Why the iPhone 6 is Great for Real Estate Investors

iPhone Mania has officially arrived.  Now is the perfect time to to evaluate the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus for usage by real estate investors. Here’s my review of the entire process relating to ordering, optimizing and using the world’s most anticipated new gadget for real estate activities.  It’s an exciting time.  Apple has officially launched their most innovative product of the last several years.  The new iPhones combined with the new iOS 8 operating system promise to enhance our business and personal lives in countless ways.

Overall, I have to say that I’m impressed. Everything about the process in securing the phone from my carrier, Sprint, has gone smoothly. I’m saving roughly 35% off of my monthly bills by switching to their service over At&t.  Receiving my iPhone 6 Plus through the mail on the first official launch day is a huge perk too.  Who needs to wait in those lines of hundreds of people at the Apple Store? I guess some people see this as a fun ritual, but for real estate investors, brokers and entrepreneurs in general, time is money. The iPhone 6 process has already saved me a nice amount of time.

Getting Started

The new iOS 8 operating system is up and ready for download. If you have purchased a new iPhone already, it’s a good idea to unlock your iPhone (if your provider allows it) and download the latest operating system.  You’ll get more money on ebay if you choose to take those two steps. Upgrading old iPhones with smaller storage might seem to be a challenging task at first.  Owners of lower storage iPhones are oftentimes getting a message that a whopping 5.7 Gigs of space is needed for the successful download of the new operating system.  Yikes! Does this mean that we need to immediately start the painstaking process of choosing which of your personal videos, pics and apps to delete? If so, that isn’t too nice of Apple.  There has to be a better way. Luckily there is.

Overseas Travel

If you do your update through iTunes on a laptop with sufficient storage for the download and backup, that big multi-gigabyte number of open storage space needed on your iPhone is reduced considerably to around 1.1 Gb.  I just went through the download process without a hitch and now I’m all set with iOS 8 on my iPad and (old) iPhone 5, which I plan to keep for use in the Bahamas and my other travels abroad.  I’d recommend that international real estate investors keep at least one phone unlocked, so that you can slip in a local sim card once you arrive in a new destination country. You’ll save yourself plenty of money with local pay-as-you-go data plans vs paying your American cell phone providers a king’s ransom for international data.  T-mobile service might be exception with their unlimited data roaming plan in 120 countries, but unlucky for me, my most frequently travelled country, The Bahamas, isn’t covered.  As a general rule, it’s best to have your unlocked phone be of a GSM variety for greatest compatibility with foreign services.  Ok, now that we’ve got past some pre-iPhone 6 activation/usage, lets move ahead with why the iPhone is the recommended phone for real estate investors.

Big Hands Need the Plus

I’d speculate that the iPhone 6 plus is best for males, while the iPhone 6 is best for female real estate investors.  Personally, the larger model was a no-brainer for me.  I’m 6’2 and have large hands. I also tend to have large pockets in my shorts (I live in Miami) and pants. So, I don’t foresee any problems with having the proper place to store the phone when I am on-the-go. Female hands, pockets and skinny jeans tend to be smaller. So for many, the iPhone 6 Plus is simply too cumbersome to carry around and use.

Loving the Hype

I must confess that I have had a bit of an obsession with this phone since the rumors were first circulating that a large screen was in the works. Following the rumors on http://www.macrumors.com/ became a fun thing to do.   At one point, I was tempted to make the switch over to Samsung for their larger screen sizes, but I just didn’t like the architecture of the Android operating system. I had grown spoiled by Apple’s logical swipes and seamless integration with my Macbook Pro and iPad.  (While on that topic, I use the a 15” Macbook Pro retina to do most work like creating content & spreadsheets and the iPad for reading books and to display maps during meetings).

Perfect Displays for Graphics

As I was creating the sky five properties website for real estate investors, I made a point to create research and analytics capabilities that suited that demands for the private equity funds that routinely communicate with me to underwrite the market pricing for new condo towers in South Florida.  My objective was to provide the data in a pretty graphical environment that makes the browsing experience pleasant. I like to use the term beautification – setting that up as one of the core values of the company.  The larger displays for both new iPhones really do the graphical information justice. They make all visuals better with their exceptional resolutions of 1334 x 750 and 1920 x 1080.

No Lines – No Problem

Getting my iPhone 6 plus was a rather smooth process. It pays to be ahead of the curve, if you wanted to receive your phone with the first batch of shipments.  For some reason, I woke up out of a dream at 4am on the morning of September 12th (the first official order taking day)…made a bee-line over to my desk and attacked the sprint website with a constant wave of refreshes until the site let me into the shopping page.  I read a bit on my kindle in-between clicks to help make the mindless refreshing time more productive. All in all, it took about 45 minutes.

Thumbs Up to Sprint

It was easy selecting Sprint as my new cellular provider.  At&t just stopped being competitive with their pricing some time ago. Real estate investors of all sorts should enjoy the $50 unlimited talk, text and data plan. Can’t beat that one. On top of the non-competitive plan pricing by At&t, I couldn’t even get the iPhone 6 Plus to come up as one of my purchase options during my early morning shopping blitz on September 12th. Throw in the fact that Sprint’s new Spark service is presumed to be ultra-fast within Miami, and I was sold. The company did a good job of managing delivery expectations; I was originally messaged that the delivery would take up to three weeks, but it turns out that my phone was delivered on the September 19th launch day.  No need to camp out all night long at the Apple Store like some of those diehard crazy Apple fans.

Incredible Photo and Video Quality

Real estate investors, brokers and buyers of all sorts are really going to enjoy the new and improved camera on the iPhone 6 Plus.   The new full HD 1080p quality video is fantastic.  It makes life so much more simple as we can take amazing quality videos of properties for later review on laptops and televisions. The 128Gb storage option is awesome when combined with the top-end video quality because you don’t have to stress nearly as much about running out of storage space on your iPhone while filming multiple properties. The larger aperture sensor is also fantastic for image light and detailing. If you are creating a presentation package for investment partners, images shot off of the iPhone 6 Plus can be better manipulated in post-processing than other past models due to the enhanced information taken in by the powerful new sensor. Low light performance is also a noticeable improvement.

Serious Battery Stamina

Another key area of smartphone performance has been dramatically improved.  Real estates investors and brokers are on the phone constantly. And having your phone die at inopportune times while on the road is a sign of an amateur.  With my old Iphone 5, battery life was a serious issue. Apple appears to have made huge strides with the battery performance of the new iPhone 6 Plus.  The new model makes it through a full day of heavy calls and usage without a need for a recharge. Love it!

Improved Spreadsheet and Email

The review of spreadsheets are performed much better on the new iPhone than previous models.  This was an issue in the past as my eyes were either quite strained or I had to zoom in too far and lose the context of other cells, rows and columns. More screen real estate is quite helpful for real estate investors that have to do this sort of on-the-fly quantitative analysis.  Reading and sending emails is also an improvement.  There is a nice new feature in iMail that allows for a quick save of the contact information of an email contact through instant reading their email signature. That’s a nice and efficient step.

Highly Positive Verdict

All in all, the new Iphone 6 and Iphone 6 Plus models are a winner for real estate investors, brokers and entrepreneurs.  The enhanced camera features, improved battery life and expansive screens offer a considerable improvement over other iPhones of the past, and clearly place this new phone above all competitors.  My personal preference is the 6 Plus; the upgrades that it offers over the standard 6 model are worth the extra money.  Stay tuned to future blog posts about leveraging technology for your real estate endeavors.

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