In the future, mobile technology will drive the way real estate deals get done.

Voice and motion will likely replace the touch keyboard, and users will enjoy a multiple sensorial experience with Alexa on call for commands, rich media streaming on screen and the controls to a lockbox as close as a few taps on your mobile watch.

Artificial intelligence (AI), 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) will make our smartphones smarter, enablng smoother, faster-loading videos, more customized client information and connectivity across all devices.

When you need to drive to a showing, the smartphone will replace the steering wheel to guide your self-driving car, communicating along the way with “smart street lights” that can warn of traffic issues ahead and help calibrate the signals to clear congestion.

Need to book travel to a conference? A simple voice command will take care of that. Flight delayed? The phone of the future will reschedule the flight, rebook your airport transportation, change your dinner reservations and even process a refund, automatically.

Tomorrow’s smarter phone will be our on-the-go “go-to” device for how we learn and teach, communicate visually and source machine-learned information.

By the year 2025, experts predict that the phone will likely overtake the laptop as the preferred device for browsing and online shopping.

According to CDW’s StateTech, the 5G network will revolutionize mobile phone technology, amping browsing speeds 23 times faster and download speeds 100 times greater than today’s 4G devices.

Armed with faster browsing and download speeds, real estate agents and clients of the future will increasingly turn to their handhelds to view 3D videos, vet lenders and home insurance products, and to complete the real estate transaction.

Already, the smartphone has evolved as the primary device for online shopping among Gen Z and Millennials; and, as a growing number of retailers optimize their platforms for mobile, more consumers of all ages will turn to their phones for the convenience and superior user experience mobile tech affords.

“Connected experiences are the future, and agents and brokers who embrace mobile app technology will be better prepared to serve their home buyers and sellers,” says dotloop Senior Director, Business Development Jason Reinking.

Many real estate pros currently enjoy one-click connectivity to a CRM, transaction management platform, accounting and back-end apps, video and marketing software on their phones. Take it one step further, and think of all the devices your future phone could power within the home.

As more devices become connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), real estate agents will increasingly use their handheld devices to perform functions, such as turning on the lights of a home remotely or adjusting the temperature settings.

Handhelds have become the centralized hub for storing a consumer’s wallet, notes, a digital camera, MP3 player, news and video engaged social content.

In the future, virtual reality and augmented reality technology might expand the lens by allowing agents to show new construction properties before they’re built and enable buyers to enjoy a completely immersive virtual experience of a property, all from the palm of their hands.

Like the phone — the hub of future communication, open platform transaction management software will continue to aggregate data from a variety of integrated apps to optimize a brokerage or team’s operations, inform brokers and team leads of agent performance, track lead gen ROI and drive future deals faster and more efficiently.

“The difference between a mediocre producer and a top producer is efficiency,” says Nick Bailey, Chief Customer Officer of RE/MAX, LLC. “We all have only the same amount of time in a day. And so why is it that someone can sell four times what someone else can? Number one, they’re focused on money-making activities. Number two, they are finding efficiencies. I have a saying, ‘Technology’s not going to put an agent out of business, but an agent who doesn’t adopt the technology is going to put themselves out of business.’”

In addition to serving the agent, real estate mobile apps provide a wide range of benefits for buyers and sellers, including on-the-go access to data; more responsive communication; and, of course, convenience in viewing properties.

With the pandemic only galvanizing the virtual home shopping trend, real estate clients are using their phones to get a jump on hot listings, conduct research into comps and to find an agent.

Use of videoconferencing and virtual home tours hit a high last year and the trend is showing no signs of slowing. Zillow 3D Home virtual tours, for instance, spiked last year up 750% in the month after stay-at-home orders went into effect and remained around twice as high through late November 2020.

Bottom line: The smartphone is going to become the one indispensable tool that could spell the difference between survival and success for the real estate professional of the future.

Currently, mobile accounts for 63% of traffic to retailers yet 53% of sales, according to data from SaleCycle’s 2019 Ecommerce Year in Review. In retail, travel and fashion sectors, the numbers reflect a shift in eCommerce traffic toward mobile, while conversion rates still lag behind desktop for actual sales. In other words, more people are browsing on their phones but completing the sale on desktops.

The gap between traffic and conversion is most pervasive in the travel industry. Only 29% of travel consumers convert on their mobile devices despite a 53% traffic share (compared to desktop), suggesting that people prefer completing purchases for more complex transactions like travel — and real estate — on larger desktop screens.

Just as many retailers have taken a mobile-first approach to their web design, focusing on key UX factors like easy navigation and a simplified checkout experience, it’s imperative that your transaction tech supports consumers with a clear user experience to keep pace with the mobile conversion opportunity in real estate.

If you’re still requiring your clients and admins to jump between systems to eSign, gain compliance or retrieve closing documents, consider all the functionality an end-to-end transaction management software system like dotloop affords by tying together all the steps, contract to close, on one all-in-one platform.

Tying your CRM to your transaction management system already allows you to open loops in dotloop directly from the CRM or even Gmail if integrated.

But did you know that enhanced functionality added over the past year now enables agents, admins and clients to complete convenient, time-saving earnest money deposits and remote notarizations via desktop or dotloop’s 5 star-rated mobile app?

1. Integrate Your CRM With Your Phone

Dotloop integrates with real estate’s leading CRMs, offering a plethora of benefits accessible from your smartphone. As noted, many offer a “Create a Loop” function, allowing you to open a “loop” (transaction) directly from the CRM app. Any edits to contact or property details can be made from either the CRM or dotloop and will automatically update on both, thus eliminating multiple data entry and errors.

Artificial intelligence is also helping to inform dotloop’s latest CRM integrations. Cloze, for example, applies AI to seek out contact info, call and email logs as well as contextual information from an agent’s apps to help build their database. This CRM can pull in relevant data from iPhone conversations; apps like Evernote, Slack, Whatsapp, FaceTime and Dropbox; all major phone carriers and email marketing tools; as well as the Google and Microsoft suite of products.

This platform operates like a personal assistant to fill the CRM’s “empty box” automatically with contextual, informed contact details that help “humanize communication,” says Cloze Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder Alex Coté.

Thanks to rapid inroads made by AI, Cloze is able to identify and auto-classify some types of contacts. Coté expects to take this even further in the future using subtle nuances within the context and tone of a text conversation. “Is it an urgent or passive lead? What is the tone of the conversation? AI in text messages is fundamentally different from email, so there will be much to come on that front,” he notes.

Market Leader’s Next Level Contact Management allows users to toggle between Recently Active or All Contacts and to call, text or email directly from the contact record.

Follow Up Boss offers a dialer accepting both inbound and outbound calls and logs all conversations automatically, thus enabling inquiries from listing signs, ads and other marketing campaigns to flow directly into the CRM as a means of organizing contacts and minimizing lost opportunities. Follow Up Boss’s two-way integrated texting feature takes it one step further by enabling agents to continue a texting conversation on the mobile app.

In addition, mobile-first CINC now offers three mobile products: its CINC Agent App; Etta, a consumer app branded to the agent’s business, which also lets agents track their home buyers’ property searches; and an Open Houses app that collects visitors’ personal information and flows it into the CRM.

For a complete list of dotloop’s CRM integrations partners, click here.

2. Go Mobile With Offers and Listings: Share, Edit and eSign

With a few preliminary steps on a desktop to prepare documents and templates, it is possible to create and close transactions on your smartphone. Once you have the bulk of contact and property details loaded into the contracts, agents and admins can simply add the offer price plus any contingencies and create an offer in literally 10 minutes or less before the client has even left the driveway of a property. To view a quick video on how to “Complete a Real Estate Offer in 10 Minutes or Less on Your Phone,” click here.

You can also prep documents before a listing appointment then make your listing searchable and create an Easy Offer folder in 5 minutes or less as a quick and easy way to market a listing on your phone.

Dotloop’s mobile app lets you eSign contracts via the mobile web or text; host in-person signings on your phone during open houses and showings; and scan contracts, which can be converted from a picture on your phone into an editable PDF.

Dotloop makes it easy to edit and set up documents with “pinch and zoom” navigation; autofill for contact and contract details; auto-assigned radio buttons; add signature, text, strikethrough and checkbox functionality; and the ability to select templates and documents from the app.

For a full video webinar on “How to Close Transactions With Dotloop’s Mobile App,” click here.

3. Pay Deposits Digitally

In 2020, dotloop announced its integration with Earnnest, simplifying the transfer of earnest money deposits digitally. Within seconds, agents can now send buyers a request to make earnest money payments using the Earnnest app.

Once buyers receive the request and pay through Earnnest, agents receive a payment receipt as proof. Because the money is secured using a bank-level encrypted digital transfer, there’s no worry of wire fraud or identity theft.

4. Close Virtually Anywhere

As contracts approach closing, an agent can submit their compliance documents for review to the transaction coordinator, who can also review them directly from the mobile app.

Dotloop’s mobile app helps agents and admins stay compliant using real-time push notifications, task management and submit for review functionality.

Now that dotloop has integrated with Notarize, it’s no longer necessary for clients to drive to a notary when they can review, sign and notarize real estate documents 10x faster on their phone or desktop. With a few clicks, agents can bring their dotloop documents into Notarize, where the client will virtually connect with a notary and complete the notarization in 15 minutes or less.

Dotloop users can also automatically create a title order and securely transfer documents to their preferred title agency by adding a title agency to a loop and using the ShortTrack integration.

5. Communicate Via Messenger to Stay in the Loop

One of the most valuable functions of the mobile app is dotloop’s text Messenger. Studies show that many users prefer text messaging over phone calls and email. According to The Local Project, 78% of people wish they could have a text conversation with a business; also, response rates from text are 209% higher than those from phone calls.

Not only is texting the preferred communication style of many clients and real estate professionals, it’s also a great way to speed up transactions with such features as unlimited group messaging, sharing and eSigning docs via text, and tracking of all text activity.

The future of mobile offers exciting innovation for real estate pros open to change. Those who are ready with integrated apps and a mobile-first, open platform transaction management software system will be well-poised to receive the bright future smartphones promise to deliver down the road.