What is a Real Estate CRM, and How to Choose the Right One for You?
Picking the right real estate CRM is an incredibly important strategic decision for your real estate career and business. Your CRM should not only be a seamless part of how you work, it should be a tool that empowers you to reach and exceed your goals!
While that’s all well and good, sifting through all of the options out there is a bit of a time-consuming drag. In this guide, we help you painlessly find the right solution for your business.
What is a CRM?
A CRM is a customer relationship management system. At its core, a CRM allows you to track who you’ve talked to, the contents of what was said, what you committed to doing for that client, when to follow up, and other things of this nature. This can be done via software, or on a spreadsheet (by the way, if this is your preferred method we made a free download for you here).
Real estate-specific CRM vs. generic CRM
While there are thousands of CRMs out there, if you’re a real estate agent looking for a CRM, it’s best to veer towards one made specifically for the industry. This is because it’ll provide you with the ability to keep track of property information with ease, and because you work with a different set of stakeholders than other industries. You will be dealing with buyers, sellers, renters, longer-tail leads you’re nurturing, and a host of other industry-specific individuals.
While you can absolutely jimmy a generic CRM software to work well enough for you, you’ll really reap the rewards in terms of efficiency by using one built for real estate agents.
A good real estate CRM will help you:
Get in touch with new leads fast,
Nurture your past clients and broader network to accelerate the number of high quality referrals,
Keep you organized and at peak productivity, and
Work seamlessly with all of the other moving pieces in your business to save you time.
CRM vs. Lead Generation
A common mix-up is confusing a real estate CRM for a real estate lead generation service. The two are interrelated, but separate: a real estate lead generation service would collect information people provide. For example, someone might be interested in a property on your website and fill out a form. Or, they may submit their information on a larger listings aggregator site which you then pay to acquire.
This information is collected by the lead generation service. Your CRM, on the other hand, is where this information is deposited. You can log in to your real estate customer management system to see what leads have come in, send them automated drip marketing e-mails, and then keep track of the subsequent contact that you’ve had, and follow-ups that you need to do.
CRM vs. CMS
A CMS, or content management system, refers to a software that lets you maintain a website – so think Squarespace or Wordpress – with minimal coding required. You can also think about it as the ‘front-office’ of your digital workspace and brand, while your CRM is the ‘back-office’.
Your CMS is what potential home buyers and home sellers see when searching for a home. The connection between your CMS and CRM is the lead generation services we talked about above. You would connect your CMS (in other words, your website) to your CRM via a lead generation service. We know, we know. Enough with the alphabet soup!
If you practically need a dictionary to even figure out what all of these things are, how are you supposed to choose which real estate CRM is best for your real estate business? This decision may feel daunting, but it’s far simpler than you think!
Start with some reflection
Don’t start out by looking at every real estate CRM out there – that’s just a recipe for overwhelm. Instead, we recommend taking a step back and looking at what you actually need to run your business. It’s going to be different from agent to agent depending on your comfort with tech, budget, how much time you’re willing to invest in learning the system, what system you’re currently using, and to some extent – your sales philosophy. So, we recommend first answering the following. These questions are important to consider prior to diving in because they’ll guide you towards a real estate contact management system that is an ideal fit for you and accelerates your business.
What are my pain points in my current workday: what roadblocks do I come across?
This is an easy place to start and helps you get into a strategic mindset. What are the main annoyances you come across in your day-to-day? Where are your opportunities of improvement that will help you provide better service to potential clients? Where do you find yourself running out of time? Software features that address these will become your ‘must-haves’ when you start your search.
What works well for me in my current system?
It’s natural to become so focused on the limitations of your current system that you overlook what works well for you. After all, if it’s not annoying, it’s not on your radar! This becomes a problem if you switch to a new system that doesn’t work as well in your non-problem areas. Taking a holistic approach will help you avoid this, so be sure to survey what you do really well right now. Make note of what helps you accomplish those things, and add them to your ‘must-haves’ list as well.
What is my number one career/business goal this year?
Once you have a sense of what your day-to-day needs are, take a step back and look at the big picture. What is your number one career goal as a real estate agent this year, and in five years? With this in mind – what can you digitize, automate, or focus on to help you achieve this?
For example, if your goal is to increase the proportion of referrals in your business this year, then perhaps designing and implementing a really great drip marketing campaign is your number one business goal this year. In addition to tracking your inbound leads, this means you’ll want to ensure that whatever real estate CRM you choose, it should have or integrate with a drip marketing solution.
What is my approach to work - everything all at once, or really focusing on the task at hand?
A popular trend in real estate CRMs are all-in-one solutions that go beyond customer relationship and database management to perform every aspect of your business within a single system. They’re in line with the “everything all at once” approach. While these are a great solution for a subset of real estate agents, for others they don’t work quite as well.
Taking a look at what aspects of your business you do digitally, and your personal approach to your business will help discern the following:
Do you prefer to use software that specializes in doing a few of these things in a simple and user-friendly manner, or
Do you really just want to do all your work on the one website or software above all else.
While the allure of convenience is enticing, please be aware that the steep learning curve and price tag that comes with many of these solutions puts to question how much time and money you actually save. Let us give you an example:
We talk a lot about the ways to stay top of mind with clients on our blog. Maintaining an active social media presence is a pretty self-evident way for you to do this. Now, is this something you necessarily want to do within your CRM? There are a number of companies that specialize in helping you manage your social media content calendar. They provide advanced metrics, provide resources, and in many cases help you design eye-catching visuals to complement your content.
If you decide to manage your social media within your all-in-one system instead, you still need to learn how to set everything up, and invest the time in creating or customizing quality content. That part doesn’t change, and any time you saved having it all-in-one is negligible, if it exists at all.
What’s more, you may not get the same kind of advanced metrics you could access from software designed specifically for social media management. After all, you’re managing your presence via a CRM whose primary product is something else, and social media management is only a secondary add-on to entice you. On the other hand, a social media software company’s primary product and focus is going to be providing you with the best experience with that one specific thing.
Evaluating CRMs
So far we’ve demystified the acronyms thrown around when talking about real estate database management, and looked at what you should ask yourself before making any decisions. Now, how to evaluate which CRM to go with?
In addition to looking for the features you identified in your self-assessment, look at how the CRM performs on the following criteria:
Information Tracking Capabilities
Workflow Optimization
Integrations
Data Safety and Privacy
Customer Service
Ease of Use
Information Tracking Capabilites
When you’re trialing different CRMs, make sure they provide you with a solid foundation in the basics to run your business. This means they should be very, very good at allowing you to track the following in each client’s profile:
Basic Information
Property Information
Deal Tracking
Referrals
Managing Files
Client Portal
Optimize your workflow by organizing your information
As a real estate agent, the amount of information you need to keep track of can quickly get out of hand. For any of it to be meaningful, you need the flexibility to be able to sort your information based on different parameters. For example, you might want to:
Organize by New Leads
Your real estate database should have a lead capture component where new contact profiles are created as individuals sign up on your website. Prioritize your contacts by “new” so you can contact leads as soon as you can. After all, a majority of buyers and sellers use the first real estate agent they contact, so time is of the essence.
Organize by Task Due Date
With each contact, you want to set tasks and assign them due dates. This way, if you call a lead and can’t get hold of them today, they’re at the top of your list to call tomorrow. At the beginning of each day, you need to see everyone you want to reach out to.
Organize by Last Contacted
You’ll want to spend some time staying in touch with potential clients, even if they’re not actively seeking to buy or sell at the moment. Having the ability to organize your database by last-contacted helps you identify the potential clients you haven’t reached out to in a long time, and stay in touch with your network.
Organize by groups
You’ll want to be able to look people up by particular attributes like neighborhood, lead source, or any number of other things. Look for a CRM that allows you to customize groups for tagging.
Calendar View
If you prefer visuals, having a calendar view of tasks will help you time-block and manage the competing demands of being a real estate agent effectively.
While most real estate management software will allow you to sync your client appointments with your pre-existing calendar app, this doesn’t necessarily help you when you also want to see your non-appointment tasks. Incidentally, this is why we love the daily routines and ‘to-dos’ section of our planner so much.
Integrations
Whether you decide to go the all-in-one route, or the specialized real estate CRM route, look at what kind of integrations are offered. Critical integrations to look for:
Lead generation services
Drip marketing software
Mailing labels
Calendar app
Contacts
Data Safety and Privacy
Critically, you’ll want to make sure that you can trust the CRM you’re using with all of this highly sensitive information. Look into what their data security and privacy practices are. Questions to ask include where your data will be stored, how it is encrypted, and what security standards are being followed.
Customer Service
Are you able to access information and help when you need it? How long is the turnaround time? Are there online communities to crowdsource help when needed?
Ease of Use
When you first log in, how intuitive does this system feel to you? Are you able to get up and running with a few clicks, or are you lost in the details? Regardless of whether there is a steep learning curve or not, you want to make sure that at the very least, you’re able to get working on the basics very quickly.
Summary
Taking some time at the beginning of your search to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for will save from overpaying for frivolous, low value add-ons that over-promise and under-deliver. Rather than distracting you from your core business, a good real estate CRM will keep you organized and on top of things, so you can spend your time focusing on providing your clients with the unparalleled, personalized service that will keep them coming back.
Between future-proofing your real estate business, designing drip marketing campaigns, 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.
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