Most real estate appraisers probably carry a flashlight with them.  You might need a flashlight when doing a head and shoulders inspection of an attic or crawl space and definitely need a flashlight when appraising a bank owned property that does not have the power turned on.

You might not need your flashlight anymore if you have an iPhone 4.  The iPhone 4 has a LED flash on the back of the phone and there are several free iPhone apps that turn the iPhone’s LED flash on and keep it on so you can use it as a flashlight.

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

There are several free iPhone apps that turn the iPhone’s LED flash into a flashlight

1) LED Light for iPhone 4 Free

This app enables you to use the iPhone 4’s LED flash as a flashlight and strobe light.

2) LED-Flashlight

LED FlashLight for the iPhone 4 is the ultimate free flashlight for your iPhone 4. Forget digging for your keys with those dull screen lights!
Features:
- Instant-on flashlight on startup
- Simple one-button on/off flashlight
- Auto-Off while switching to other apps
- White-background for additional light

3) Free LED Light

The first Flashlight-App that uses the iPhone4 LED-Flash!

4) FlashLight4G

FlashLight4G is a very simple flashlight application,but very useful!
Flash LED for iPhone4 can be turned ON/OFF quickly.
Features:
・Blinking mode equipped
・Simple on/off button
・You can light while hearing the tune of iPod on the back ground.
・Cool real flashlight picture

5) CameraLight – See in the dark

NOW FREE! – because like 500 other people made this app!
CameraLight turns your new iPhone 4 into the brightest flashlight yet using the new LED flash!
Simply open the app, and the LED turns on.
You can switch it on or off, or even take low light pictures with the camera.

6) Flashlight 4: LED Light for iPhone 4

The absolute fastest, simplest LED flashlight app for iPhone 4.
It does one thing, and does it ridiculously well.
It quickly and easily turns on the LED flash next to the rear camera, and keeps it continuously lit.

7) LED Flashlight HD

– INSTANT ON -
Our flashlight is one of the FASTEST starting flashlights on the market. Don’t sit around waiting for your light in the dark.
- BRIGHTEST LIGHT -
The iPhone 4’s LED light on the back is incredibly BRIGHT. In a completely dark room you can see clear to the other side.

8) LED Flashlight – Brightest Flashlight for iPhone 4

Ever wanted to use your iPhone 4’s camera flash as a flashlight? Well, now you can with our LED Flashlight app!
This is the brightest iPhone flashlight you’ve ever seen!
You can even play music while the light is on. (Some others don’t do this.)

A LED Flashlight app for the iPhone 4 is a must have iPhone app for real estate appraisers.  The LED on the back of the iPhone 4 is very bright and is a great backup for your flashlight.

Do you carry a flashlight with you during real estate appraisal?

Real estate appraisers commonly walk long distances, whether it is appraising a large tract of land or measuring a big house.  Have you ever wondered how many calories you burned during a real estate appraisal?  You can easily find out by using the free iPhone app by Jillian Michaels.

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

The Jillian Michaels Fitness Motivation is a free iPhone app.

You’ve seen Jillian Michaels help people shed hundreds of pounds on NBC’s The Biggest Loser and Losing It with Jillian. Now you can get that same hard-driving encouragement for your own workouts – when you download the only fitness app from America’s toughest trainer – FREE!

Just for fun I used Jillian Michael’s iPhone app while measuring a house for a real estate appraisal.  It took me about 25 minutes to measure the house, workshop, sunroom, and porches, and patios.  I burned a total of 35 calories in 25 minutes.  It is important to note that measuring a house for a real estate appraisal is not an intense workout, but it was fun to use the app and I would recommend using it during a real workout.

The iPhone app has several great features:

The app has motion tracking to calculate your workout’s intensity and then tells you how many calories you burned.

GPS feature that tracks the distance you ran.

The app tracks your goals and progress.

The app also gives tips to maximize your workouts and videos of Jillian demonstrating some of her exercises.

You can follow Jillian Michaels on Twitter and Facebook.

Do you ever feel like you have had a good workout after measuring a large house for a real estate appraisals?  Do you use any iPhone apps to track your workouts?

MapQuest has released a route planner that will optimize a route for up to 25 addresses.  You can even view and edit your map on your iPhone.

Need directions for a trip with multiple stops or are you simply looking for the ideal road trip planner? You have found it with the MapQuest Route Planner, which can help you create your fastest driving route. You can decide your travel directions or we can recommend the best route, mapping out the order based on fastest driving route or distance.

Hands on with the MapQuest Route Planner.  Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video below.

How to use the route planner

Step 1: Enter the addresses.

Enter the addresses individualy, copy and paste the addresses from a file, or upload an Excel (XLS) or Comma Delimited (CSV) file.

Step 2: Optimize the route

After you have entered to the addresses, you can reorder the route for the shortest time or the shortest distance.

That is it! MapQuest will plan and optimize your route.

You can edit or reorder the map if you are not happy with it.

One of the best features of the Route Planner is that you can save your map to view on your iPhone or view later.

You have to create an account if you don’t have one or log into MapQuest to save your map.  Once your map is saved, you map will be listed under “My Places” in the MapQuest iPhone App.

It is a tremendous time saver to be able to map multiple addresses and optimize a route.  The MapQuest Route Planner and iPhone app are great tools for the mobile real estate professional.

Be sure to check out my review of the MapQuest iPhone and how to map multiple address on your iPhone with Google Maps.

What is the best way you have found to plan your routes?

Google has unveiled their Google Cloud Print that will enable you to print to ANY printer that is connected to the internet from ANY computer.

Our goal is to build a printing experience that enables any app (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world.

According to Google, the cloud print will work with all printers, including those that are not themselves connected to the internet (referred to as “legacy printers”).  You will no longer need a local computer and printer drivers to print!

The Google Cloud Print is exciting news for the mobile real estate professional.

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

There are obvious security concerns with the Print Cloud.  Google already controls vast amounts of data through Gmail, Google Voice, and their search engine.  Their cloud print would mean they would control even more data as all of the printed documents pass through their cloud.  There would also have to be some control over user permissions.  You would not want anyone to to be able to print to your printer.

Let’s forget the security concerns for a minute.  The Google Cloud Print means that you could pick up your smartphone, laptop, or iPad, or any computer and print a document no matter where you were.  Not to mention printer drivers are a pain, especially when you upgrade your computer or operating system.  You might not have to every worry about printer drivers again.

There are numerous real world scenarios where the Cloud Print is useful: A real estate appraiser needing to print a document for a homeowner could use his/her smartphone and print the document while they were at the homeowner’s house.  Maybe you are sitting in Starbucks checking your email and realize you need to print something.  You can see there is an available printer at Kinko’s next door, print the document, walk next door and pick it up.

The possibilities go far beyond just printing from your smartphone.  With Google Cloud Print (or something similar) you might be able to print from any device. You might want to print a coupon that is on your TV, you could print the diagnostics test results from your car to your home printer, or even print photos directly from your digital camera without the need to hook it up to a computer.

While you might be moving towards a paperless office, there will always to be need to print and the Google Print Cloud appears to be a good solution, especially for mobile devices.

Bottom line: enabling any app to print to any printer is very exciting.

Boxcar is a free iPhone / iPad app that sends free push notification to your iPhone or iPad for services like Twitter, Facebook, email and RSS feeds.

Boxcar is a great way to be notified when someone sends you a tweet, retweets you, or sends you a direct message on Twitter.  You are on Twitter right?

Here is a demo of the app.  Click Here if you can not see the video below.

Setting up Boxcar with Twitter and Facebook is pretty straight forward.  You can even add more than one Twitter account.

To set up push notifications for your email, you will need to forward the email messages you want pushed to your phone to a unique Boxcar email address.  For Gmail, you will probably need to set up filters so you are only notified of the most important emails.  Rebliss covered how to setup filters in Gmail in a previous post.

Boxcar lets you receive notifications for mentions, retweets, and direct messages on Twitter.

Boxcar integrates with most twitter clients so you can pick which client will open when you view a new message.

One of best features about Boxcar is the Quite Time feature that lets you specify when you don’t want to be alerted to new messages.

Once you have the services setup, you will receive a push notification for each new message.

Boxcar is free but does have some advertisements.  You can get rid of the ads with a one time fee of $4.95.  Boxcar also has an API so you can integrate your website or service with Boxcar.

What service or app do you use to notify you of new Twitter messages?

AT&T has announced a new pricing plan for the iPhone that includes the ability to tether. Above photo by BryanMcDee.

What does this mean for the mobile real estate professional?  It means you might not ever be without an internet connection.

There are two pricing plans, a DataPro plan that gives you 2GB of data and a DataPlus plan that gives you 200 MB of data.  It will cost an additional $20 to have the ability to tether your iPhone.  Tethering for iPhones will be available when Apple releases its new operating system this summer.

How much internet surfing can you do with the new data plans?

AT&T provides a data calculator to help you figure out how much data you will consume.  For example, 200 MB of data will be enough to send/receive 1,000 emails with no attachments, plus send/receive 150 emails with attachments, plus view 400 Web pages, plus post 50 photos on social media sites, plus watch 20 minutes of streaming video.

How much data will a mobile real estate professional use searching a MLS or tax assessor website?

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

I was curious to know how much data I would use searching my local MLS or tax assessor website.  There are numerous programs that help track bandwidth usage.

FreeMeter is a free program that tracks how much bandwidth you use.  You do not need to install the program, just download and run the progam to track your data usage in real time.

To determine my bandwidth usage, I opened Google Chrome, logged into my MLS, and searched for sales in a subdivision.  The search resulted in 7 sales in the past 6 months.  This search used a total of 397 KB.  I also searched the local tax assessor website for a property.  The search used 87 KB of data and looking at the electronic plat map for the property used an additional 80 KB of data.

So what does this mean?  Well, if you have the 200 MB data plan, you can search MLS 500 times a month or search the tax assessor website over 2,000 times.

Note: Be sure to turn off any additional programs running like ZumoDrive.  Searching MLS with ZumoDrive running in the background took an additional 20 MB to complete.

Check out the FAQ at MacWorld if you have some questions about the new AT&T plans and tethering.

I am a heavy smartphone user.  I constantly stream Pandora, use GPS, and browse the internet and am hard pressed to use more than 500 MB of data on my iPhone.  This is because I am usually connected to a WiFi network either at home or in the office.  For me, the change is welcome, at least for now.

But what about the future?  What about GoogleTV and Hulu?  Putting a cap on smartphone internet use could severely limit what people will do with their smartphones.

What do you think?  Do you have the need to tether your smartphone to your laptop when you are out of the office?  Will limiting the data slow down what developers will make for your smartphone?

It is becoming increasingly important to be able to access your data and files from anywhere.  One solution is to sync all of you files to all of your devices (desktop, laptops, smartphone, tablet, and even an iPad.  Unfortunately all of these devices have a limited amount of internal storage.

ZumoDrive can help solve this problem.

Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service has a different twist-the service tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.  Via TechCrunch

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

You probably don’t want to sync all of your real estate files between your desktop and laptop or iPhone.  You just want to be able to easily access those files when you need them.

ZumoDrive allows you to store your files in the cloud or easily sync entire folders to the cloud so you always have access to them.  The big advantage of ZumoDrive is that the service practically gives all of your devices unlimited storage.

ZumoDrive Features:

Mobile Access

By storing your files in the cloud and not on your device, ZumoDrive essentially  gives your smartphone several gigs of extra storage.  ZumoDrive is available for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre.

Folder Linking

Easily sync a folder to ZumoDrive by right clicking on that folder and selecting “Link Folder to ZumoDrive”.  That folder will then be synced to the cloud and the contents available on other devices.

Sharing

Share files with specific people by emailing them directly from ZumoDrive or create a link to send to someone.

Music and Photos

Access all of your photos and music from ZumoDrive.  ZumoDrive integrates with iTunes so you can listen to your iTunes from everywhere.

How much does it cost?

The free account gives you about 2 gigs of storage.  10 gigs of storage costs $2.99/month.  25 gigs of storage costs 6.99/month.  Click here for the complete price list.

I use ZumoDrive to access documents that I might need while I am out of the office.  I currently store an FHA Checklist on ZumoDrive that I can reference while doing an FHA real estate appraisal.  I also use it to store a copy of my appraisal license and E&O insurance.  I can easily email someone a copy of my license if I am out of the office.

How would use a service like ZumoDrive?

Google Maps has started to integrate plat maps into their maps.  This is an exciting feature because this will anyone to find the approximate location of the property lines for a house.

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

This is an exciting feature that can help anyone interested in buying or selling real estate.

For the Homebuyer:

Image looking at a house that you want to buy but being unsure how far the property extends.  You will be able to open Google Maps on your smartphone and see the approximate location of the property lines.  And because your phone probably has GPS, you will be able to walk the property lines and have your location updated in real time on the map.

For the Real Estate Agent:

Image giving a tour of a home to a potential buyer.  After the tour of the interior of the home, you can tour the exterior and the lot.  You will be able to interact with the map on your smartphone or even an iPad.

For the Real Estate Appraiser:

Real estate appraisers appraise vacant land and it is not always easy to find the property survey markers.  Having a plat map on your smartphone will be a convenient way to make sure you know where the property line are.

The iPhone 3GS has a built in compass that will make the map rotate as you rotate the iPhone.  This will allow you to know exactly where to walk if you wanted to walk along the property lines.  Not sure how to integrate the iPhone compass?  You can read How To Integrate The iPhone Compass With Google Maps.

Of course the GPS and map on a smartphone will not be as accurate as a surveyor, but it will be close enough to get a good idea of where the property lines are located.

Google Maps has not integrated plat maps for every county in the U.S. but my guess is that it will be available soon.

How will you use Google Maps with plat maps?

You might also want to view  a previous blog post:

Will Google be the Appraiser’s Source for Plat Maps?

MapQuest released a FREE iPhone app that includes voice navigation.  Not only does the app work extremely well, but it also includes features such as auto reroute and the ability to map multiple addresses.

MapQuest® 4 Mobile brings over a decade of digital mapping experience to your iPhone® with unique features to help you get where you’re going. Try Voice-Guidance, our latest addition to Driving Directions, for a more hands-free experience!

Watch the video below for a hands on demonstration.

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

Here are some of the great features:

Voice Guidance

Voice guidance tells you when to turn and informs you of upcoming turns.

Map Multiple Addresses

Not only can you map multiple addresses, you can easily rearrange the addresses to optimize your route.  The picture below shows me rearranging the destinations by dragging the 3rd address to the 2nd position.

I previously wrote how to map multiple addresses on your iPhone with Google Maps.  Mapping multiple addresses with MapQuest is much easier.

Reroute Assistance

The app will ask you if you want the to be rerouted if you go of course.

Access Saved Maps From MapQuest.com

Maps created and saved on your desktop at MapQuest.com can be accessed on your iPhone.  All of you saved maps are located under “My Maps” on the iPhone app.

Clear Exit Photos

The map displays an exit photo when you need to exit the interstate.

Business Search

You can search for local business and have them mapped.

Search for addresses and businesses separately

This is a nice feature that lets the application knows you are searching for an address versus searching for a business name.

Pick Your Icon

Pick what icon to use to represent you on the map.  This might not be a useful feature but it is fun.

MapQuest raised the bar when creating this free app.  The app is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.  It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.  The app is free and available in the app store.

What GPS device do you use?

Did you see Google’s video Parisian Love during the Super Bowl?  It received good reviews and has been viewed almost 5,000,000 on YouTube.

Now you can create your own search story for free with YouTube’s Search Stories Video Director!  It is fun and really easy to use.

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.

How to create your own search story:

Step 1: Enter several search terms and define the kind of search (web, blog, images, etc)

You can enter up to seven different search terms. The story will end with your last search.

Pick what kind of search you want to use.

Step 2: Pick your music.  You are given 24 different soundtracks to choose from.

That is it! Preview the video and make any changes you want.

Then upload the video.

YouTube’s search stories is a fun way to highlight your local real estate business or blog.  Let me know if you make a search story, I will link to it here.

There have been some pretty good videos created so far.  Be sure to search the search stories.

Here is the video I made for my local real estate appraisal company:

Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.