Why You Need a Real Estate CRM
With as much running around as you do as a real estate agent, you know you need software or an incredible personal assistant to help, but one is hard to learn about and the other is outside of your price range. Manage your contacts, improve your referrals, generate more leads and get down to closing more deals with a CRM for real estate agents. But how do you choose the best CRM for real estate?
Customer relationship management… it’s what a personal assistant does, but also what software can do now for you as a real estate agent. Juggling meetings, payments, emails, property proposals—fill in the blank here with your legwork—saps focus on big-picture tasks. And if you’re like most real estate agents, you can’t afford to hire an actual personal assistant. But you’re also one of the realtors who thinks: I don’t need a CRM tool, I’m the best person to handle everything, even if I honestly feel burned out. According to REAL Trends, real estate agents are 26% more effective with CRM software.
Better Contact Management
More than any other industry, real estate agents need CRMs. Why? Because centralized contact management is so crucial to being successful. Below are just some of the solutions that a solid CRM provides:
- Stop analyzing data and quickly identify what’s working and what isn’t>
- Stay in contact with former clients to increase referral generation.
- Stop trying to wedge tasks in between other tasks while on-the-go, which you know reduces the quality of any solution you provide.
- Improve response times and avoid losing sales to customers and landlords who expect extremely fast replies.
- Focus on one task at a time based on priority, instead of fielding needs left and right hoping for the best result.
Improve Your Referrals
You already know as a real estate agent that you rely on referrals, unless you use a proven system of real estate lead management. Doing a great job with one buyer leads to the next job, and while a lead book you hit with regular follow-ups isn’t a dead strategy, CRMs allow you to connect with past customers on a deeper level. Unless you have a very detailed system of interaction, it’s very difficult to nurture leads over time with consistency, leaving them to go dormant. Most realtors are inconsistent, leading to connecting with past clients at the wrong time, but with a CRM reaching out becomes consistent yet human. This is important: your CRM is not a robocall, it is a soft touch reminder that you can build on with a more substantial call, email, text or in-person meetup—the kind of real effort you won’t get to put forward if your timing and outreach is wrong in the first place.
Increase Lead Generation
If you have a lot of experience as a real estate agent, you should have a steady stream of referral business reaching out organically. But what if you are new to selling, or for another reason don’t have lead generation figured out? You may be an amazing closer, but you need leads to get the chance to pitch. CRMs are often thought of as just lead management tools, but they also help you generate new leads.
- Link social media and website information: Tracking how your leads interact with you is essential. Which pages they visit most on your website, which posts they like on social media—mine trends from this and related data and learn where your leads really lay.
- Improve understanding of your lead volume: Are you struggling to understand your lack of lead volume? Figuring out why you don’t have enough leads is a quick route to generating more leads by stopping what doesn’t work and doing what does work. Define the metrics you want to track—like marketing campaign ROI, lead time and demographics—then simply connect your CRM to your marketing automation and start learning.