Field Guide: Real Estate Agents

Helping people buy and sell homes can quickly become a tangled mess of email threads. Basecamp can help keep everything organized in one place and everyone on the same page.

In this guide, we'll show you how you can set up a Basecamp account to use with your Clients ✨

Jump to:

• Projects
• Templates
• Message Board
• To-dos
• Chat
• Schedule
• Docs & Files
• Email Forwards
• Card Table
• External Doors
• Adding your Clients
• Communicating with your Clients
• Keeping everyone updated

Projects

Projects are at the heart of Basecamp. As a real estate agent, you'll want to create a new project for each buyer or seller and you'll likely have a private project that's for Non-client work things.

Here's an example of how you could organize your projects:

The Seller and Buyer cards you're seeing are actually projects that are organized into Project Stacks. Clicking the Stacks will reveal the projects within:

Your projects can be created from scratch or created from a project template. You'll likely use the same kind of projects for your buyers and sellers, so creating project templates for each type of client will save you loads of time. We'll dive into Templates in the next section.

Templates

Templates are perfect for any projects you'd use over and over again — like the projects you'd use with clients that are buying (or selling!). If you already created a project for a client, you can always create a template from that project.

Here are two different project template examples:

Here's a project created from the Buyers template:

Keep reading to learn more about the project tools used in this buying project 🤓

Message Board

The Message Board tool is where you’ll want to post any important information you’d like your Clients to know.

Learning new software can be overwhelming, so we recommend posting a message that helps your clients understand how to use your Basecamp account.

Wondering what that number 1 you're seeing next to the Introduction email is? That's the total number of comments left on that message. This number won't change once you read the comment as we want everyone to know how much chatter is happening in a specific post at a glance.

To-dos

The To-dos tool is pretty self-explanatory. It's where you and your clients can add, assign, and complete tasks.

The two lists with "The client sees this" banner are the lists your clients will be able to see, but they won't see that banner on their end. The list without that banner will only be seen by the Non-client users on the account. You can read more about how permissions work in Basecamp here.

We'll chat more about working with clients further down this page, so let's move onto the next tool used here.

Chat

Conversations with everyone in the project will occur in the Chat tool.

There are a few other features used above — Boosts and @mentioning. A Boost is a short, flexible, and personal way to respond to something directly. While @mentioning sends a notification to the person so they know their attention is needed.

Schedule

The Schedule tool will pull all dated To-dos and Cards in the project, and you’ll also have the option to add events here. The buyer project is set up with two Schedules — one for due dates and another for scheduled tours.

Docs & Files

Store any documents and files relevant to your project in the Docs & Files tool.

Most of the documents shown above can be seen by the clients, but Notes from buyers remains private to the team as these notes are for the real estate agent's eyes only 👀

Email Forwards

Any emails related to the buying process, like ones sent from the mortgage lender, can be forwarded right into the project's Email forwards tool. Anyone with access to the forwarded emails can reply directly to the lender's email here too:

Or, just leave a comment for other folks on the project:

Card Table

The Card Table tool is generally best suited for work that moves through stages or phases, like the loan approval process shown in the example below:

You might be wondering, why not use a To-do list for this? Well, To-dos are more for tasks that are binary, like "Send Zoe the mortgage lender contact information" or "Check your MLS portal and flag any homes you're interested in touring." When those items are done, you can check them off. There isn't a need to track the progress of the work being done.

At the end of the day, you'll want to use the tools that work best for your workflow. That's pretty much the beauty of Basecamp's flexibility ✨

External Doors

Adding Doors helps your clients access all of their buying resources right from the Basecamp project. Our buying project here has Doors to services buyers' MLS client and mortgage lender portals:

Adding your Clients

As a real estate agent, you'll most likely invite your Clients as Client users in Basecamp. This user type has the most restricted permissions and you'll have the option to keep project items, like notes you've taken or your own to-do list, private from them.

We have great Working with Clients guide that you'll definitely want to check out, but there a few things that we'll go over here.

When you invite your Clients to the account, they won't have access to your account right away, but they will start receiving email notifications from the project you've added them to.

To access the account, your Client will need to first accept the invite that's automatically sent to their email address by clicking the 'join' link in the email. After they accept that invite, they'll log in at https://launchpad.37signals.com/signin or on an app's login screen. Once logged in, they'll see just the project(s) you've added them to and only the items you've made visible to them.

Here's a comparison of what a Client sees versus what a Non-client will see:

An important thing to note is that ​adding Clients to a project is different from adding Non-client users.

When adding Clients to a project, you'll first be asked to add a Client company. Since real estate agents generally work with individuals and not companies, we recommend using either Buyer or Seller as the company name. Here's an example of how the project's "Set up people" page would look:

And how it would look in the "Add/remove people or change their access" page in Adminland:

Communicating with your Clients

With any collaboration, communication is key. Stay in touch with your Clients by using:

• Pings: private conversations that aren't appropriate for the Chat tool. You can create 1:1 or group Pings to chat privately and in real-time. It's not possible to edit the folks in a Ping.
• Chats: A group chat for everyone in the project to discuss things related to the purchase or sale.
• @Mentions: Use this to draw someone's attention to a specific discussion or to-do anywhere in your project.

Keeping everyone updated

There are different ways you and your Clients can stay up-to-date with everything happening with their home purchase or sale:

• Notifications: You and your Clients can customize your notification preferences so you're alerted about in a way that works for you/them. Use the Don't forget feature for items that you and your clients don't want to, well, forget 😊
• Activity: Glance at the latest activity in each of your projects, and catch up on what you missed using the built-in reports.
• Automatic Check-ins: This is a project tool that you could use with your Clients for any recurring questions like "Are any properties you're interested in touring?" or "Do you have any questions for me?"

That's a wrap for now! We hope this guide helps you close on properties quickly and smoothly. And if you need any assistance with Basecamp, you can always check our learning center, help pages, sign up for a class, or send us a note at Support. Happy Basecamping!