I consider myself a very open-minded person, but try to convince me to switch from Mac to PC, for example, and I'm going to dig in my heels. I'm not alone; most of the people you meet are committed to their marriages, their families, their careers, and their operating system. So when you're choosing any technology product, your first question needs to be whether or not it will work with your OS.

Real Estate and Mac

You can't exactly describe the relationship between the real estate industry and Apple computers as a love affair, but they're certainly warming up to each other. As more agents purchase Apple computers, more vendors are developing solutions that work on the Mac OS. However, there is a lot of real estate software that will not work.

"You need to make sure that the solution you choose is 100% Mac and Safari-compatible and syncs with Mac Address Book and iCal," says Matthew Collis of IXACT Contact. "Some CRMs claim to be 'almost' Apple compatible but have features that only work on a Windows PC." The company read the writing on the wall and developed their real estate CRM to work on both Mac and PC.

So what's a Mac to do? You can dig through your options until you find a solution that's built specifically for Apple. You can find a product that was built for PC, and then tweaked a bit to fit Mac (with some features or functionality missing). Or, you can find a Web-based tool that works on any operating system.