Running Your Business Like a Business

It’s 3 A.M. and you wake up to your phone ringing. You grab your phone and see that it’s your tenant calling you. You reluctantly decided to pick it up in case something terrible is wrong. The tenant informs you that the other person living in the property has parked their car in the wrong spot. You tell the tenant that you will resolve the issue the next morning and say goodbye. How does this sound? Do you want your tenant calling your personal phone in the middle of the night? Do you want to give your tenants free range of calling you whenever they feel like it? I know I do not and that is why I plan on running my real estate properties like a business.

A business operates in a professional manner. It has its own bank accounts, its own email, and its own phone number. Your real estate investments should be no different. The portfolio must have its own bank accounts, its own email, and its own phone number. Do not combine any personal ones with that for your real estate business. Separating them will make your life much easier financially and give you a peace of mind knowing that people don’t have your personal phone number.

2nd Phone Number for Free

A great way to separate your business and personal phone number is by getting a Google Voice number. Google Voice is free to use and links with the phone number that you already have. This app will give you a new number to use and will call the phone that you currently use. This gives you the privacy needed for a business and by using Google Voice you can even set up times that allow a call to ring to your phone. This means that you don’t have to take any late night calls if you don’t want to.

You can also use Google voice to screen incoming calls. The app will first call your number and have the person say their name. Then it is up to you to decide if you want to accept the call or send it to voicemail. Another great feature of this app is it transcribes texts and voicemails that can then be sent to your email for later reference. This can be extremely helpful when dealing with a multitude of numbers from contractors, agents, and tenants.

One of the greatest features of a Google Voice number is the power to choose a number located anywhere in the country. This has been great for me since I live in a different state than the one where I am planning to begin investing. By having a local number, I am instantly given credibility because I appear to be someone local. It looks like I live in the community and am not some random number calling from somewhere else in the country.

Google Voice is a powerful tool and I encourage anyone reading this to implement it into their own business.