After the COVID-19 pandemic, the previously thriving real estate industry became more competitive and tougher. Investing in technologies has proven to be just as critical as building strong relationships with consumers. Those players in the real estate market who retrofit business methods in time turned out to be more prepared for the challenges and less vulnerable in times of abrupt market shifts.
The demand for improved technologies has led to the use of such a tool as CRM. Salesforce real estate - one of the best in the world - not only allows you to manage complicated data sets but also provides flexibility, mobility, and stable customer relations.
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CRM Requirements For Real Estate
While CRM is more commonly used by B2C and B2B organizations, real estate agents are successfully adapting it to their needs. They work with many clients and need to have data about them at hand. But serviceable real estate CRM is more than a customer database.
The most suitable CRM in real estate should be a customizable tool developed to automate essential functions and get accurate data. A reliable CRM must be competent in solving any problems that workers in this field may have.
- Problem: Agents deal with large amounts of information.
- Solution: CRM tools can combine various sources into a single database, available from any device or location, making data retrieval quick and convenient.
- Problem: Agents rarely work from home.
- Solution: With CRM, agents can work fully on portable devices. At the same time, they will have access to all tools and functions.
- Problem: According to research, over 88% of customers expect a response within an hour.
- Solution: CRM is configured to track and send reminders and direct messages to the agent, and to automatically respond to specific requests.
- Problem: Agents need to keep in touch with former clients.
- Solution: Because real estate is an expensive investment, recommendations and feedback from family and friends guide buyers. Positive feedback from a previous client can lead to business expansion for a realtor. No fewer than 74% of customers prefer to return to agents who have not lost contact with them even when they completed the sale process.
Therefore, regular, automated messages to former clients that can be sent using CRM can play a vital role in the development of a business.
- Problem: Agents must respond quickly to potential problems.
- Solution: CRM tools’ real-time data collection and presentation technology mean realtors can respond to situations as they evolve, track revenue and campaign success, and determine which consumer interactions are most profitable - all in real-time.
Why Is Salesforce the Best Fit For Real Estate Brokers?
Salesforce, a global company and leader in CRM with a capital base of over $100 billion, offers its consumer-facing product called Lightning and also serves as a backend for other customizable solutions. This package is indispensable for sales and marketing departments around the world and helps to build relationships between companies and their customers.
CRM tools allow you to collect, analyze, and store all available information about users and potential customers in one place. The companies use this information to provide a more personalized experience to the clients. This results in faster passage through the sales funnel and increases the chances of repeat trade. All this makes the Salesforce real estate app indispensable for the real estate industry.
Salesforce’s interconnected infrastructure includes the AppExchange, where you can upgrade your system with third-party solutions - from full-fledged apps to components to enhance the platform.
What is more, Salesforce provides an online Trailhead learning center and a supportive pioneer community to share ideas and suggest solutions to problems. And the free trial provided by Salesforce allows users to see how this best software for real estate agents functions and how effective it is.
Before moving on to Salesforce for real estate review, let’s turn to the statistics:
- An Activerain study found that wealthy real estate agents invest 6 times more in technology than poor ones, and CRM is integral to their success.
- Salesforce currently charges for almost 20% of the CRM market share, according to Gartner. It’s like over 4 top competitors combined.
Salesforce Customer Success states that companies that have switched to Salesforce saw a 25% increase in their revenues and a 35% increase in consumer satisfaction.
Salesforce Real Estate CRM Benefits
Feature-rich solutions such as Salesforce CRM provide deeply customizable, easy-to-use, and flexible solutions that integrate with any process, existing system, or database. Besides, the capacity to share data across various channels enables realtors to utilize this data to create a variety of marketing campaigns. Here are the major benefits that Salesforce for realtors and brokers offers:
Reducing Resource Losses
A properly optimized CRM for commercial real estate can save you 11 hours per week that you previously spent finding and creating considerable business connections, as well as increase the number of clients through intelligent automation and data collection. Salesforce real estate management helps experienced realtors effectively manage acquisitions/dives and investment operations, track rental and transaction processes.
For non-professional investors looking to buy real estate for investment, Salesforce for real estate investors will automatically calculate the cash flows as a loan-to-cash or cost ratio and automatically sort them. Optimizing key processes and focusing on what matters is essential to growing your business.
Functionality Available on the Go
With Salesforce for real estate brokers, you can show properties, meet with clients to discuss, and still be open to instant collaboration. Since it is a cloud-based property management software, there is no need to download anything and no maintenance. Information is always up to date, no matter where it is accessed. Brokers will manage their companies by phone, and agents will stay in the office, meeting with clients anywhere.
Merged and Secure Communication
A common contact database enables brokers to manage all communications from one place, such as phones, emails, or chats, and see important milestones and the results. With Salesforce, you can securely share, store and sign documents in dedicated chats, which can vary depending on the user’s permission rules. With this feature, you can close deals remotely with varying levels of privacy and access.
Effective Lead Management
Real estate leads differ from sales leads. On the one hand, these are direct consumers, and on the other hand, most of the potential clients come through lists or from direct referrals. Network email marketing is of the utmost importance when selling real estate, which is why you need one that can send network emails to develop relationships. By analyzing factors such as location, age, number of points of contact, you can see the patterns that your clients are following. This awareness will help you offer the right service at the right time and maximize the likelihood of a sale.
Response Time
Customers prefer quick responses and quick solutions to their problems. That’s why Salesforce has thought of every way to communicate between you and your customers. With smart automation in Salesforce CRM, agencies can ensure that no message or request is missed. Even when the agent cannot respond to the request, an automatic message will be sent to the lead/client that the request has been received and that the agent will respond as soon as possible.
Also, agents will conduct a conversation on different devices. And since it integrated the platform with social media platforms, they can always get in touch from a single interface. The platform can also track events and dates and keep users informed of any significant upcoming customer deals.
Marketing Automation
Driving a real estate business involves organizing the same data for every new prospect and performing similar repetitive tasks for every new client or property. A commercial real estate CRM on top of Salesforce can transform your back-office work, marketing, sales, and consumer service. You don’t need to manually input new information into the database, calculate the distribution of real estate brokers’ commissions, or delegate various tasks to your team members so that they can be assigned and calculated automatically.
Another benefit is that it can immediately direct leads to market funnels based on various attributes such as company size, previous interactions, interests, and sorted for future analysis. The tool can automatically retrieve important files and information when needed. But this feature is not part of the standard Salesforce functionality and comes with add-on products like Marketing Cloud or Pardot.
Predictive Analytics
This CRM add-on for the Salesforce real estate team lets them see which potential customers are more likely to use services and builds a predictive model of sales probability based on the history of all touchpoints. With Salesforce’s CRM for real estate, companies can combine market data with social signals about which properties will hit the market and get up-to-date statistics. With in-depth analysis, they can fully track the evolution of sales and generate exception reports with various graphical representations of the data.
Data Centralization
With a shared customer database, you’ll be able to monitor your customer motivations and preferences and personalize every interaction, which will perfect your customer experience and help you in lead conversions or follow-up sales. This database is accessible to them from anywhere, which is very great as real estate agents are permanently on the go.
Online real estate CRM is an opportunity to see each client in 360 degrees at the micro and macro levels. At the macro level, you will receive a comprehensive overview and all possible information about the client. At the micro-level, your lead’s budget will be calculated. Personalization is crucial for tailoring your tactics to the personalities of real buyers, and for successful marketing.
Data Integration from Multiple Channels
The real estate industry involves generating leads and managing contacts from many sources. Companies contact many customers from various sources daily. To track all leads without losing leads, agents need to store all of their information in a centralized database. Keeping all the information you need in an easily accessible location allows real estate agents to gain a holistic view of their business and identify where improvements need to be made.
Customer Support Service
Customer support is essential as just one unresolved request can be very expensive due to the money invested in the real estate business. A Salesforce-powered service center will deliver a flawless customer experience and increase customer support.
Advanced Built-in Functions and Adaptation
Another undoubted plus of the commercial real estate CRM Salesforce is the customizability of the platform. Salesforce offers different customization, such as system configuration, enhancement with external apps and components, and code customization. Non-technical teams can easily do some of them, for example, creating custom views or even renaming modules. More complex optimizations may require outside help from Salesforce developers.
Apps from AppExchange
Moreover, Salesforce can easily sync with a variety of systems and third-party tools such as collaboration portals, map search apps, property databases, social media, data visualization software, email services, and more. All these solutions are hosted on AppExchange, and they provide a full range of tools necessary for realtors and brokers. There are both free and paid offers among them.
For example, Jungo offers a one-stop solution, tailored for the mortgage industry. Zillow® Connector for Salesforce is a tool for displaying the value of a home along with other suitable property and comparable information. Subscription25 is a native Salesforce application that generates invoices based on orders, contracts, and subscriptions.
Also worth mentioning is the BReal Estate solution for real estate agents, property managers, investors, and large rental companies for sales, rent, property, and condominium management.
And Propertybase, a global real estate platform for brokerage firms and teams looking to interact productively with clients, drive long-term growth, and close deals faster with IDX and MLS-integrated websites, lead generation, and back-office tools, and intelligent transaction management.
Salesforce Real Estate CRM: Pricing
There are 4 different packages with different combinations of functions.
- Sales Essentials Edition: $25 per user / month *
- Professional Edition: $75 per user / month *
- Enterprise Edition: $150 per user / month *
- Unlimited Edition: $300 per user / month *
* All products are billed annually.
Conclusion
Even a small amount of automation is already increasing interest in brokerage services. And if automation includes personalization, then a deeper relationship with the client and increased engagement are guaranteed.
Using Salesforce for real estate can revolutionize the industry and help you deeply understand your customers’ preferences and needs. This excellent sales, marketing, and client service tool will dramatically improve organizational processes, as evidenced by the Salesforce real estate reviews. However, it must be implemented correctly and in full accordance with corporate goals.
Ergonized offers customized as well as ready-to-deploy solutions Salesforce for real estate agents. Our competitive edge is our rich experience in the real estate industry. We deeply understand the industry and will deploy a real estate CRM considering all the features of your company.
While the versatility of Salesforce is an enormous advantage, some of the functionality may be overkill for small and start-up businesses. Therefore, the system may need to calibrate and optimize redundant or complex functions. Our Salesforce administrators and developers can help you customize the system to your requirements and adapt all the functionality of the system to the demands of commercial real estate so that your investment in Salesforce becomes a valuable long-term asset.
