Starting a boutique real estate brokerage, or evaluating your franchise’s software package? Providing the right framework to your agents is critical in helping you attract and retain top talent. These are the top 5 must-have industry tools your real estate agents are looking for. 

 

#1 - Real Estate CRM

Your agents need a way to keep track of their client calls, notes, files, new leads, calendar, and workflow for each stage of a deal. A customer relationship management system, or CRM, allows them to do all of this from their desktop and mobile devices. Beyond these basics though, Realtors need a system for staying in touch with their real estate sphere of influence (SOI). A good CRM helps agents benefit from their SOI’s referrals and returning business, leading to the massively productive books of business of top producers.

Your real estate CRM is a team management system as much as it is a customer-focused system. It should help you keep your agents excited, motivated, and feeling in charge of their own fortunes. They should be able to set goals, and to see how all of their efforts each and every day move the needle towards that overarching vision.

RealOffice360 is a bespoke CRM built specifically for Realtors. This means your Realtors can get up and running with next to no lag time for training and set up. It keeps them motivated by displaying how they’re tracking agains their goals, and focused on building a successful book of business with reminders for their multi-touch point relationship marketing system. Using RealOffice360, Realtors can set themselves up to go above and beyond with every client with seamless workflow scheduling. What’s more – the teams feature will give you a bird’s eye view of your real estate team or brokerage. You’ll be able to foster collaboration while managing your team, assigning leads, tasks, and more.

 

#2 - Transaction Management

With transaction management your first concern is meeting regulatory compliance for each and every real estate transaction. Your transaction management software should help your agents execute all necessary paperwork accurately, collect signatures, and keep the transaction moving.

DocUSign Rooms for Real Estate allows you to create customizable templates that will pre-fill standard data for your staff. You can ensure compliance and cut down on training time for new agents with standardized required documents, and associated tasks lists, due dates, and reminders. You can collect digital signatures, and set up reminders to all of the parties involved, helping your agents ensure the deal isn’t sitting in limbo in an inbox.

 

#3 - Open House Management

Open houses are a prime lead generation opportunity. Help your agents capitalize on the time they invest in them with open house management software. This allows them to collect prospective buyer information right on their devices, and provide a stellar customer service experience by following up in a timely and relevant manner.

Open Home Pro allows visitors to record their attendance on a digital sign-in sheet with automated post-showing follow-up. This tool helps your agents quickly narrow down visitors without a Realtor, and those with upcoming homes for sale. Your agents can set up auto-forwarding of these real estate leads to their unique @ro360mail.com email account to automatically add attendees right into their real estate sales pipeline.

 

#4 - Email Marketing Software

Despite the endless number of jazzy new lead generation tools and platforms, email continues to be king of digital marketing. Your agents will require an email marketing tool that integrates with their CRM to take advantage of automations. The ideal tool should allow them to set up a range of emails easily - whether that be real estate drip campaigns, one-off emails, or newsletters.

 

Mailchimp remains the most cost-effective and user-friendly option available for real estate email marketing. Contrary to popular belief, your agents can set up basic automations such as an email to new leads or a birthday email on Mailchimp’s free plan.

 

#5 - Real estate website

There are two approaches you can take here – a brokerage-centric approach, or an agent-centric approach.

Brokerage-centric website:

This is where you have a main brokerage website, and your agents have an individual page with their contact information and current listings.

Pros:

• New agents benefit from your existing infrastructure and aren’t fighting an uphill battle to appear on search engines.

• You can generate more link-backs to your site, propelling it higher in search results.

• Potential home buyers and sellers are exposed to the full range of skill sets and services offered by your brokerage. If a particular agent does not suit their needs, you still have the opportunity to keep their transaction in-house.

• Overall time saved in having a single website to update.

Agent-centric website:

This is where each individual agent has their own website.

Pros:

• In a personal brand-driven industry, some agents may prefer having their own standalone website.

• If your agents specialize in different niches, over time having a website that singularly caters to that niche may rank higher in search engine results than a generic brokerage website.
  

MyRealPage provides responsive, search engine optimized, and easily updated websites. They have pre-built (and changeable!) themes that allow your agents to get up and running quickly. They integrate with your board’s listings eliminating any manual steps needed to get the most up to date listings on your site. Your agents can also set-up pre-defined searches for their area of specialty.

How can I tell which software is right for my real estate brokerage?

Keep these questions in mind when you’re evaluating technology for your brokerage:

1. Do the systems talk to each other?

You don’t want to stick your Realtors with systems that take a lot of manual updating and input. Instead, you want to choose software that seamlessly blends into their work day. For example, make sure your real estate CRM can sync with your lead generation platform, upload contacts from existing databases like Google Contacts, and sync with your email marketing platform.

2. How secure is my data?

What are the data privacy and digital security practices of the tools you’re considering? Are they up to date on web security standards? This information can typically be found directly on the company’s website.  

3. Is it built for the real estate industry?

Software that is purpose-built for the real estate industry is going to save you the time, effort, and money of customizing something generic to suit your needs. You shouldn’t have to pay extra or go out of your way just to set up you CRM with client property information, for example.

4. How much training is required?

The real estate agents you work with are going to have different degrees of comfort when it comes to learning new technologies. Tools that require a lot of up-front learning can be a barrier to success and kill confidence in those important first days and weeks in the seat.

5. What is the cost, and who pays?

Software costs vary widely depending on the tool and the degree of customization you’re looking for – do you want to white label the software with your brokerage’s branding? Do you want to start all of your agents on advanced plans, or have them cover the cost of upgraded tools themselves? These questions are relevant to your business plan and attraction and retention strategy. The answers will be different from broker to broker.

 

Final Thoughts

It can seem as though everyone who has been in the real estate industry for more than a minute has stories of something slipping through the cracks. This doesn’t have to be the case - you can choose systems that set yourself and your team up to deliver consistent excellence. Attract top agents, set them up for success, and future-proof your real estate brokerage with the right tech stack.

Between hiring and training new real estate agents, managing the day-to-day demands of your brokerage, and staying on top of industry trends, 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, RealOffice360 helps you visually build your business plan, cultivate your real estate team, and ultimately keeps you focused on what matters most. Get started for free - no credit card required!