A Real Estate CRM is probably the most important part of any Real Estate Business or in fact any business. A CRM is where you manage all of your future, past and current business. This is not possible for any human without a CRM. You can try but ultimately you will kick yourself when you miss a lead that did business with someone else because you are a tight arse and did not pay for some software that would help you.
The OLD School CRM is your BRAIN!
Back in the day when I started Real Estate I just did as I was told and created a cardboard contacts card in some box that sat on my desk, and it was up to me to provide the information to make it worthwhile and have some strange intuitive sense when to flick through it and look at a name and think! “You know what maybe they are worth a call” Most times I was right but jeesss that’s a lot of effort right?
Do I really need a CRM for Real Estate?
No is the answer if you want to keep missing out on business, but if you have half a progressive vein in your body the answer is YES you sure as hell do! The average Real Estate CRM has really evolved from 10-15 years ago when I started in the game. They were only just a contact system like outlook on steroids however now they literally can control your entire business.
What to look for in a Real Estate CRM these days.
Well, most of the CRM’s will do all the basics pretty much the same as tagging contacts, attaching properties to contacts, adding property information like marketing collateral and exporting properties to major property websites. Where these systems really can differ is quite important.
Advanced features to look for when choosing a Real Estate CRM
When of the areas where you can really save some time in a day is if your CRM has process automation. If it does not there is so much work that needs to be done by other team members like a Real Estate Virtual Assistant or Personal Assistant. Process automation will put the business on Autopilot.
Marketing Automation is key for today’s Real Estate CRM.
Most CRM’s may have some marketing, but the keys is to have it automated so that as you move from one process to the next that it is created automatically. Leveraging Just Listed and Just Solds will ensure you have more and more listings and buyers coming into your funnel daily.
Deal management for a Real Estate CRM!
One of the features that is a must is deal management in an easy way to follow. If you have used Trello before you would have experienced the Kanban style where you can move things from left to the right easily. This is perfect for the deal management in Real Estate Sales or even Property management. To be able to have prospect moved from, prospect to appointment to listed with all the correct things happening because of the automation mentioned above is absolutely amazing.
Things to think about when using a modern CRM?
These thing above are crucial. As mentioned, though CRM’s do a lot more however, I am not sold on the direction some have moved from a customer’s perspective. Real Estate CRM’s our now attaching company or agent websites to the CRM. This may create ease for the customer however you are going away control of your business as if you ever try to change CRM’s what happens to your website?
I bang on about SEO a lot because it is super important in modern times, and it is the best source of new business. When you use a website that comes with a CRM generally you will have very little control when it comes to building additional pages, the link structure itself and the functionality you can create for lead capture. My suggestion is that if you like a CRM and want to use the website feature use it only to display your properties but not really for much more.
One of the questions I ask myself is that if I want back and started a Real Estate Business is would I use a Real Estate CRM or just one of the larger traditional CRMs and take advantage of customisation features and make it my own? Well, the answer I’d probably just have a standard CRM or maybe even both.
The reason why is simple, the budget of these standard CRM companies like SalesForce, InfusionSoft, Freshworks CRM and more have way more money than smaller Real Estate Specific CRM companies. This means they have more features and more integration capability. In our business ShoreAgents, we have customised Fresh Works CRM into something amazing with a combination of some of the other FreshWorks products.
Some of the features I have not seen that make like easy are lead scoring where you can set in the backend-specific rules for actions taken. This is attached to the website with a script that allows me to track visitors and send them marketing based on what page they went to. This is super powerful. That script also allows us to pull in data from uses and utilise webhooks to push that data out to another app we use like ClickUp for daily task management.
This is another topic for another article as I get writing I realise I’ll be here all day. What I am getting at though is to really have a good look around if you are considering getting a new CRM for your real estate business as you must pick the best options for you and your ability.
There is no reason if you are the Real Estate Business owner that you could not use something like FreshWorks CRM for the company and then have a specific Real Estate CRM for all the agents. This way you can take total control of the business and let the agents have easy day-to-day tasks in a system specifically built for them.
We would like to start reviewing all CRM’s here so if you have had lots of experience using a Real Estate CRM please leave a comment on this article we are happy to give you one <DoFollow> link to do so. Thanks for your time, I hope this article gave you some things to think about when assessing a Real Estate CRM for your business.
