Transforming Real Estate Agency Workflows with CRM & Automation
The real estate sector is going digital. Property professionals are now finding out how Customer Relationship Management technology and automation can change their entire way of working, after years of relying on spreadsheets, sticky notes, and manual processes. Modern real estate agencies are not only keeping ahead of their competition by adopting these technologies – they are leaving traditional ways behind.
Why Real Estate Agencies Need CRM Solutions More Than Ever
The current property market moves at a blistering pace. Client desire fast responses, personalized service, and instant communication through multiple channels. Traditional real estate workflows could never support that kind of service without drivers an unmanageable workload for agents and admin staff alike.
Real estate CRM systems help overcome these challenges, coordinating client information, automating normal and mundane tasks, and providing impactful insight into market trends and client behaviours. Industry research suggests real estate agencies that use CRM technology see and average 41% increase in revenue per salesperson and 27% increase in the speed of closing deals.
The Unseen Costs of Manual Real Estate Processes
Before we address solutions, it’s important to identify the hidden costs of manual processes on your agency. Every hour devoted to data entry, reminders, and administrative duties is an hour not spent with clients or listing properties. Hidden costs add up quickly:
- Lost leads from slow follow-up
- Missed opportunities due to poor management of client data
- Limited productivity from redundant administrative tasks
- Inconsistent communication which affects the client relationship
- Limited growth as manual processes become bottlenecks
Core Features That Transform Real Estate Workflows
Automated Lead Management and Nurturing
The value of a modern real estate CRM platform is that it captures and organizes leads from multiple sources—your website, social media, referrals, and property portals. An automated lead management solution does the heavy lifting of organizing and nurturing leads for you. Instead of having to type out their contact information and remind yourself to follow up, the system does all this for you.
Intelligent lead scoring technology lets you identify just who are your hottest prospects, allowing your brokerage to focus its energy on people most likely to result in a successful transaction.
Easier Property Management Integration
Many industry-leading CRM solutions have direct integration with the MLS and property databases, instantly increasing the visibility and synchronization of listing data and client preferences. In addition to saving agents from dealing with duplicate data entry, listing activity happens seamlessly, and clients will always receive exactly what they expect in terms of property recommendations.
Many of the matching algorithms the agent used to identify properties for their client would instantly determine potential listings that suits each of their clients.
Intelligent Communication Automation
Not all automation is created equal, and communication automation is certainly not just an email update/marketing campaign! Modern CRM systems can track client communication across phone calls, emails, text messages and social media. Leveraging the full extent of your system to include last week’s interactions with your clients to understand previous contacts and to focus on service trends can help agents deliver personable service at even higher levels.
Automating appointment reminders, expiration deadlines for contracts, and reminders to congratulate all bend milestones for clients about the significant endeavor, solidifies each follow-up.
Advanced Automation Strategies for Real Estate Success
Pipeline Management and Deal Tracking
The best real estate agencies know that every client and communication is part of a bigger pipeline. CRM automation tools give you visual representations of pipelines that show you where each prospect sits in your sales cycle. Whenever a prospect moves from one stage to another, the CRM will automatically assign tasks and notify your team of deadlines. With CRM automation capabilities, you’ll never let a deal go cold because you didn’t assign the next steps.
Deal tracking gives you the visibility to monitor contract progress, financing approvals, inspection scheduling, and closing dates, while alerting all involved parties to potential issues as soon as they arise. The app notifies all potential team members, so if a small snag comes up, you and your team can work out solutions together before an ambush of tiny problems become deal-breakers.
Market Analysis and Reporting Automation
Data-driven decision making is what separates the agencies who are staying busy, and the agencies struggling to stay afloat. Automated reporting will take all market data, performance metrics for agents, and even client satisfaction ratings and provide actionable reports.
These reports will identify trending properties in neighborhoods, optimal pricing strategies, and even areas where your team is doing well and in need of improvement. Automated Reporting provides you regular reports without the manual process that, often times, has led to mistakes in data entry, gathering from multiple sources, and has burned valuable time that you should spend with your clients.
Implementation Best Practices for Real Estate CRM
Selecting the Right CRM Platform
There are many CRM systems available, but not all systems offer real estate-specific functionality. When deciding on which platform is suitable for your agency, look for the platform’s ability to provide:
- Native MLS integration capabilities
- Mobile-first design to accommodate agents who are out in the field
- Customizable workflows that reflect your agency’s processes
- Automation capabilities that are robust but not overly complex
- Pricing that is scalable as your business grows
Team Training and Adoption Processes
No matter how sophisticated the CRM system is, no value will be derived from the software if the people using it don’t use it to a sufficient extent. A successful implementation centers on training program quality, adoption timeframe, and support capability. We’d like to help you create a community of power users that can become internal champions of the software, as well as gradually rollout across the bigger organization.
Consistent training sessions, collection of user feedback, and continuous improvements to the system will ensure that your investment is being fully realized as your agency grows.
Assessing ROI from Real Estate CRM Investment
- Metrics to Measure
When assessing the success of your CRM, you need to monitor a set of specific metrics that can be tied back to the financials:
- Lead conversion (and time of conversion)
- Average deal size, average commission per deal
- Client retention rates and referral generation
- Agent productivity (measured based closed deals per month)
- Eliminated administrative time across the team.
2. Taking into Account Business Growth
In addition to the immediate efficiency gains your brokerage will enjoy, CRM automation is compounding. Better client experience leads directly to improved referrals, consistent follow-up processes recapture deals lost over the last 10 years, and the ability to leverage data to make better-informed business decisions.
Agencies that fully commit to using CRM technology observe 30 to 50% revenue growth within the first year of implementation, with continued growth as processes become more efficient, and team knowledge advances.
The Future of Real Estate Technology Integration
The real estate industry is quickly advancing. With artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and IoT devices we are finding more ways to connect with clients in a new way and create more effective workflows and efficiencies. Innovative agencies are even thinking about how they can connect these technologies to their existing CRMs.
Understanding these technology trends while understanding that successful CRM implementation relies on commitment to relationships with clients, creates your agency’s opportunity for a continuous cycle of success within a more competitive marketplace.
Are you feeling inspired to modernize your real estate agency with new CRM technology? Contact BusinessEzee today to learn how our custom built CRM technology for real estate can help you with automation, improve your conversions, and grow your agency. Our team of experts can help you discover the right system for your agency’s individual needs and growth objectives.