For all you Harry Potter fans out there, you’ll appreciate this post about how to “manage your mischief.”

And by mischief, I mean all those nagging challenges that keep you from making more money. (You can read more about my take on that here.)

Things like CRM, lead generation, lead development and transaction management.

In the course of my travels, I’ve come across a number of tools that I believe are creatively solving problems for the real estate industry and I talked to their creators today at ERA Real Estate’s 2013 International Business Conference in Austin, Texas.

Here’s a look at some of these innovative solutions and what their creators think of them.

Problem: An unorganized database
Solution: Contactually, a service that organizes contacts into categories, then integrates information from your gmail conversations and social media interactions to suggest when and how to contact people in your sphere.

If organizing sounds like a four-letter word to you, don’t worry! This app works like a game, throwing a contact up on the screen and asking you to put it in a bucket within four seconds. In the space of an afternoon, I whittled down 7,000 connections into organized buckets and was ready to let the magic begin.

Because the service links to your gmail, you don’t have to log into a separate CRM system. Every time you get or send an email, you get a prompt to label and file the conversation. Behind the scenes, the app works to analyze all your interactions with your network and then sends you a hot sheet – here are ten people you should follow up with and why. Based on your activity with them it will recommend a contact method – you emailed three times – now call, providing some context to your contact method.

Zvi Band, Founder of Contactually explains it this way:

For professionals like us, relationships are most important tool we have and it is really hard to do manage them. Address books hard to maintain, etc. So we turned it into a game. Your email already knows what you’re doing, so Contactually pulls everything in from your Outlook and gmail, so the program always knows who you are talking to at any given time. All we care about is that you stay in touch and continue to build relationships with your contacts.

Problem: TMI (Too Much Information!)
Solution: Curaytor, a search engine just for real estate advice

Let’s face it, the water cooler is dead. 92% of agents communicate with brokers less than 15 hours per month. 42% don’t go to office meetings. The water cooler has moved online: people seek information and advice from their friends and colleagues via Facebook.

Curaytor, a conversation search engine that I founded with my friend Jimmy Mackin, has taken an archive of 80,000 real estate related conversations on a real estate Facebook groups and made them searchable. It also organizes them into four buckets: Trending, Popular, Latest and Staff Picks.

Jimmy’s take on the problem is:

The big lie in our industry is that technology is supposed to make it easier but it has becoming overwhelming There is no strategy or plan associated with use of applications and then there are no results. It has become social not working instead of social networking. Curaytor give you a way to connect with actual other agents that use the project who can provide you with support. It is great, you have real people sharing real experiences.

We also host a show called The Water Cooler – check it out!

Problem: TMP (Too much paper!)
Solution: DotLoop, online transaction management

Real estate transactions are a hassle, no doubt about it. While electronic signatures are becoming more prevalent, version control of key documents is a challenge. The folks at DotLoop (full disclosure, I am compensated by DotLoop), took the Words with Friends approach and created Version NOW, the single, sole “board” for a real estate transaction. Just like when you play a word and all your friends are notified, any time something changes on the real estate “board” everyone is notified. This approach makes transactions hassle free, allows the parties involved to work from anywhere there is an internet connection and provides real time insights into the transaction through a cool dashboard.

Austin Allison, CEO of DotLoop sees it this way:

DotLoop all started with the concept of people. Real estate is about people working with other people. The internet was taking the people out of the transaction process. People are loyal to experiences that are delivered. We’ve learned that through Starbucks, Amazon, etc. We help agents and brokers deliver amazing consumer experiences. You can let the technology do the work for you. Every transaction is an arm length away. Plus, the agent or broker brings a USB drive to the closing instead of a big book.

You may not be able to recite a spell to generate business, but with these four innovative solutions, I bet you’ll be able to create some marketing magic and leave your clients spellbound!

Chris Smith will be speaking at ERA IBC 2013 in Austin, TX March 21-24, 2013.