Chad Fisher enjoys life as an entrepreneur, developing sites to help people find
affordable housing, and creating a resource for users to compare auto insurance quotes from companies in their state.

An Android smart phone can be a real estate agent’s best friend. Rather than having to trudge back to the office or make a phone call when an impromptu inquiry pops up, you can have all the information you need in a jiffy. Real estate agents fulfill so many roles that you probably need more than just five good apps to get the job done. Still, these five apps are useful to any agent. They are available directly on your phone and can provide the information you need in just a few clicks.

1. Suburb Scout

This handy app highlights anything that might affect the property value of a home. It will show you at a glance how far away the nearest airport is, if there is a landfill in the area, or the proximity of the local power plants. Prisons in the area are also highlighted. REALTORS® and home shoppers can use this tool to eliminate any unexpected surprises before they get too far into the home buying process.

2. Smarter Agent

This clean-cut, easy-to-navigate app helps anyone locate the nearest homes or apartments for rent or sale. You can look up the prices for any listed property, as well as recent photos and maps of the location. You can also get a quick average of home values in the neighborhood by researching the prices that area homes have sold for within the last three years. Users can browse by price or location and narrow searches easily. Even REALTOR Magazine likes this app as a tool to share with clients. It’s a freebee you can offer that lets clients search the MLS based on GPS coordinates and other criteria.

3. Google Voice

Google Voice is quickly becoming one of the most useful tools for real estate agents. Once you establish your own Google phone number you can use the native Android app to send voice messages as well as text messages. You can also listen to voicemails or read text transcripts of the voicemails directly from Google. Since it is part of the Google suite of applications, it automatically incorporates all of your contacts and information in one place on your phone. It’s never been easier to stay in contact with prospects, the office and other agents.

4. Google Maps

Google Maps continues to improve its excellent interface. You can follow a GPS signal to make sure you are headed in the right direction, no matter what part of town you need to locate. You can use the app to locate businesses or schools in the area. It will calculate the distance between locations and give you a good estimate of how much time it will take to travel that distance. If you like, you can choose to get driving directions in a simple list form. You can also receive driving directions in a graphical interface that shows exactly where each turn is along the route.

5. Karl’s Mortgage Calculator

Nothing works better than a visual aid when trying to help prospective buyers understand the value of a home and the cost of a mortgage. Karl’s Mortgage Calculator helps you fulfill your role as adviser when buyers are considering a purchase. It offers a sophisticated visual analysis of loans and investments to help buyers feel confident about their purchases. Try different interest rates, early payoffs or extra payments for “what if” scenarios.

Other helpful apps that you might consider include Remember the Milk for a to-do list, iHandy Carpenter to get that last-minute wall hanging up straight, Evernote for capturing and organizing any type of information you need, Dropbox for storing and sharing documents in the cloud, and Safe Neighborhood to help clients with concerns about locating convicted offenders in the area.

What are your favorite Android apps?

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The guys at 1000Watt Consulting have mapped out the full spectrum of Real Estate 2.0 companies to create a (near) complete map of the Real Estate 2.0 universe. Print it out and stick it on your wall so you can see who should be on your radar screen.

Many of the old guard are there; Redfin, Zillow and Trulia, but so are some of the young turks; WellcomeMat, Vflyer, Realtyger, Real Estate Shows and Active Rain, proving you don’t need to have millions in VC financing to make an impact in this space.

Inc.com just finished a comprehensive look at entrepreneurialism in the U.S. and released a list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies in America.

You can view the rankings sequentially or, for the first time this year, navigate the list using a Google Maps mashup that plots each company geographically. Of course, you can also browse the list by industry, which give us the top 100 fastest growing private real estate companies.

Interestingly, none of the companies in 1000Watts’ universe made the list and the top three real estate companies were engaged in more “bread and butter” business models; #1 Noble Investment Group (development), #2 Great American Title Agency (title), #3 Atlanta Investing (foreclosures).

Mapping a list geographically seems to be a trend these days. The InmanWiki just launched a map view of its Real Estate Blog Directory. The directory, which has over 580 real estate blogs, has been growing at a fantastic pace and now you can search by city or state for real estate blogs in your hometown. (Full disclosure: I work for Inman News and helped steer this project).

Finally, if you are already feeling overwhelmed by all the places you can post listings online these days, International Listings has put together a list of 37 Places to List a Home where they’ve broken it down into destinations for US, International, Vacation and Luxury homes. If that’s not enough to make your head explode…

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Matt Goyer digs up a new tool that help you calculate the costs of home ownership. HouseMath 2.0 lets you calculate all the costs associated with your new purchase and gives you a true monthly cost of owning your new home.

Online property searches are evolving quickly and are morphing away from simply displaying listings on a map. Adding the proper context to the data, like Trulia’s heat maps or Oodle’s Index or Shackprices‘ neighborhood suggestions, is the next frontier of real estate online.

I’ve always liked mortgage calculators as part of a listing page – it lets a buyer quickly see if they can afford the property they are looking at. That said, most mortgage calculators only work as function of the term, down payment and interest rate and are therefore not truly reflective of the full cost of home ownership. (Unfortunately, they also tend to quickly crush my fantasies when I see how much that nice 4 bedroom is going to probably going to cost me)

HouseMath aims to fix that. It gives you a very detailed analysis what it’s going to cost you per month to own that home. It even gives you a number of charts so you can see what a buyer can truly afford. It seems to me this could be particularly useful for investors as well.

I can’t testify to it’s accuracy of their calculations as I’m no financial whiz but I’d love to hear what others find out (Noah?)

HouseMath is not live in all cities right now and does not have complete market data for all of its cities (i.e. some cities are limited to condos, or houses).

But, I’d love to see one of the big Real Estate 2.0 guys take look at this and implement it or something similar on their sites. HouseMath is already tied into Zillow’s API, so it would make sense that they could use this to supplement their Zestimates and homes for sale. Dontcha think?

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