Real Estate agents use Basecamp to sell homes

ActiveRain is an online community for real estate professionals designed to help them promote and grow their business. They recently reviewed Basecamp and called it "the ultimate online project collaboration tool."

Every now and then we come across a business tool that's so incredibly helpful and beautifully easy to use that after about 30 minutes we start to wonder how we ever managed without it.  Basecamp, the online project collaboration tool by 37Signals, is one of those things we wish we had found out about a long time ago.

The review includes a description of how a realtor could use Basecamp to help sell a home.

For example, you might call one project "Home Listings".  Under the To-Do list for that project, you might name one "Miller Home Listing Presentation."  Then you can create items in the To-Do list, and assign them to various people.

You might create an item that says "Compile comparables to use in Miller market analysis", and assign that to yourself.  Then you might create these items:  "Create printed market analysis for Millers using the comparables", and "Schedule photographer to shoot Miller photos by Tuesday", and assign those to your assistant.

All of these would be listed under "Miller Home Listing Presentation".  When your assistant logs in, he can choose to see all to-dos, or just the ones assigned to him.  When a to-do is completed, simply check a box and that item slips down into the "done" list - greyed out, but still visible for reference.

Each project has a Messages section, where you can list who spoke to whom.  For example, you could name a Messages section "Miller Communications", and make an entry whenever you get important information from the Millers.  This would then be visible to anyone on your team who checked the Messages section.

There's also a Writeboard feature, where you can post and edit different versions of your documents.  For example, you might post a paragraph called "Miller Listing Description", that you'd like to use as the property description in the newspaper ad.  Your business partner can log in, make edits, then save that as a new version for you to see.  And here' what's really neat:  Writeboard lets you compare the two versions together, showing the edits made in the last version while still saving the original.

The reviewers also wondered if there's an affiliate program. Answer: Yes!

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.