Choosing Best CRM for Real Estate Agents in 2023 – Definitive Guide

Realtors or real estate agencies already have their plate full – they need to meet clients, be on the field, manage clients – all with different requirements.

They are juggling between managing existing clients and exploring new areas for businesses. Real estate is a tough business, and that’s why the need to have a real estate CRM becomes so important.

In this guide, we will cover up every aspect of real estate CRM software and most importantly how it can help you close more deals.

What is Real Estate CRM?

CRM for real estate means a way to centralize all your sales channels and customer communication processes into one platform. It makes it easier to find and manage customer data, send follow-up emails, set reminders, and schedule appointments. Tasks like these can be automated to save time and energy. 

Realtor CRMs effectively put customer data and customer management processes in place. They also make it possible to track and analyze data through data visualization tools to identify strengths and weaknesses. Identifying pain points is a critical way to make your business more efficient and profitable in the long run. 

Mobile applications allow the entire outbound sales team to view their customer profile before visiting them, getting in touch, making notes, and creating schedules for the future within the mobile dashboard. Overall, a CRM for real estate help improves operational efficiency, make sales more fluidly, and improve your organization’s overall sales.  

These are just some ways that real estate CRM software can help make your business operations easier. Real Estate Agents, Realtors, Brokers, and Professionals can visualize deals in the sales pipeline CRM software. Identifying good deals and moving them down your sales funnel helps agents close deals faster and perform better. 

Why does one need a Real Estate CRM?

CRM for real estate can improve lead handoff between marketing and sales. With Real Estate CRMs, marketing teams can provide key information to sales. Teams can communicate with each other using the application and save notes to share important information. sing

Besides this, it gives you a virtual snapshot of the sales pipeline. They also help you track contract value and even forecast future sales projections. Doing this can help you make important business decisions with the information that you receive. 

Real estate CRMs effectively improve collaboration between different departments within an organization. By connecting sales and marketing teams, you can effectively make your business communication flow more fluidly. It reduces compartmentalized work culture and instead connects teams more closely. 

Additionally, Customer Relationship Management tools make it easier to prioritize and classify leads to parameters that interest you. It can effectively help to improve real estate sales processes.

How does a CRM empower real estate agents? 

“Real estate agents earning $100,000 or more in gross commission income are more than twice as likely to use advanced technology tools like a customer relationship management tool (CRM) than agents who earn less.”  

– saassessions.com  

Customer Relationship Management tools can help take the efficiency of realtors to a new level. A CRM can empower Realtors to track customer activity in logs analyzed for data. It also provides valuable insights to provide real estate agents or professionals with much-needed context for each account. To add to this, many real estate CRM software display a timeline view of every transaction with each customer in thread form. In practice, this makes it simpler for agents to keep up with customer activity and decide their next business decision. 

CRM for real estate works great to assist agents in qualifying leads. Once potential leads have been captivated by the real estate CRM software of your choice, you can execute drip campaigns and analyze the email open rate, reply rate, and qualify leads as per their response. You can easily track your prospects’ activities on your website and send out more meaningful messages to your customers. It is a powerful way to drive deeper engagement with integrated live chat software. 

It even helps real estate agents stay proactive and communicative. With Real Estate CRMs, teams in an organization have a common platform to stay connected and discuss current operations. What’s more, Real Estate agents can communicate with different interaction channels like social media platforms and engage in real-time conversation, cutting down on significant communication delays and saving valuable time. In this way, CRMs make it easy to priorities leads depending on their engagement with your business. 

The communication gap between on-field agents and back-office administrators can be effectively closed with a CRM. Now, Realtors can easily discuss contract information, make updates to agreements and coordinate on a centralized system. Since CRMs centralize conversations for all sales channels, customers have the liberty to contact agents on the channel of their choice and have their messages routed to a single repository to be managed easily. This can result in your customer service operations being exponentially improved. 

However, to make the most out of your real estate CRM software, you need to have a CRM strategy. It can help you organize your process and make teams work towards a common goal. 

Implementing a winning CRM strategy for your real estate business

Let’s now discuss the in-depth, step-by-step process to successfully design your own Real Estate CRM strategy. 

1. Streamline your lead generation process 

CRMs for real estate make it effortless to collect leads from various sources and put them into one centralized platform: 

• Websites 
• Tradeshows 
• Social media platforms 
• Email campaigns 
• Cold calls 
• References 

Custom lead web forms allow you to map data into your CRM after collecting leads from websites or landing pages. To nurture real estate leads, understand customers’ pain points, and assist them in finding what they are looking for while personalizing every step of the information gathering process. 

Personalized multi-step form to easily segment data 

Uncover a system for making the most of these forms and pages throughout your agency’s website. 

These forms can then collect information from your prospects that can be reviewed. Agents can understand customers’ preferences, locations, dislikes and make additional notes. 

Bulk SMS 

Text marketing in commercial real estate is a quick way to communicate with your customers and promote your offers. It hardly bothers your customers to receive a short text message while still getting your message across effectively. 

Advanced CRM software can use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and artificial intelligence to read and absorb data from customer’s text messages. Push notifications and automated responses mean that you are better connected to your customers to provide added value. 

Social media presence 

Social media marketing is now more important than ever before. Leveraging your social media presence to run social media campaigns on them to get in touch with an influencer to reach out to a bigger audience. 

Realtors can touch base with their customers and maintain rapport in the marketplace easily with social media. Social media helps realtors stay in touch with leads and obtain more information about them, giving you a complete understanding of your customer’s background, interests and preferences. 

Integrated live chat  

Integrated live chat in real estate CRM software lets you track website and application visitors, keeping you in touch with your customer engagement. Live chat and custom, URL-based webforms make it possible to obtain lead information even when agents are unavailable to attend to customers.  

2. Build a solid customer profile for lead segmentation 

Picturing your ideal customer’s profile in your mind is the first step to identifying the market leads with the most potential. With Real Estate CRMs, leads can be categorized and segmented into easy-to-manage groups. You can use tags to assign similar leads to a certain group based on area, segment, requirement, and much more. Tags are an excellent way to track engagement and how far a customer is in your sales funnel.

Taking it a step further, trigger tags can be assigned to initiate a function automatically after a certain action or condition has been taken by the user. For example, when a new lead is obtained, a welcome email can be sent, or an email address can be added to your newsletter. The possibilities are endless with Real Estate CRMs. 

Invites for a meet-up can automatically be sent out when the customer downloads a report from your website. You can use this automation to your advantage to assist you with sales and marketing functions. 

It is easier to see the number of deals created and how well performance compares to the set targets. The real estate CRM software can alert agents on which deals are warm, hot, or have gone cold. The agents can then use this information to fine-tune your efforts accordingly. 

3. Integrating call functions for outbound sales activities 

Real Estate CRMs are perfect for integrating call functions for outbound sales. It allows agents to add notes to customer databases, view notes on previous calls, and schedule follow-ups. 

If you are working with a team, you must see which calls are assigned to which team member, whether they were completed and if they were reassigned.

For teams that engage in a mass call, choose the best real estate CRM that allows you to integrate with auto-dialing systems for added convenience. Click-to-call and auto logging features help realtors save time, improving overall productivity and trackability for communication with prospects without worrying about keeping track of previous commitments. Get more insight into conversions and more accurate forecasts for the future. 

4. Managing multiple pipelines for buying and selling properties 

Customer Relationship Management tools help you buy and sell properties from multiple pipelines. 

Staying on top of various Sales pipelines is no longer a challenge. CRMs provide a unified interface to manage and track individual pipelines within a business. 

Every customer requirement can evolve into a deal. The deal outlines the responsibilities the client needs to be performed. The CRM can then list such deals and keep them organized. You can then send it to your partners, shortlist items and create future events. 

Deals have multiple stages in a pipeline: 

1. Lead – The lead stage implies that the team has been notified of a possible sales prospect. This can be done based on the settings that you specify within your CRM. 

2. Contacted – This stage provides information on whether the prospect has been contacted already, or needs to be contacted by text, call or email by the team. 

3. First Appointment – The lead has responded positively, and an appointment has been set. 

4. Follow-up – The Follow-up stage is for team members to stay with customers and keep leads warm after their first appointment. 

5. Signed Exclusive Brokerage – Once customers have decided to work with you in buying or selling a home, they are considered to have entered this stage. 

6. Search – The search stage implies that the customer is working with you to locate a Real Estate opportunity.  

7. Offer Negotiations – This stage provides information on offers that need to be accepted or negotiated. 

8. Under Contract – This stage represents prospects that have agreed to buy or sell Real Estate with your company. 

9. Clear-to-Close – Once the paperwork and legal agreements have been completed, this stage signals to the team that the sale is ready to be closed. 

10. Closed – In this stage, clients need to be sent closing information and relevant documents. This is the final stage of the pipeline. 

Depending on the nature of your business and your workflow, you can define your pipeline to suit your organization better. 

Real Estate CRM For Teams 

Keep track of performance and project completion with the help of the best real estate CRM software. CRM tools are vital for different teams to communicate with each other and stay in the same loop. Responsibilities can be easily assigned within CRMs using tags and category functions that send push notifications and updates to team members. 

Team inboxes create a one-stop destination to refer to for updates and collaboration. You can even mention team members with tags to connect them to threads, exchange important information, and provide inputs to the rest of the team. 

Automatic call distribution means that customer workload can be assigned to representatives automatically on the fly.

1. Automating the workflow of marketing and sales team 

Marketing and sales teams can automate tasks that are repetitive and mundane. Now, realtors don’t need to manually categorize leads, send templatized responses and follow-up emails.

A CRM for real estate can help your enterprise automate emails, workflows, save time and focus on more prioritized tasks. 

2. Real Estate CRM and integration 

CRM integrations help create a conducive ecosystem that your team can work and perform within. 

Customer Relationship Management includes the ability to integrate with your social media channels, customer service platforms and other third-party programs. Integration helps to tie together loose ends in large teams and across different departments. 

How a CRM enables real estate agents to streamline their sales activities and close more deals?

1. Generating leads from a real estate website   

Having a beautiful real estate website with IDX property is only one aspect of generating leads from a real estate website. Selling a home includes multiple sales stages like – Pricing the property right, creating virtual tours, calling prospective buyers and shortlist them, map the sellers’ and buyers’ requirements.   

This is where webforms can be of significant assistance, as they help you capture the lead data right from the website automatically save the details into your CRM in the form of contact. Salesmate webform can help you add custom fields, allowing real estate agents to have a detailed understanding of the prospect requirements.    

The custom field allows the agent to ask qualifying questions like the number of bedrooms, budget, location, and much more – and segment the leads accordingly. So, whenever the sales agents make a discovery call, they can present an offer aligned with the Prospect’s requirements.    

Moreover, Salesmate CRM gives you notification upon a web form inquiry submission – allowing the real estate agents to be more proactive. You can also define tags for each web form to make the segmentation process easy and refined.

2. Pre-qualifying the real estate leads

Once the real estate agent gets a lead – the next step would be to make the discovery call or cold call. A power dialer alleviates the pain related to dialing numbers one after another. It creates a list of your contacts and puts them into the auto-dialing mode, so all your real estate agent needs to do is look at the prospect info on the dashboard and pitch the services.

3. Streamlining the sales cycle   

Now that when leads have entered the sales pipeline, the real estate agents need to figure out a way to the next steps in the sales process. How exactly the leads will get transitioned from one stage of the sales pipeline to another.   

In the real estate industry, the leads are commonly assigned to a pre-sales agent, who takes the responsibility to nurture the leads – he initiates a conversation with the leads, garners important details like exciting projects, and sends him the list of suitable leads properties. Once the information is ready for a site visit, the lead is submitted to the on-field sales agent, who takes the conversation ahead – and tries to close the deal.   

A real estate CRM can automate the activities of a pre-sale agent. Email automation tools can do wonders for your real estate sales agents – they can send a bunch of personalized emails to a segmented group of prospective buyers, eliminating the mundane task of approaching leads one-by-one.    

There are many real estate sales emails being sent in a day, and many are repetitive. As part of the sales cycle, sales reps can automate generic emails like:  

• Welcome emails to new leads  
• Follow up emails to unresponsive leads  
• Demo emails to new sign-ups  
• Reminder emails about meetings  
• Thank you emails to new customers  

No just generic emails, but real estate agents can execute workflow automation to tailor the next engagement step by tracking user behavior.

4. Define the lead stages and automatically move deals in the pipeline  

A real estate CRM helps the agent define the lead stages in the funnel and enables you to set the criteria to move the lead from one stage to the next in the lead funnel.   

• Whenever you receive a new lead, it is defined as incoming.   
• Once a first contact is made with the lead, it is marked as Prospect.   
• If a site visit is scheduled, then it will be an opportunity.   
• After the sales representative sends a price quote to the lead, the stage is changed to Negotiation.  
• Finally, once the booking is made, the lead is marked as Booked and closed deal.  
• If the lead doesn’t opt for your project for some other reason, like booking an alternative project, it is marked as a lost lead.  

The lead stage you define will be entered into your real estate CRM system and used to track all your leads and sales performance.  

Sales automation feature in the real estate CRM can help an agent automatically move the deals to the next stage once they perform a predefined action.   

Using a sales automation tool, the real estate agent can track leads right from when they have entered the funnel, segment them into an appropriate prospect group and execute nurture campaigns based on behavioral signals.

5. Qualifying questions for choosing the right Real estate CRM  

Question: Do I need a CRM?

Answering the question: Well, if you are mid to big-sized real estate agent generating leads online and wanted to automate many marketing activities, you need a CRM.  

Question: Should I use a CRM that every real estate agent is using?  

Answering the question: The straight answer is no, as your requirements can differ from other real estate agencies. You should choose a CRM that fulfills your needs; for this reason, you need to pen down your requirements and see which CRM fits the best.

Question: Is there anyone CRM that fits the need of everyone?  

Answering the question: No, there is no single CRM that can be an excellent fit for everyone. Every CRM comes with its own USPs and shortcomings, so you must have complete clarity on what types of features you need in your CRM.   

Question: What is the first thing that I should be looking for in a Real estate CRM?  

Answering the question: Actually, there are two; the first is the CRM should be user-friendly; you will never use software rich in the feature but lack intuitive ability. According to a survey reported by Niall Byrne, seventy-two percent of experienced senior executives would trade CRM functionality for ease of use.

The second thing is cost – if the CRM is too pricy, it will cut down on your profit margins. Price is a significant deterrent as it directly affects your ROI.

What are the essential features that I should be looking for in a Real estate CRM?

Your Real estate CRM software has to have the following features.

1) Contact Tagging – Often, a real estate agent needs to filter out the contact list; like an agent, you only want to focus on local contacts located in your area. With a CRM, you can easily filter out such contacts in a few seconds.
2) Track engagement – Real estate agents try their best to get a hold of their prospective clients; however, often, they miss leveraging on an opportunity simply because they don’t have the right tool to track customer engagement.
A good real estate CRM will help you track your Prospect’s activities across their journey.
3) Automation – You should be able to set up an automation where your real estate CRM does the emailing for you or prompt you to take some action – for instance, whenever a lead fills in the web form, an automatic welcome email should be triggered.
4) Lead Generation Forms – Your Real estate CRM software should be able to retrieve leads from your website, and for that, you need a webform – so you can easily capture people’s contact info into your CRM and apply the appropriate tag.
5) Deal pipeline management – Wouldn’t it be great if you can predict the potential sales numbers that your agents are likely to going to hit or quickly identify the number of stall deals.
An ideal real estate CRM software would you and your agents organize your deal pipeline and at what stage your deal is in your pipeline.

Use Cases for CRMs 

1. Sales prospecting 

Scenario – A particular Realtor finds it difficult to contact and prospect good leads for their Real Estate business. 

Solution – CRM for real estate can be used to acquire large amounts of data through mass-imports into the software. You can aggregate customer information from a variety of sources and have them extracted automatically into the platform. This saves the effort of manually prospecting customers by traditional means. 

2. Improving overall revenue 

Scenario – A real estate business is looking to grow its revenue and expand its operations. To do this, they need to better understand customers, have a clearer database of their information and access this information on the fly. 

Solution – Real estate CRM has sales analytics and data reports to better understand their customer base. Knowing this information is helpful to market to the right leads and avoid cold leads and those that do not fit marketing criteria. Better target customers save time and improve overall operational efficiency, leading to a better overall bottom-line. 

3. Managing multiple sales processes 

Scenario – Situations can arise where particular Real Estate companies offer multiple types of products for different size organizations. For this reason, companies end up with multiple sales pipelines, which can be tedious to manage and keep track of. 

Solution – CRMs can deal with multiple sales pipelines efficiently. Teams can assign pipelines to the appropriate agents to reduce the chances of error and mismanagement. 

4. Difficulty tracking leads 

Scenario – My team doesn’t know how many leads we received this month.  

Solution – Real estate CRM can track all your incoming leads and put them in a centralized database. 

5. Fragmented leads

Scenario – All my leads are scattered across various platforms.  

Solution – CRM, when integrated with popular platforms like Zapier, helps you retrieve leads from all your social media accounts. Moreover, leads generated through a web form, drip campaign, bulk SMS, can be directly sent to the CRM – so everything can be in one place.   

6. Lack of time 

Scenario – My agents don’t have time to nurture each lead.  

Solution – Using a CRM for real estate agents makes it easier to nurture each lead as you have access to a complete customer profile and move them along your sales pipeline.  

7. Classification of leads 

Scenario – It’s not clear which leads are hot and essential at this moment. 

Solution – CRMs let you classify leads based on priority and assign them to their respective team members. 

8. Missing out on profits 

Scenario – We are literally leaving the money on the table.  

Solution – CRMs for real estate help you identify where you can optimize your business for better performance and an improved bottom line. 

9. Difficulty with follow-ups 

Scenario – Follow-ups are inconsistent and often forgotten.  

Solution – Using a CRM tool is an excellent way to nurture leads, conduct follow-ups, and schedule them for future dates meaning that they are never forgotten. 

10. Constraints to growth 

Scenario – We can grow our sales if we can engage with leads & follow-up more.  

Solution – Using a CRM tool can help your business engage with more leads through various integration and automation features. Automation and scheduled follow-ups make repeated contact with leads a breeze. 

11. Understanding why deals fail 

Scenario – Good deals are falling through the cracks, and I don’t even know why. 

Solution – CRMs allow you to visualize your entire sales pipeline, to identify the stage at which deals are failing and how you can be more successful in the future. 

12. Performance is not tracked 

Scenario – We don’t have much visibility in our sales and team performance. 

Solution – Using data analytics and reporting tools, CRMs can highlight your team’s performance and identify trends in your sales figures. 

13. Extracting the most out of CRM

Scenario – “We’ve tried CRMs – they either slow us down or do not work.” 

Solution – There are different CRMs with unique features and abilities. Try using a different CRM with additional features as this might be a better way to find the right one for you. 

How to Choose Real Estate CRM Software for your Company?  

When you are in the market for the perfect Real Estate CRM for your company, here are a few of the important features to look for: 

• Calling integration 
• Lead generation 
• Campaign tracking 
• Email marketing 
• Marketing automation 
• Social media integration 
• Reports and analytics 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

Q: What is Customer Relationship Management or CRM? 

A: Customer Relationship Management or CRM software helps you manage your business processes more easily and take advantage of artificial intelligence and improvised workflows. 

Realtors can use a CRM for email marketing, managing customer bases and assisting lead generation operations.

Q: How can CRM help my business? 

A: Improved workspaces, unmatched connectivity across teams, social media integration, live chat interactions, and more are just some of the ways that a CRM can help improve your business overall. 

You can also set important reminders, make notes and analyze performance through data reporting tools. 

Q: What are the integration features of a CRM? 

A: CRMs can be made to integrate with your social media marketing profile, customer service platforms, and other third-party software to expand your capabilities and operate more efficiently. 

Q: What should I look for when purchasing a CRM? 

A: Before you invest in a CRM, look for features like calling integration, lead generation, campaign tracking, email marketing, marketing automation, social media integration, and reports and analytics capabilities. 

Q: Will CRM help me get more qualified leads? 

A: Yes. Using a CRM can potentially help significantly increase the number of qualified leads you receive. Intelligent algorithms in-built within a CRM can help identify and pre-qualify your leads based on your specific criteria.