The 9 Best Real Estate CRMs in 2021
The Process
We only considered CRMs that were purpose-built for the real estate industry, or that had easy, out-of-the box customization for the fields real estate agents need to do their work. Once we had a list of every real estate CRM we could find, we removed a few contenders because they didn’t meet basic criteria such as hosting the CRM on a secure connection.
This left us with thirty CRMs which we took for a trial run. For each CRM we evaluated their plans for individual agents, and not their enterprise or brokerage offerings. From that list, we chose the top 10 real estate CRMs that performed best. (See here for a full explanation of what we evaluated.)
The Winners
Best CRM For Individual Real Estate Agents - RealOffice360 (https://realoffice360.com/)
RealOffice360 voted the best real estate CRM for real esate agents in 2021.
What stood out
Relationship focus
Features such as customizeable follow-up lists, contact cards that have fields like birthday and home anniversaries, printable mailing labels, and Mailchimp integration all come together to help you nurture leads without leaving your past clients in the dust. With 91%(!!) of home-owners saying they would work with their Realtor® again, this empowers you to build a self-sustaining, relationship-focused book of business.
Task planning
The Daily planner is by far the most robust for helping you manage the various components of your day-to-day. Not only can you time-block your to-dos, you can also keep your overall goals and routines top-of-mind.
Deal Tracking
It’s easy to see where deals are in the sales pipeline, and you can also see the next follow-up you need to do for each deal on the same page. This makes it easy to prioritize your day without having to click to specific screens to see what to do next. We also liked being able to set nuanced goals that accounted for variables like average home price.
Why it made the list
The user interface is really easy to understand. It took us just a few minutes from sign-up to scheduling follow-ups with our imported clients. It’s a great option for new real estate agents, relationship-sales focused Realtors, and budget-conscious real estate agents.
Drawbacks
No teams function. If you need to assign tasks across multiple people, or need more than one log-in to access your book of business, this isn’t going to work for you.
Runner Up
Realvolve (https://www.realvolve.com/) – you may like this better if you’re a real estate agent seeking a highly customised workflow.
Follow-up Boss (https://www.followupboss.com/) – you may like this better if you follow a transactional sales philosophy.
Best CRM for Small Real Estate Teams - WiseAgent (https://wiseagent.com/)
What stood out
Transaction management
This is where this CRM shines. Wise Agent facilitates transaction management via integrations including Equifax and Docusign, so you can access the full lifecycle of a deal right within the CRM.
Team features
Wise Agent gives you the ability to integrate with your team from the get-go with access to additional logins.
Landing pages
This is one option to explore if you don’t already have a website. The ability to create single-pages for an individual property will help you get your clients’ properties noticed until you have a chance to figure out and optimize your own site.
Why it made the list
We liked this option for those real estate agents who find it difficult to manage different tools for the different pieces of their business. We liked this CRM the best for real estate agents working within teams that don’t need broker-level customization, and agents looking for a transaction management solution.
Drawbacks
There is such a focus on doing everything that the core CRM functionality itself was not as user-friendly as some of the other options on this list.
Runner Up
Top Producer (https://www.topproducer.com/) – this may work better if your team also needs a website and market stats.
Lion’s Desk (lionsdesk.com) – you may like this better if you’re also wanting assistance designing Facebook ads.
Best CRM For Real Estate Brokerages
We recommend evaluating CRMs as if you were going to run your book of business from them personally. You’ll be able to effectively set your agents up for success by picking the one that best embodies and facilitates your sales methodology.
Each one of the recommended CRMs for individuals real estate agents and small teams has a brokerage offering available. The options range from offering white-labelled software to you (where the CRM is re-designed to have your branding), to more robust solutions that include websites and other add-ons.
Best CRM For General Real Estate Industry Businesses - Zoho (https://www.zoho.com/crm/real-estate)
Zoho voted the best general real estate business CRM in 2021.
What stood out
Filtering
Zoho allows you to filter your leads and deals by activities, whether they were touched, e-mail time, source, and a number of other convenient fields that are useful for prioritizing your database.
Deals
Zoho allows you to add what you think is the % probability of a deal closing. This is a neat feature that could help you manage your time effectively, although it might lead you to lose deals if you were off on your guess and consequently didn’t allocate a sufficient amount of time and energy to a potential deal.
Workflow Rules
This allows you to customize on a very granular level the actions you want to happen. For instance we set up a rule that if a lead containing a certain zip code comes in, then a specific e-mail template is sent to them.
Why it made the list
The enterprise plan would be a great fit for those who have multiple lines of business within their company, and want the ability to view sales activity across the board, invoice, and manage the activity of other groups all within the same system. It’s a particularly business-to-business (B2B) sales friendly CRM so with customization, this could work well for commercial real estate purposes as well.
Drawbacks
Right off the bat when you look at contacts there is no property field on the contact card. While we fell for the real-estate specific landing page, after a test drive it felt like the amount of up-front investment needed to customise for pretty basic needs was not a realistic time investment for individual Realtors.
Runner Up
Copper (https://www.copper.com/crm-for-real-estate-agents-and-brokers) – you may like this better if you don’t want to have to spend a lot of time customising a CRM for your team.
Realspace (https://www.realspace.com/brokers-agents) – you may like this better to manage developers and new home sales together.
CRMs that didn’t make the cut
We came across many real estate CRMs that were effectively an after the fact add-on to something else the company is trying to sell you. For instance they may be a marketing, lead generation, or website platform first and foremost. These options work best for the ‘thing’ that organization specializes in. When used as a CRM however, we came up against missing or poorly executed core customer relationship management features that made it frustrating to use day-to-day.
Final Thoughts
After spending several weeks researching, testing out, and weighing all of our options, we are very sympathetic to the work it takes to land on a real estate CRM that works best for you. Frankly, after what felt like the hundredth sign-up page it was tempting to run back to Excel. Among all of that, we did find amazing solutions that will help you with streamlining your workflow, improving productivity, and building client loyalty in 2021.
Between marketing your business, juggling showings, and staying on top of your leads, you need a system to manage your workload in a stress-free and intuitive way. RealOffice360 is an unbelievably simple CRM, business tracker, and daily planner for real estate agents and Realtors®. Rather being just a data dump for client information, RealOffice360 helps you visually build your business plan, cultivate your real estate database towards your goals, and ultimately keeps you focused on what matters most: your clients and your deals. Get started for free - no credit card required!