Real Estate's Shift to Cloud-Based CRM: Strategies for Better Client Management

The days of real estate brokers and leasing offices manually keeping track of their potential clients and deals are long gone. New technologies in the industry and updated marketing practices have upended many of the structural components of the real estate business. Even if your teams still participate in good old-fashioned networking – chances are you’re also attracting clients via social media, lead generation, and listing aggregators.  

With so many moving parts, things can get messy quickly. Considering the variability of today’s real estate landscape, any brokerage, sales, or leasing team requires a streamlined and efficient means of nurturing strong client relationships, and that is where CRMs can help.  

What is a CRM?  

Customer relationship management (CRM) software represents a category of software tailored toward managing, attracting, and retaining clients, overseeing their transactions, and allowing you full control over deals.   

Essentially, CRMs let you centralize all your real estate business into one neat cloud–hosted platform – allowing ease of access and management whether at your office desk or entertaining clients at a sales gallery.  

Most CRMs, at their core, promise an efficient means of managing real estate leads and tend to offer a larger variety of features that can streamline many aspects of your business. For example, a CRM can help reengage clients with e-mail, text, and social media campaigns. It also allows you to track sales metrics, lease performance, and revenue forecasting.   

Top Features of CRM Systems Tailored for Real Estate 

Truthfully, you might already be using CRMs in your day-to-day work in the real estate business; however, you need to be sure you are using your software to its fullest potential. 

Centralized Client Information  

One of the most important aspects of a CRM implementation is appropriately taking advantage of the software's ability to aggregate client data. Any good CRM will allow you to track all relevant client specifics, ranging from how they heard about your business to where they are in the sales process. This information is a powerful management tool for determining marketing budgets, communicating with investors, engaging potential customers, and developing strategies to increase sales and leasing. When client data is properly organized, fewer deals fall through the cracks, clients are happier, and sales increase.  

Business-Wide Adoption  

When implementing a CRM system, it’s important to make sure that all relevant team members and staff are utilizing it daily. One of the major selling points of CRMs is access to aggregated sales, deals, and client data. To fully benefit from these capabilities, developing a plan that works toward adoption firmwide is integral. It’s also important that executives at the firm set the “tone at the top” to champion the benefits of utilizing CRMs so the employees firmwide can follow suit. 

Lack of widescale adoption is one of the major reasons that implementations fail. When your team isn’t properly using the software, it disorganizes client data and inaccessible insights. A CRM is only valuable as a tracking, planning, and reporting tool if your team members are trained and held accountable for utilizing the software in their day-to-day workflow.   

Integrating CRM with Existing Real Estate Tools 

While CRMs are productive, they are not the be-all-end of real estate business software. You likely already use other software that meets many of your organization’s needs. The beauty of many CRMs is that they allow you to integrate with the third-party systems your team already relies on for leasing and sales. CRM integrates with email, calendar systems, marketing applications, and accounting and listing platforms as a centralized software hub for your business.  

Your team risks double entry, poor data integrity, and lost business efficiency without proper third-party integration. It’s important to understand how existing software impacts CRM integrations and how companies can properly connect their systems to maximize organizational production.  

Common Challenges in CRM Implementation and How to Overcome Them  

As simple as this may sound, we believe that starting small is crucial to proper CRM adoption and implementation. When adopting any new piece of software, it’s best to start slowly with basic features that provide instant value – layering on more complex automation as the team becomes more comfortable with the new system. 

Companies often try to take on too much too quickly, which overwhelms the sales team and results in poor adoption and low data value. Instead of wasting time and energy adopting certain features that don’t particularly meet your immediate business needs, focus on the lowest-hanging fruit and develop a pathway for your company to start benefiting from the insights and efficiencies inherent in a real estate CRM system.  

To learn more or develop a unique plan that effectively implements CRMs into your real estate organization, fill out the form below.