important days are on the calendar. Click on Event and start adding in the day that escrow is opened, the day it should close, contingency removal dates, inspections, etc. You will see that the dates are displayed in an Agenda style; click Calendar to view them on a 6-week grid.
- This would be a good time to point out that you can subscribe to this calendar so that you have access to it via Google Calendar to view on your smart phone or tablet.
- Time to make checklists! To jump back to the main page of the project, type the address into the search box, click, and you’re there. Click To-do List, and the title will be Disclosures. Click Save and start adding in each disclosure, the date that it needs to be signed by, and who is responsible for getting it done (you or your TC/VA). I just want to throw in really quickly that New Basecamp does not yet support Checklist Templates like Basecamp Classic does. If you already have a Basecamp Classic account, you may want to do this as a Checklist Template instead.
- My poor husband was just bombarded with all of those emails! Anyhow, at this point you or your TC/VA will then get all of those forms signed by your client with DocuSign, EchoSign, or by that old-fashioned method of signing in person (on an iPad of course).
- Check them off as they are signed, then compress them into a Zip file, and upload that to the File section.
- Once they are all loaded, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the link that says “Loop-in someone who isn’t on the project to share this by email only” Add in the Buyer’s Agent’s email address. If you know their TC/VA’s email, you can add that in as well.
- Alternatively, you can click to add a discussion and address the Buyer’s Agent directly and add the documents in that way as well. This works best when the other agent isn’t as tech savvy as you are.
- Once you receive the fully executed documents, you or your TC/VA should upload each individual file to the file section in Basecamp.
- You can keep up-to-date with what everyone is doing by clicking on the Daily Progress tab.
Keeping an accurate account of every step of a real estate transaction is important. If you’re negotiating a short sale, you can use Basecamp’s Text Documents to keep track of each person you speak with and everything that was said and/or promised during the conversation. If you’ve negotiated them before, you know that they tend to “forget” what was previously said, and this is a good way to remind them.
Having all of the information in one central location is also important. Sure, there are a lot of transaction management programs out there, but most of them are not very intuitive. Basecamp is so easy, I’m sure that my grandmother could use it, so getting people on board with you should be much easier.
If you need help getting this set up, or you are in need of a transaction coordinator, go to my Work With Me Page, fill out the form and schedule a quick chat session with me. You can also check out our TC packages here.
