Learning About Real Estate CRM: 3 Steps to Remember

By Jess Penner

Real estate in Canada’s major metropolitan areas is getting to be very high-priced and competitive. So too is the business of buying and selling real estate on behalf of individual and corporate clients. Today’s real estate professional must be fast and effective to survive, let alone prosper. They need ways to stand out from their competition to in odder to keep their current customers and build up their client portfolio. Real estate marketing programs help support them to achieve those goals. One of the most important of them is real estate Customer Relationship Management or CRM.

What are the benefits of real estate CRM?

Real estate customer relationship management or CRM is a computerized system that assists real estate professionals to manage not just their business relationships, but all of the associated data and information as well. That includes having the capacity to store client, customer and prospect contact information as well as current accounts, leads and sales opportunities all in one location. Then having the ability to access and manipulate this information to meet their real estate business goals.

  • A real estate CRM can also be used to share resources across a company. That allows individual real estate agents to build on each other’s efforts and have mutual success. Contacts, new leads and generating prospects for sales are crucial in today’s competitive real estate market.
  • The best CRM models for real estate not gather basic information like contact profiles, but provide the value added of automated reminders and additional ways to generate more leads and possibilities real estate sales and opportunities. Here’s how real estate CRM works

Basics of real estate CRM

A real estate customer management system can help make any real estate agent or agency become more effective and more profitable. The CRM itself is simply a piece of software that has been specifically designed for real estate professionals to help them do their job better. It often has a few common features and qualities that are common to all software development companies.

They include initial contact management systems and email autoresponder marketing techniques that keep real estate agents get in in touch with and nurture their relationship with leads, current clients, and returning or potentially returning clients.

Step 1: Beginning

Most CRM software packages starts with a lead capture website. This may differ from program to program but that initial process begins with trying to offer a real estate website visitor with something of value in return for their email or other contact information. This might be a free report like as a digital download, an e-book on buying or selling real estate, or even access to an MLS home search tool so that potential buyers can search online for properties to purchase in their area.

Step 2: Follow-Up

Once that initial contact has been recorded the CRM software will notify the real estate agent or agency about the contact so that someone can follow up. That might start with an automated message called an email drip that seeks to keep the contact engaged in a dialogue until an agent can make a telephone call to them.

This might in fact be a series of emails that are pre-written and automated to be sent over a short period of time.The goal is to build a relationship between the contact and the real estate agent for future business.

Step 3: Convert the Lead

All of this initial contact is a prelude to that phone call and then a subsequent face-to-face meeting with the contact by the real estate agent. Then the agent can try and sign them as a client or get them to agree to be a reference or referral for new real estate business. The emails set the scene for the agent to build their trust and the meeting is to convert the contact into a solid lead. This process when it is repeated hundreds of times lays the groundwork for a successful and on-going real estate business.