The real estate market is influenced by many factors, such as economic indicators, pandemic and COVID-19 restrictions, growth or decline in supply and demand, mortgage rates, cost per square meter, and much more. For example, according to JLL, direct investment in commercial real estate declined by 5% year-on-year to USD 200 billion.
How can real estate agencies survive in such a difficult time? They had to compete with each other before, but in today’s realities, the situation has become aggravated. The market has begun to revive, so businesses need to attract new customers and retain old ones. They need a tool that will store information about the meetings, calls, and other contacts. This base should be constantly updated and expanded. To optimize this process, a company should implement a specialized CRM adjusted to deal with the real estate industry. Let’s find out what these systems are and how they can benefit your business.
What Can CRM Do?
As the name implies, CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is designed to manage relations with clients and automate business processes.
Maintain a database
Using CRM, you can easily keep track of all real estate objects, customers, and transactions in one place. To find the necessary data, you don’t have to open various applications or use Excel tables. For example, CRM will store information about the clients‘ demands and expectations, which will allow you to offer them the best options and close the deal. You can also quickly and simply view the desired property, including its address, parameters, plans, photos, owner information, and transaction history. There is a great list of real estate CRMs in the market.
Process requests quickly
If you integrate CRM with all communication channels and with the website, all requests will be collected in one place. Your managers won’t have to manually process requests from different channels, which will significantly reduce their work time and will not allow you to miss a single client. For example, integration with IP telephony will automatically record all incoming and outgoing calls, as well as record them. Then the manager will be able to listen to and analyze these calls.
Integration with the e-mail will also considerably save the manager’s time, who will be able to quickly access the correspondence or find the required letter. Moreover, you can send group emails, save templates, and much more. It’s very convenient since all correspondence is connected with the client’s card and you don’t need to go through the whole mailbox. Nutshell can provide your employees with these features.
Schedule tasks
CRM will automatically remind the managers of scheduled appointments or trips to show customers the facility. CRM will never let them forget about the meetings. Cross-platform CRM solutions, such as Zoho CRM, can be integrated with other platforms, allowing your employees to be always available for clients. The omnichannel feature will allow them to collect customers‘ requests from different communication channels and transfer them to CRM.
Prepare analytical reports
Data analysis and real estate market research is an important part of the operation of any real estate business. Thanks to CPM, your employees don’t need to manually calculate statistics on calls, transactions, or refusals. They can simply download this information in several minutes from the CRM database. For managers, CRM can offer reports on the performance of employees, a sales funnel report, and others. For example, Revaluate offers real estate agents to use AI-based predictive analytics to generate leads and increase sales. It assesses social media and other data and finds people who are going to move within 3 to 6 months.
Maintain document flow
In addition to analytical reports, managers deal with various contracts and other necessary documentation, including buyer’s agent agreements, purchase agreements, riders, amendments, home inspection reports, insurance policies, property deeds, listings, and much more. CRM offers ready-made templates for all the necessary documents, making the life of your managers better. For example, you can find a template builder in HubSpot CRM.
Automatically publish ads on the Internet
CRM can automatically upload ads to an external platform many times faster than a manager will do it manually. The automated ad uploading saves a considerable amount of the realtors‘ working time, allowing them to pay more attention to customers. For example, Zillow Premier Agent has built-in advertising tools that will be useful for your agents.
How Will CRM Benefit Your Real Estate Business?
Software Advice revealed that real estate agencies account for 25% of all CRM software users, which is shown on the infographic below. Why do they choose CRM?
Sales growth
Using CRM will allow you to increase sales because you will be able to attract new customers and retain the existing ones. Capterra found that using CRM helps 47% of companies retain customers.
Increased customer loyalty
CRM allows you to get more feedback from your customers. This information will help you find bottlenecks, improve service quality, and reduce customer dissatisfaction. The above-mentioned Canberra’s study demonstrates that 47% of businesses improved customer satisfaction thanks to CRM solutions.
Improved KPI of your employees
CRM allows managers to allocate working time as efficiently as possible, speed up routine tasks, and reduce the number of human errors. The platform can show you which next step to take and how to better communicate with the customers. Some CRM solutions allow implementing gamification and a competitive system aimed at helping real estate agents reach KPIs and better results.
Reduced costs
Digital marketing services cost from $2.5k to $12k per month on average in 2021. With the help of CRM, a real estate agency can reduce advertising and marketing costs based on data on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Also, automation of document flow cuts costs and errors related to orders, invoices, acceptance certificates, and so on.
Better HR management
CRM helps you compare the performance of your employees and their KPIs when calculating various bonuses and rewards. Automating manual routine operations allows your employees to devote more time to customers, thereby increasing their loyalty and bringing profit to the company.
Be aware of everything
You will receive analytical and statistical information about the percentage of regular customers, their LTV, employee efficiency, bounce statistics, and so on a real-time basis. This will allow you to make the sales plans, monitor their implementation, analyze the duration of transactions, find bottlenecks in the sales funnel, and predict the financial performance of your real estate business.
Customer retention
Implementing CRM will save you from the situation when your agent leaves and takes a customer database away. Unfortunately, there are sad cases when dismissed employees steal confidential information. 90% of them said that they did it because the employer didn’t have the technology to protect it. So, CRM can solve this problem.
Which Features Should Your CRM Software Have?
Have the necessary functionality
If you choose a universal CRM software, check whether it includes the features you need. For example, a real estate agency needs to publish ads directly from CRM, but the universal one may not have such a feature. In this case, you will need to add the desired functions for a separate fee, or immediately choose a specialized CRM software.
Be integrable
A real estate company usually uses various communication channels to attract new customers. They include IP telephony, SMS, email distribution services, instant messengers, and social networks. Therefore, your CRM should be able to integrate with all the channels you use. Taking into account the fact that nowadays people prefer voice messaging rather than texts, your CRM should have one more important feature – be able to convert voice messages into texts. For example, WhatsApp is developing the same technology for the iOS operating system now.
Have a mobile version
As a rule, employees of real estate agencies often go to meetings with clients to show them the premises. During the meeting, they may need to change the order status, obtain specifications, view transaction data, and much more. All this can be done using a mobile phone, so it’s also important to have a mobile version of the CRM platform in order to always be able to receive up-to-date data.
Be secure
Since CRM stores information about customers, sales volumes, and company analytics, it must be secure. For example, developers can provide data backup and encryption of the Internet connection. It will be good if you’re able to restrict access rights, i.e. each manager will only see the data of the clients he/she is working with. It can help you avoid situations when thieving employees steal the company’s databases as it happened with Martin & Co. Their ex-worker stole the client database and sent it to the competitors.
Your CRM must be protected from hacker attacks as well. If you choose cloud CRM, all databases of calls, customers, and requests will be stored in the cloud on the secured server. Out-of-the-box CRMs are installed on the employees‘ computers, and all data is stored on the company’s server. In this case, you must make sure that it’s secured.
Bottom Line
Does your real estate business agency need CRM? A definite yea, if your company is developing, you need to process a large amount of data, you want to attract new customers and not lose contact with old ones, you want to easily and quickly generate reports, as well as monitor performance of your employees. CRM will help you collect requests from different sources in one place, store all customer information, reduce the time spent on routine tasks, and increase sales.
You can purchase CRM software available in the market, or you can order it from us. At Elinext, we have extensive experience in developing and testing CRMs. Our team can make CRM that will perfectly fit your needs and help you move forward despite all market problems.
