I’ll be releasing future articles on eSigning, Transaction Management, Training Tools, Communication Tools, etc. Subscribe below and I’ll keep you posted. If you’re a devout fan of a specific CRM, this article probably won’t persuade you into switching platforms. This article will be less about feature comparison, and more of a… what to consider as you’re researching real estate brokerage and real estate team tools in the market. Functions & Features Running a real estate brokerage or team requires a balance between managing agents, overseeing transactions, ensuring client satisfaction, and on the less fun side of things – avoiding litigation. Whether you’re just launching or looking to improve your existing firm’s tech-stack, the real estate brokerage tools you choose to support your operations can make a significant difference on your administrative workload, the scalability of your operation, and if you’re so-inclined, the sell-ability of your brokerage. Keep in mind as you’re looking into software, that you’ll be talking to software salespeople. They will all make their programs sound like the Ark for your brokerage’s rainy day. So herein we’ll discuss the features, functionality and gotcha’s to look out for; so that hopefully you’ll find the best tool for your business. Our Experience with CRMs Over the years, through running our team and now multiple real estate brokerages, we’ve had the chance to work with: Through experimenting with these different CRMs at different stages in our growth, we came to learn which factors were make-or-break for our CRM requirements. Your requirements will be, and should be, different than ours. My intent is not to tell you the best CRM, but to help you find the best real estate CRM for you. CRM Goals Lead generation and capture, agent activity and productivity reporting, deal tracking, recruiting, client-facing real estate website, agent personalization. These are some of the things we had in mind when looking for a CRM. Lead Generation vs Collection Does the CRM you’re looking into help with generating leads, and if so, how? Pretty much all CRMs we’ve experimented with allow for some kind of web-based form that allows a customer (potential client) to enter their information and become a “lead” in your system. Some, such as CINC and Boomtown, have taken this all the way to be full-fledged customer-facing real estate search websites and the vendor will run your lead generation ads for you. All you do is hand them your credit card. With these you can simply dump advertising dollars into the vendors pocket, and they’ll generate the ads, driving traffic and leads into your system. These full-service vendors also tend to be more expense options. Others are more designed to collect leads than to generate them, such as Follow-Up Boss. Such systems may leave you looking to other programs to build a customer-facing real estate search site, and they prefer to sit in the background to collect the leads. Backend, collection-only systems tend to be a little cheaper than the aforementioned full-service vendors. Keep all this in mind when looking at different CRMs. In short, the full-service vendors will provide a more comprehensive solution, meaning you’ll need to buy into fewer real estate brokerage tools to build out your tech-stack. But you will also be married to their way of doing things, as they are less likely to integrate (or at least integrate well) with other systems. When speaking with sales reps, they will try to convince you that their system IS the end-all-be-all system. After having a thorough web-demo with a $1,200/month vendor followed by a $300/month vendor, you will begin to get a better view of how they stack up against each other in terms what all their system actually does, versus how well their system might integrate with 2 to 5 other systems in order to actually do-it-all (which also means 2 to 5 additional monthly bills, and integration points that can have issues). Lead Capture Closely related to Lead Generation & Collection, we learned recently how distinctly different Capture is than Generation or Collection. Allow me to walk you through three customer experience examples. Customer is moving to a new town, so they search that town name. A Google Ad appears stating “Homes in New Town under $500,000”. User clicks on the ad to be taken to a home search website. One of three scenarios occurs next. While 5/5 sounds a bit harsh, 1/5 sounds totally complacent. So here’s the part that may or may not surprise you. Expect to spend exponentially more on ads if you go with a 1/5 type lead capture website compared to something that is more of a 3/5 or higher. We’re talking $10/lead versus $200/lead difference. We know from EXPENSIVE experience. Are you paying for a website and ads out of the kindness of your heart, to make sure everyone can find available homes? Or are you trying to run a profitable business and turn leads into commissions? With the real estate industry averaging between 1% to 5% conversion of leads to closings, I’ll let you do the math. Yes, 100 leads statistically means 1 to 5 closings. I’m not here to dictate that one way is right and one way is wrong. But if you intend to be able to ramp-up leads for your team or brokerage with ad spend, be aware that your tech-stack will strongly influence how effective your money is utilized. Agent Activity & Productivity Reporting If reporting is a four-letter word to you, well… don’t skip this section yet, and here’s why. Say you have two agents on your team, you know them well, you know when they’re calling on leads, going on showings, at an inspection, etc. Who needs reporting? Fast-forward a few months and you have seven agents. Do you really think you will have as solid of a grasp on seven different individuals daily work schedule and productivity? Skip ahead a year, and you’ve grown to 16 agents as well as considering breaking off to launch your own
