Commercial Retail Real Estate
While my company wasn't the first to add iPads to our repertoire, we were certainly amongst the earliest amongst our 'colleague' brokerages. As the marketing director/office manager for an 8-broker office specializing in commercial retail real estate, I have been able to convert a lot of our multi-site tour books (which could be close to 75-100 pages and 2-5 or more copies of each book) into iPad format. My more tech-savvy/tech-comfortable brokers will take the clients on the site tours with the iPads and maybe only a few specific pages of hard copy. If the client subsequently needs the tour book to bring back to their office, I simply take the exact same files that I put onto the iPads and upload onto a flash drive.
All of the clients that have had the iPad tours have been very happy with the transition. No more schlepping 3-ring binders on an airplane back to their home offices. The clients that have not switched to iPad tours haven't been "converted" only because they are represented by the old school brokers...the brokers that aren't as comfortable with anything more technological than their shoelaces.
While so many people talk about tablets saving business, right now, I am looking at our iPads at helping us save money on our paper consumption and the wear & tear on our digital printer. Ultimately, it saves me time because I don't have to collate and put together four 50-page tour books. For a small business like ours, saving time and cutting back on certain expenses is well worth the cost of the iPads themselves.
