It’s hard to imagine how real estate professionals manage to do all their numerous assignments and do not lose mind. They monitor listings in various areas, hunt for new clients, link people to the property they want, create leads and brochures. Plus, there are loads of documents they need to process, multiple transactions to monitor, and many other things to do. To manage all that, real estate CRM software solutions are the best and most efficient way out. While it runs all routine tasks for you, you are able to foster your efforts to do more important things that are worth your precious time and qualification.
Well, what is real estate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software? It can be defined as software created for real estate agents with the purpose to manage sales, automate business processes that take place in real estate agencies, keep better track of customers, prospects, business partners. It assumes that having CRM at hand, either on your mobile device or PC, to manage all your real estate assignments, you will no longer need to log in to several different systems. You will have all you need in one centralized database containing all your clients and their contact information, assignments and tasks, leads and listings, projects and goals, documents, and calendars.
Though CRM software offers a host of features and tools for real estate business, and its benefits seem to be endless, here is a consolidated list of top 10 ones.
1. Business processes automation and integration
CRM system ensures automation and control of all business processes of real estate companies, which increases the quality and timely performance of such operations.
Business processes automation also presupposes such function as sales force automation. It can help to automate tracking process of a customer’s account history for both repeated and future sales. It also can coordinate sales, retail outlets, marketing and call centers for the implementation of the sales force automation. It can as well help automate the uploading of your information about properties to the required real estate websites and portals, or automatically connect buyers with the ideal listing.
In addition, some real estate CRM software offer integration or plugin that links your CRM software to different Multiple Listing Service (MLS), like realtor.com or any other. It does a great job of automatic import of listings for client portals, email marketing and presentations for buyers or sellers.
Business processes automation allows to view and manage all details of each selected property, real estate ratings and referrals, any other property-related date on one page in one system. It facilitates property management and makes it run smoothly.
2. Comprehensive overview of a client
Since relationship management is customer-oriented, one of the most important benefits of CRM software is a comprehensive overview of a customer. From the first time when you see your customer to his final invoice.
Basic CRM software helps track and codify any interaction that takes place or took place between you as a real estate representative and a client. Advanced CRM software provides a complete overview of a client’s real attitude to the services rendered by a real estate company.
CRM software is very helpful in attracting new clients, customers, prospects, turning them into loyal ones, and even into your business partners. It keeps in one place all client-related reminders. It can be your client’s birthday, professional holiday or 10 years since they bought a house from you.
In addition, real estate CRM system provides a client base consolidated in one place. This base can also include data about companies, branches, partners, suppliers and competitors. Having such a unified base, real estate company receives priceless information about its clients, their preferences and on this basis builds its interaction strategy.
Apart from that, CRM software helps to build referrals. Building referrals is building your business, because referrals are a source of vital power for real estate. If your client is satisfied, he will become your best source of new business. Staying in touch with your clients is critical to your business success and that CRM software does better than anyone else.
3. Sales management
As it was mentioned, CRM software system keeps the whole history of interaction with your customers. And that, in it’s turn, helps to analyze clients’ behavior, form the right offers, win clients’ loyalty. CRM tools allow to estimate the volume of deals, possibility to close deals, log offers, showcase listings and, in general, to monitor pipeline at each stage of the sales cycle. If for instance, key metrics are not as promising as you would like them to be, the reporting tools of CRM software can help to find out possible causes, like average price for square meter of current listings, or average time period property spends on the market. Thus, CRM tools are indispensible to make your sales pipeline running simple and easy.
4. Marketing management
CRM software is also a powerful marketing instrument in real estate sphere. It allows to plan and implement marketing events, manage resources and marketing budgets, coordinate all marketing activities.
CRM software for realtors is designed to help generate business, be it online or offline, offering automated real estate drip marketing schemes. They include postcard campaigns, flyers, listings and hundreds of emails which can be easily customized to clients using your company’s logos, pictures, email addresses and other details.
Creating campaigns is easy with CRM software solutions, and once you’ve completed, you can save or print, or send emails right from the application.
Real estate software solutions can also include features vital for marketing such as different types of photo editors, templates, report designers. Having these tools, users can easily create customer-tailored reports and appealing brochures. And with powerful search functions CRM software solutions can be even more beneficial, while several different languages and currencies can be a real asset for international real estate agents.
5. Product portfolio management
It’s important for every real estate company to provide products and services of high quality and at competitive price. And effective companies tailor their products and services to meet the needs of their clients. CRM software provides company managers with unique insight into the lives of their regular customers. CRM tools can be used by organizations with many sales and service channels to unify the information flow, and also to enable self-service for ordering or tracking.
Thus, CRM solutions allow to structure and manage any company’s products and services, to record special prices and discounts, analyze data to offer the best options for clients and find out the most popular ones.
Real estate listing management is also important. With CRM tools, you’ll be able to create a record of all listings with criteria to fit every listing. It will help to track types of property, addresses, property details, instructions, dates and much more. You’ll have an opportunity to leave comments about house owners or its history. If you have a client who wants to have a house in a certain area or is looking for a specific apartment, you’ll be able to search for all the properties meeting his requirements.
6. Time and workflow management
If you are a busy real estate agent with the same busy schedule, very often it may be difficult to find time to live your life in-between all your appointments. But CRM solutions are indeed helpful in better organization of you work and your time. Using them, you’ll be able to manage your business in a flash and relax, because you won’t need to worry about being late for appointments or missing out on a new business, or forgetting anything.
Automatic reminders will tell you about important tasks you need to manage, so that you stay on track. You can also automate routine tasks with invoice reminders, have an overview of all the assignments and events you or your colleagues have planned or completed. You can make to-do lists for a day, week or month and monitor your progress. Plus, it is possible to sync your day planner to your phone – because time is so essential for every transaction.
Sometimes you come across people who are not yet ready to buy or sell, but, let’s say, in a year they will be. How do you preserve such a lead? With lead management feature of real estate CRM, you will not miss out on this opportunity. Using a custom workflow, you will be able to create appointments, tasks and follow-up detailed reminders for every lead. You can keep notes about your prospect and all interactions such as emails and calls.
All these functionalities ensure that real estate agents stay on task, well organized and that nothing avoids observation.
7. Document control automation
The real estate industry deals with lots of documents. With CRM software, you’ll be able to store contracts and purchase agreements, marketing materials, and other important documents. You can draw up, store, and once you are ready, print or email the documents directly from the system.
With CRM tools it’s easy to edit documents automatically according to templates, quickly search necessary documents in a system, create an e-storage for documents, make pdf versions and much more.
8. Optimization of communication inside the company
You can share updates and documents using CRM apps with everyone involved. Because CRM system allows effectively organize interaction and exchange of information in the company. Now important information won’t be lost and there will be no place for information gaps.
In practice CRM tools ensure coordination of work of different departments in the company. From this point of view, the purpose of CRM is to remedy the situation when different departments act independently and their actions are inconsistent and unbalanced.
9. Perfect assistant in financial issues
CRM software can create advance payment, sales and invoices in multiple currencies. It can also import your bank statements, and match all receipts and payments with the corresponding invoices. It allows to create different budget scenarios, so that you could compare them against actual costs, profits, revenues. Commission and payment tracking option of CRM system can calculate or keep track of agent commissions and other payments against prearranged schemes and agreed payment plans.
This functionality can be sometimes provided by means of integration with payment software or commissions tracking software.
10. Security
You can keep your clients safe and business secure with CRM software solutions. You will get the peace of mind, if you have your data protected with multi-level data encryption, and safe against the failure of your single device with several storage units. In order to ensure additional levels of security for you or your customers, CRM software can safeguard your information with latest virus scans and intrusion detection systems. Moreover, it can back up all your information every hour, day or week to ensure you have access to it when needed.
So you can pretty well see that at present real estate CRM software has become integral to the real estate business. CRM manages interactions between you and your clients, connects more buyers with more sellers, turns your contacts into relationships. It helps you to manage, maintain and turn real estate leads into priceless long-term real estate clients. And this, in its turn, can’t but result in increased sales, profits and revenues.
Elinext Alliance projects:
UPC Real Estate App
EdQuants Analytic App
Torshavn City App
CRYPTOCARD Case Study
Industries and Technology Areas:
Industries: real estate
Technology Areas: software development, custom CRM systems development
