If you could have a system/app that could help you automate parts of your land investing business, what would be your TOP 3 feature wishlist.
For full transparency, I'm the co-founder of Pebble by REI Conversion (www.pebblerei.com) an app to help streamline and automate land investing, and we'd love to hear what you'd want to see to streamline your and investing allowing you to save time/save money/scale grow.
I'll start with some features I'd love to use for myself that I think would keep my team organized and save me time:
@Jessey I don't know if this is the kind of thing you're looking for, or maybe you guys can already do this, but I think it would be great if an automated system could intelligently (that's the hard part, I think) reformat my mailing list. So for example, I've been manually going through and reformatting the owner info from things like "JOHNSON MICHAEL" to "Michael Johnson", so at its simplest it's a matter of just changing from all caps to capitalized first letter each word and reversing the order, but then where it gets more complicated (from a human vs. machine logic standpoint) is knowing how to rearrange the order of some words (or not to, in some cases), or when to leave things in all caps. For example, a common owner field might start as something like "JOHNSON MICHAEL JOHNSON KAREN" which I might reformat for mail merge as "Michael & Karen Johnson". Another example, I don't want "ABC LLC" reformated as "Llc Abc". One more example, when an estate owns a property, in one or more counties I've been working with I'll often see owner info listed like, "JOHNSON, MICHAEL ESTATE" whereas I want to address my letter to "Executor of Michael Johnson Estate".
In my limited experience (having only done 3 mailers so far), there seem to be a lot of recurring patterns, especially when working within the same counties repeatedly, but there's also enough variance to cleaning up mail merge fields that I couldn't envision an automated solution working reliably enough that I wouldn't have to go through and manually correct a lot of mistakes. I'm not a software developer, though, so maybe this isn't as complicated as I'm making it out to be. And I know this can be done with a human VA, but if it were possible to automate, that would save some time consuming and tedious work on someone's part within the team.
On a related note, parsing out mailing addresses that are currently represented as one combined field (e.g. "123 ELM ST, SPRINGFIELD, IL xxxxx-xxxx" to separate mail merge fields (with appropriate capitalization) for Street Address, City, State and Zip ("123 Elm St"; "Springfield"; "IL", etc.) would also save a lot of time relative to the way I've done my scrubbing/formatting so far.
@Jessey I can help you with a few different offer calculators. Maybe you, me and Kevon should put our heads together on this and kill two birds with one stone.
Something else that might be cool is a mobile app version of Pebble (though, probably not vital at this point).