Today, more number of businesses are considering CRM to be a critical solution in the real estate business. They believe that CRM is an excellent solution when it comes to having effective interaction with potential and current customers. It is considered as a strategic tool by many real estate agents. An ideal CRM solution will help the business to nurture the leads and customers while enhancing the productivity of the team.
How CRMs Work for Real Estate Business?
Real estate businesses make use of CRM to get access to the information of customers easily and securely. For easy management of such data, it combines all the documents and data of the customers into a single database. In order to help the real estate business stay ahead, Real Estate CRM software keeps all the transactions updated by automating workflows. It keeps track of all the interactions that happen within clients – business and tracks the productivity along-with the performance of the team.
52.0 billion U.S. Dollars is the expected CRM Market Revenue by 2021 – Statista
What an Ideal Real Estate CRM Do?
Across the world, real estate CRMs offer many features that can help with activities like lead sourcing, build relationships, make automation outreach easy along with an intuitive user interface. Some of the features that real estate CRMs should possess are:
- Organize all the contacts in specific categories in a separate manner.
- Send reminders and emails automatically.
- Track all the communications with the contacts.
- Based on the previous interactions, allocate specific actions to different contacts.
Benefits of Using CRM for Commercial Real Estate
Today most of the top real estate agents in the market are making use of CRM software for their business. There are some evident benefits of using CRM for real estate business and they are:
Send Immediate Responses
When it comes to making successful conversions, replying immediately back to the queries, especially the online ones, is very important. For the same reason, many of the CRM software in the real estate business makes use of an auto-response feature, which is entirely customizable so as to send in responses to contacts immediately.
Many may believe that auto-responders seem to be impersonal, and the clients can get away after receiving one. However, if such messages are customized based on a specific group of contact, it can prove to be effective. Such messages are actually focused on letting the customers know that their query has been received, and the business will respond back to the query soon.
You can also plan to develop a mobile app for your CRM solution. This will notify you whenever you are getting some incoming leads and this will help you reply to the query immediately. You need to keep in mind that the key is to reply back to the client as sooner as possible.
Manage & Organize Huge Data Information
Successful real estate agents follow multiple lead generation streams. Information about the leads is collected from a variety of sources like social media platforms, websites, online advertising sites, a sphere of influence, direct mail campaigns, etc. It will not be easy to maintain separate databases for these lead generation sources and things can turn ugly for big businesses. Now when you make use of CRM software, you will be able to place all your lead-related information at a single place. All the contact information will be collected and organized from different platforms in a simple manner.
Customize & Personalize your Offerings
All the information about your prospect should be recorded within the CRM. Now, this should include the neighborhood and areas of interest, number of bedrooms, type of homes that they are interested in, price range as well as other preferences like wood flooring or carpet. Getting each and every detail is very important and this will help you offer a personalized service to the prospects. Such a step will help you make more conversions and turn your prospect into a client in a smooth way.
So, what happens when the prospects get a listing for a new home from you that is not suitable for their needs! They may not plan the purchase, right?
However, if you get to send a detailed email of the property by pointing out every small detail that the prospect can like, then it can do work wonders. The prospects would definitely take an interest in your offerings even if they were not planning to buy it in the first place. So in case, they find your offering to be a good one, they will for sure, approach you in the future as their real estate agent.
Maintain your Relationship with Past Clients
Many of the real estate agents out there in the market think that the sole purpose of using CRM software for the business is to develop and manage prospective clients for the company. No doubt, it is the main reason to use Real Estate CRM, but you also need to use it to keep connected with the people who know your business and its offerings, i.e., your past clients.
Even though many people love to have a business back with the same real estate agent, only a few percents of them actually do so later. The reason for this low amount of turnaround is simple. House is not the kind of commodity that people keep buying regularly. For many, it happens just once in a lifetime. So people buy their next home many years later and almost forget the agent who helped them buy their first home.
The only way to avoid this scenario is by staying in touch with your past clients. Now, this does not mean that you should be sending them emails every day. This just means that you should be in contact in a way that they don’t forget you. You can plan to send emails on special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries. Keep the email short and simple. This will help your clients register your name in their mind and reach to you the next time they plan to buy one.
Collect Feedback Instantly
You can sit there the whole day, hoping your work is reaping good benefits. It would be better on your side to track and measure your work, and this will help you get better success in what you do in the future. When you use an effective Real Estate CRM solution for your business, you will be able to get information on click-through rates on different links, about email open rates, listings that can attract clients as well as other important data.
You need to keep on experimenting to know what works for you. Stick to the things that work for you and leave the ones that don’t. You need to work on calls to action, subject lines in your emails, etc. to know what works and what needs improvement. This will remove all the guesswork and will let you properly complete your work.
Automate Workflow & Tasks
In the case of real estate CRM, you can make use of automation to add in some personal touch. As discussed above, regarding sending an email on the anniversary or birthday of your prospective client, you can do that well using CRM. Here you don’t have to go through the database every single day to know if you need to send in some email or not. The CRM that you will use for your real estate business will do the work of remembering all those dates for you as well as automate things. You can send more than a single email at a time and keep yourself free to carry out other important tasks.
Features of an Ideal Real Estate CRM Solution
Project Management
You can get benefits by keeping your property management and sales team together. This will make information sharing easy between the teams. Excellent property management solutions can help you reach profitability, efficiency and enhanced customer service.
Leads Capture
This feature will help you capture leads from different sources and move them to the CRM automatically. It will enter a new record in your CRM by removing all the duplicate entries. You can even check the entries manually on your own. In order to nurture the leads and do future prospecting, CRM can also add to the requirements of tenants and buyers.
Web Integration
The website plays a vital role when it comes to offering performance & growth. You should integrate the website with your CRM solution to make it a complete solution for your real estate business. You need to come up with an intuitive website that offers easy navigation and is user-friendly.
Automated Workflows & Diary Management
An intuitive CRM works on to improve the productivity of the staff through automated tasks, workflows and diary management. Such CRM even comes with activity schedules that come built-in the software and can be modified based on the business needs. Such schedules will help run your business efficiently by keeping you ahead of all the tasks.
Mobile App Integration
Mobile app for a real estate business can help you manage your contacts, track your calls, manage appointments and tasks –all at the same time. Now manage your real estate business remotely with such integration.
Client CRM
It helps you keep all the client information at a single place in a hassle-free manner. Such data can be accessed by office staff and field agents from anywhere. It helps you streamline your business processes, improve marketing efforts and manage the performance of the team.
Targeted Prospecting
Several prospecting tools can be used to sell more properties and focus on listings. Just with a single click, you can import all the data into the CRM and see all the contacts and properties in a dynamic manner. This will help you get an idea of all opportunities in a go. You can easily add records of all the activities planned for prospecting here.
Property Alerts
You can use automatic email property alerts to promote listings to the prospective tenants and buyers directly. You can then set rules within the CRM based on the requirements of search so as to ensure that any price change or new listing is sent to the prospect who needs it the most.
E-marketing, SMS & Social
Boost the performance of your team with latest user-friendly communication tools like eNewsletters, eBrochures and SMS packs. Ideal CRM offers ready to use SMS templates, newsletter etc. Just customize the templates & add your personal touch accordingly. You can extend the reach of your efforts by spreading the word on social media.
Complete Reporting
A fully automated analytics & reporting feature leads to business success. You will be able to get KPI, contact, property and marketing campaign reports all available in one place.
How to Effectively Use CRM for your Real Estate Business?
Lead Segmentation
You will manage to get leads for your business from different channels, which can be offline and online. Some of the leads can come from email marketing campaigns, while some can come through social media. In order to ensure you can communicate with the customers in a better way, you must segment the leads based on the lead channels and demographics.
Imagine that you are planning to sell an expensive property at a prime locality in the city. Now, if you are marketing the property to the middle-class people who cannot afford that, then you will end up wasting your time and effort on the people who are not your target audience and at the same time, you may lose your potential buyers for the future projects. So you should make use of the right channels to reach the right audience to pass on the right message.
If your potential buyers have a very low budget for their future home and you are showcasing something that is too way expensive, then your marketing efforts will irritate them. They will think that you have no right property to show them and so they will move to some other real estate agent who has promising deals that match their budget.
Personalized Marketing
The property buyers of today are quite selective. So if your marketing efforts are generic and it is not focused on the right group, then you will have issues in communicating with the potential buyers. Now, if you have developed a customized marketing plan which clearly hits your target, chances are more that you will get a positive response from them. The number of real estate customers expecting personalized buying experience is increasing in the market. Once you know the buyer who can be interested in the property you plan to sell, you will end up having a better chance of selling it if your information about the house is directly targeted on a specific client. Such kind of communication can be automated when you make use of a modern CRM package for your business.
Build a Contact Database
You must enter all the lead-related activities into the sales funnel. It can be anything like a query you received for a product or service, your generated lead and the conversions you experienced from your website. Even if the lead is of no value to the business, it is still considered to be a potential one who can bring in sales for the business, not now but in the future. You should put your leads on the top of the sales funnel and attend to them from time and again by offering quality content, through regular communication and attractive offers.
No doubt, it may seem to you that it is a big job to come up with a huge database of leads and manage them over a longer period of time. By using CRM software in real estate business, the agent can take regular follow-ups on the leads in the right manner. They can always pursue to follow-up the lead once the initial contact is made. Again, the agent can choose the right path to follow-up with the prospect through the channel of social media or email message.
Enhance Customer Service
The real estate business needs to manage the customers in a better way. It mandatory that all your relationships will end as a positive sale for your business and so you need to stay updated and have regular communications. Again, in many scenarios, many CRM software packages have failed to build a strong relationship between the real estate agents and clients and this means they were not able to manage the relationship in a unique manner. Things are changing now as realtors want to build the new CRM software for their business.
Real estate businesses spread across the world needs to have a robust CRM system, especially when they are going through swift growth. The CRM software of today includes email marketing, social media management, and different tools for customer service right from the beginning. So when businesses make use of such software, they will be able to build a lasting relationship with the current and prospective clients while maintaining the one with the past clients.
The software can offer suggestions and ideas with respect to customer preferences, based on previous conversations. In the case of real estate business, this can be about showing relevant properties to potential buyers based on the information they have left on the site.
Track Sources of Leads
Most of Real Estate geeks know the fact that leads come to the business from a wide variety of sources. This can be both offline and online sources. You must track down all the important information about your leads, you get from your open house events, Facebook ads, or email marketing or anywhere else. This will help you know how efficient different sources are and how you can improve your marketing efforts on the weak ones.
Suppose you have a small budget to spend on your marketing efforts. Here, your CRM platform suggests you that your Facebook advertising is offering you more leads based on the data. Hence, it would be wise that you spend your money on the area which delivers you excellent results.
Things even get better! In order to know which of your sources leads to work better for property, sophisticated real time CRM software can help you. You can spend your marketing budget across different channels like organic traffic, email, social media, TV, radio, and pay-per-click. Using CRM software will let you know which source should be your target.
Popular Real Estate CRM Solutions
There are a number of real estate CRM solutions available in the market with great footprint in this niche. Some of such examples are:
- Capsule
- BidHom
- Freshsales
- ZOHO
- Pipedrive
- Nimble
- Propertybase
- RealSpace
- LeadSquared
- RealtyJuggler
Wrapping it up
CRM is one of the excellent software solutions which businesses use to keep a tab of the customer liking’s. Integrating CRM into your real estate business will help you approach your prospects with the right properties. Not only that but it also helps in maintaining a healthy relationship with past clients.
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