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What is a real estate CRM and how does it help your business win?

What is a real estate CRM and how does it help your business win?
Andriy Sambir
Andriy Sambir
Chief Executive Officer
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Linkup has compiled a comprehensive set of important information on the role of CRM in the real estate industry. Check out the top reasons why you may need this software and discover strategies for implementing it in your business to get the result that matters.

Figuring out what is a CRM in real estate

Let's start with CRM in Real Estate meaning. Customer relationship management (CRM) allows companies to monitor and manage every aspect of client relationships. Let's consider that the specifics of the industry are that real estate companies help people to solve a crucial part of their lives - to obtain a home. The question of having a high-quality CRM increases many times over.

Speaking of what does CRM in real estate stand for, its essence is to put buyers or sellers in the center of attention, which will help your company focus more on them and control all processes to raise closing rates and boost revenue.

What capabilities does this software have?

The meaning of CRM in Real Estate itself should include all the necessary functions to support the real estate business in various ways, such as managing property leads, deals, and sales. It should also store property information, provide informational organization, help with contact, document, transaction management, etc. Each of these functions is described in detail below.

Storing property information

When we are talking about purchasing, selling, or renting real estate, details are essential. CRM will be a trusted partner in gathering all the most necessary real estate information in a coherent, trustworthy, and easily accessible manner. Customers of the system will be able to sort homes by options and filter by specific requirements to find the right fit for the customer. It will make your company more competitive and help with relationship development with your clients.

Read our Apartolino case study. It is an innovative marketplace for the provision of serviced apartments in Switzerland, which has significantly improved the reality for property managers there.

Storing information about interested parties

Offering customers properties that meet their demands is one of the fundamentals of success in the real estate business. Well-designed CRMs include features to collect data on clients and create a detailed profile with information about their requirements, budget level, regional preferences, and more. You can then match your customers to the appropriate estate according to their needs from your one-stop information database and monitor the quality of services they receive.

Storing information about interested parties

Managing property leads, deals, and sales

A vital function of such a system is providing a seamless workflow for managing leads and properties to save real estate agents time. Established conveyors in the form of a kanban make easier segmentation of leads, smarter reporting on successful deals and bottlenecks, and more effectively control other processes without missing a single one.

Building relationships, communications, and interactions

First establish trust, then make deals. That's a rule of thumb in the real estate industry. With CRM for real estate, you can easily handle all customer interactions in one software. You can provide personalized services for each person. Use appointment scheduling, send emails, and track responses to email marketing campaigns. You can also receive and respond to messages from the customer support desk.

types of crm

Integrating with other systems, stakeholders, and third parties

That's another facet of the answer to the question, “What does CRM mean in real estate” This software enables the combination of several information components about the processes - real estate management, leasing, and sales- usually stored in other systems and depend on third parties. With CRM, you get all the information you need in one place and the capabilities to create a trusted referral network with buyers, sellers, lawyers, and others specialists involved.

Main features to pay attention to and benefits of CRM in real estate

Companies that incorporate CRM into their day-to-day operations gain multiple benefits. First, they can have robust digital marketing automation, manage real estate marketing campaigns more effectively, track leads, receive and analyze reports on managers' performance, and more easily follow up on future changes.

When CRM is connected to your campaigns, it allows you to have more productive social media usage because you see all inboxes in one platform and write immediate responses to them. It leads to higher campaign results and allows the scheduling of more appointments, eventually leading to more sales.

What is CRM for realtors?

crm for realtors

It offers significant assistance in managing a large number of sales. A feature such as custom reports provides data on each transaction. It gives information on current real estate buying trends, the number of sales cycles, and statistics on different customer profiles. It also correlates them to customer types, real estate prices, and so forth to gain essential insights and plan further work strategies.

This management tool helps agents save time on unnecessary organizational tasks, such as filing paperwork, and receiving paper notices, since all of this is already in the CRM. This allows to focus on core business processes - calling potential clients, reconnecting with former clients, making appointments, and closing deals.

To summarize, the benefit of CRM software for agents is that they will track the sales record and the results of their marketing activities. Real estate CRM helps them plan out their work more accurately, pay more attention to relevant clients, and quickly get their contact information from one resource to save time and speed up their workflow.

To discover more, read the article “5 Key benefits of the custom CRM for a real estate agency.”

Observing types of real estate CRMs

There are several basic types of CRM software - on-premises and cloud-based. Each of them has perks and downsides. Here we describe their main characteristics.

real estate CRMs

Cloud-based solutions are more suitable for real estate companies that want to make data available from any device with the internet in any country or place for anyone with permission. It's for companies that operate in different locations or have departments in other regions. In addition, this way of storing data is mostly cost-effective because cloud companies like Amazon, Azure, IBM, and others handle technical issues on their side. In other words, property managers don't have to spend time technically upgrading local hardware or hiring people who are good at it.

On-premise CRM is another type of real estate business information management using desktop computers. It provides improved ways to protect data. But, as we mentioned, it always requires expensive maintenance.

Here at Linkup Studio, we can install both for you. However, more and more companies prefer cloud-based CRM software, and we have a lot of experience building them. Our team can help you eliminate the need to spend time implementing software in your business, allocating the right features, installing data protection, and more.

How will real estate CRM software help grow property business?

As we mentioned above, the primary purpose of implementing CRM in real estate is to help manage current clients, retain previous ones and, in part, attract new ones, using CRM as part of marketing campaigns.

There are clear statistics from a survey of real estate companies. It shows that 91% of companies with over ten employees use CRM for customer management processes. From this, we can conclude that CRM is suitable not only for medium or large businesses but also for small companies.

So here we describe in detail how every area of your real estate business would benefit from a CRM solution.

  • Realtors and estate agents
  • Administration team
  • Marketing team
  • Sales and deals closing team
  • Customer service and support
crm benefits

Realtors and estate agents

They are the direct representatives of the entire agency to the clients. Therefore, CRM will be helpful to know the basic information about the property to present it to the client in the most attractive way. Agents can also learn about the clients, their needs, and their estimated budget to offer them the most suitable property. Realtors can also discover previous client contacts, comprehend negotiation difficulties and guess the best way to move a deal forward. That is what is a CRM for realtors.

Administration team

One of the crucial tasks of a real estate agency is to perform administrative tasks reliably. CRM allows your administrators to fill out real estate information so agents can access it easily. They can also manage properties and clients throughout the process and produce reports on the most critical metrics, such as leads, clients, closed deals, and revenue levels.

Marketing team

Advertising campaigns increase public awareness of your company and the properties you offer. With CRM, property managers can identify properties with a better chance of being sold through advertising. You can also generate audience types, such as buyers, sellers, or renters, and craft suitable ads with different emphases for each and get more qualified leads. And with CRM software, you can track campaign results.

Sales and deals closing team

Once the agent makes the sale to the client, this team accompanies the client through the entire process until the transaction is completely closed. In this work, CRM helps to operate the data of buyers, sellers, and tenants, to work with mortgage companies, lawyers, and others to ensure that the processes run according to the law. This software helps sign deals and manage documents.

Customer service and support

This team is also vital for building trust in the firm. With the help of the CRM, the support team will contact the company's clients, answer their questions in various formats, and inform them about the transactions made.

To discover more, read the article “5 Key benefits of the custom CRM for a real estate agency.”

How to apply CRM in your real estate business?

We've learned what does CRM stand for in real estate, so let's discuss embedding it into your existing system. Indeed, the best approach is to formulate a growth plan or strategy for your real estate company and include the creation of CRM software as a comprehensive process improvement for the company.

How to apply CRM in your real estate business

The first step in applying CRM to your business is to conduct an audit of your current processes. This will help determine recent results and performance levels. A few possible questions for this are:

  1. What operations does your company have, and will you expand them?
  2. Research your operations and determine what data stays on paper.
  3. What information is collected for data and what information is not, but is it worth it?
  4. What are the bottlenecks of your current automated processes?
  5. Define the expectations and functionality required of CRM.

Once the stage is completed, formulate all the requirements and start looking for a creation partner or search for ready-made tools to meet your real estate business needs.

Is it worth creating a Custom Real Estate CRM?

There are a variety of businesses in this field, such as brokerage firms with agents, property management, mortgage firms, building owners, consultants, and many others. It doesn't matter that your business may not seem to stand out, with no special needs, because your team and operational processes are special. Thus, finding an off-the-shelf solution that meets your business's particular requirements would not be easy. Therefore, a custom CRM would be the solution.

custom crm

There are also a lot of competitors in the real estate market, especially these days, and companies are trying to differentiate themselves from each other. A custom-designed CRM will help your company reflect the benefits of your processes to your customers. So, the main reasons for creating custom CRM software are as follows:

It covers all your business needs

Off-the-shelf solutions can rarely include all the features you need. Moreover, you'll have to pay for extras you don't use.

Managing user processes

As we've said before, there are many different businesses in the real estate industry, and accordingly, there are various tasks. Ready-made solutions cover widespread needs, while your business may need other, more customizable features, such as in sales processes, notification optimizations, marketing campaign results, support, etc.

Data storage

Custom CRM will allow your business to maintain and store any customer data, discover databases and choose the one with the best terms of use. Your business can significantly benefit from keeping transaction records, user preferences, business activity repositories, etc.

Improved lead acquisition & company performance

One of the most important benefits of a custom real estate CRM is that it helps you get more statistics and clearly understand why customers are leaving, thanks to extensive filter functionality. Out-of-the-box CRMs typically don't provide detailed information and don't allow you to notice minor flaws.

Custom CRM also assists in optimizing managers' time for day-to-day activities such as preparing meetings, searching for necessary documents, determining customer preferences, and much more.

Additionally, creating a custom CRM may be part of a global digitalization process. To keep up with everchanging markets and stay updated on the newest technologies, check out our podcast episode or read about building custom CRM software in the complete guide.

Don't hesitate to contact us. Our managers will show you successful case studies in this area and discuss the steps for creating your brand-new real estate CRM.

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Andriy Sambir
Andriy Sambir
Chief Executive Officer
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