Whether working independently or for an established firm, being a real estate broker means owning your own business—and controlling your financial destiny. From managing properties in various stages of the transaction cycle to keeping track of everything your clients want and need, paying attention to the little things is a necessity to close deals, boost earnings, and find clients the perfect properties.

Airtable Blocks are living tools, powerful enough to keep up with your dynamic workflow, and flexible enough to deliver the exact information you need, the way you need it. Managing your real estate business from a single source of truth means spending less time mired in minutiae—and more time knocking out that deal checklist.

Here's your step-by-step plan to get it done:

Visualize availabilities for your clients
Text important updates to prospective buyers
Drag and drop new contacts
Flesh out your contact list
Keep tabs on revenue
Plot interest level by neighborhood or submarket

Visualize availabilities for your clients

Clients have different wants and needs—keeping track of them as they pertain to various properties can quickly become overwhelming. The map block allows you to visualize availabilities for your client within customizable parameters, making it a breeze to find and zero in on their perfect location.

Step 1: Set up a location field (with addresses or coordinates) and a cache field in your table.

Make sure that your table includes a text field containing the relevant addresses. You can also use latitude-longitude coordinates instead.

Next, create a new, empty single line text field in your base to serve as your geocode cache field. The block uses this empty field to save some additional information for each address, allowing it to display markers on the map.

Step 2: Get a Google Maps API key.

The map block requires a Google Maps API key. Make sure you have a Google account—if not, you will need to create one. Next, visit this Getting Started guide and click the button that says “Get a key.” You’ll use this key for the next step.

Step 3: Add a map block to your base.

Open the blocks menu, click the add a block option, and add a new map block to your base. The setup process allows you to pick the appropriate table and view for your needs (make sure to select the same location field and geocache field from step 1). Map markers are customizable based on information from tables in your base—in this case, we assigned marker colors based on the Type field, which indicates the type of property, and used each property’s square footage to differentiate the size of each marker (the higher the square footage, the bigger the marker). Paste in your Google Maps API key from step 2 to complete setup.

You can view your completed map in one of three styles (Light, Map, or Satellite), and even look at each location using Street View.

Text important updates to prospective buyers

Real estate markets are fluid—new listings pop up, unexpectedly high offers lead to unexpected sales, inspections reveal issues that require delays (not to mention more money!) to fix. The send SMS block takes the heavy lifting out of communicating insights in the moment with one or more of your clients.

Step 1: Add a send SMS block to your base.

To add a send SMS block, open the blocks menu, click the add a block option, and add a new send SMS block to your base. Note that you'll also need a Twilio API key in order to use this block.

Go through the setup process, entering your Twilio API key and other information. Next, select the appropriate table, view, and phone number field.

Step 2: Compose your message.

Compose a message to send to your clients. You can use curly brackets incorporate information from fields in your base directly into your message.

Step 3: Send the message.

Hit the send button to quickly send a message to multiple clients at once.

Drag and drop new contacts

Networking is vitally important for real estate brokers. The contact import block makes it easy to import all that information from your extensive rolodex into Airtable, adding another layer of depth to your business’s central hub.

Step 1: Create a contacts table.

If you don’t have an existing contacts table, create one to hold contact names and details like email address, phone number, title, and company.

Step 2: Add a contact import block.

Open the blocks menu, choose the add a block option, and add a contact import block to your base.

Step 3: Drop a contact onto the block.

Drag and drop a vCard file on your Airtable base, select your contacts table, and map out which values you want to import to which fields. When everything lines up, click the create records button. The block will remember your field mappings, making future imports even faster.

Flesh out your contact list

A long list of contacts is only as useful as the information is up to date. The Clearbit block uses the Clearbit API to enrich and update your existing email contacts with additional information, like roles, titles, and social media profiles. You can also use email domains to discover new leads.

Step 1:

Select the add a block option from the blocks menu, then add a Clearbit block to your base. Note that you need a working Clearbit API key to use this block—using this block may incur fees from Clearbit.

Step 2:

Input your Clearbit API key and choose which API to work with: the Prospector API (to create new records for new leads) or the Enrichment API (to update existing records with new information).

For Enrichment, you'll need to select the table, view, and field in which the email addresses you'd like to enrich are located.

For Prospector, enter at least one email domain, and optionally names or titles, to search.

To put the block to work, click Search, confirm the Clearbit charges, and choose how you'd like to map the information to your tables.

Keep tabs on revenue

The chart block makes it simple to track revenue and display it insightful ways, so you know exactly how much each property made relative to previous sales.

Step 1: Enter property details.

Make sure that your base has a table listing each property in your workflow. In each property record, create both a field specifying the property’s address and a formula field to calculate the difference between the list price and sale price.

Step 2: Add a chart block to your base.

Open the blocks menu, click the add a block option, and add a new chart block to your base. You can choose from three types of charts—a bar chart, a line graph, or a scatter plot.

Step 3: Adjust the chart block to fit your needs.

Chart blocks are beneficial in a variety of use cases. A bar chart is great for comparing specific values, which makes it a natural fit for displaying total revenue for different properties. We suggest that the X-axis list each property, while the Y-axis displays the net revenue.

Plot interest level by neighborhood or submarket

Some neighborhoods are more desirable to prospective buyers than others. Use the matrix block to create a handy visual reference—in this instance, plotting which properties in which submarkets have the highest interest level among clients—so you can better focus your energy and attention there.

Step 1: Add a matrix block.

Choose the add a block option from the blocks menu and add a matrix block to your base.

Step 2: Configure the rows and columns.

Set the block to point to the table and view containing the records you want to map onto the matrix. Next, pick the field you want to use to define your rows and the field you want to use to define your columns. In this case, we'll set the client interest field to define the rows and the submarket/neighborhood field to define the columns. Depending on your preference, you can also choose to only show rows/columns containing records.

Step 3: Arrange the records to your liking.

Once the matrix block is set up, you can move the record cards between different cells in the matrix to redefine their values.