With real estate comes some real pressure and we usually find ourselves wondering how and where to find prospective home buyers. This pressure can be felt by any and every stakeholder in the real estate industry including real estate developers, real estate agents and finally, the brokers who help in bringing in or reeling in the actual buyers and those who are looking for rentals as well. You can be sure that all these people have felt the pressure of dealing with massive amounts of market information as one of the main challenges when it comes to finding the right kind of customers for their various properties. So what is the solution? Real estate CRM is the answer for all these real estate industry players. And here’s why:
- Information Handling: To begin, real estate is all about information and data. With the movement of all kinds of marketing and even sales activities online, it is easy to see how data or rather, big data, is something that very business needs to tackle in order to filter through it all to find and reach the right customer who can then be engaged in the right manner. With the right free real estate CRM system in place, you can achieve the same in an automated manner. The information or the big data can easily be sorted and stored in terms of the keys or the fields that you feed into the framework. For example, the demographics as well as the overall income of the prospective or ideal owner of a certain property can be fed into the system. Then, the CRM side of the framework does all the work of finding the leads and putting the details into the system so that you have a ready list of email addresses that can enjoy your emails and find the home or the property that they may be looking for. Storing their information and the interactions you have with them is also a part of the CRM framework and this is important because many people look to upgrade from an apartment to a townhouse and from a townhouse to a single family home. So, this is where a repeat order or an up sell can easily happen.
- Team and Collaboration: When you have the right real estate CRM in place, you can be sure that your teams will also collaborate in a much better manner. Many of you would know by now that the team and the teamwork is what guides any framework – automated or not. If you know how to get an LLC or have monotonous activities at the core of all the teamwork and needless communication coming from many different channels, then you can be sure that there will be confusion and chaos will run rife within the team. There may be duplication of tasks and a complete miss on some others. At the same time, boredom will be a factor that will keep your team members from feeling fully motivated at all times. In order to avoid this, automation is a must. First of all, the information will correspond with the right functions within the CRM framework. This will ensure that there is seamless automated communication between the team members so that one member is notified when the previous task is completed by another member. Also, cutting out the monotonous tasks and making them automated will free up the bandwidth of the team so that the team members are able to concentrate on tasks involving their core skills, which can actually contribute in a positive way when it comes to the conversion rate.
- Leads: This simple word has such a powerful connotation when it comes to your real estate CRM. Generating leads and making the most of these leads with allied features along the lines of marketing software is what will finally help in upping that conversion quotient. This is a simple thing, yet it has many complex tasks attached to it. To begin with, your free real estate CRM should be able to carry out proper segmentation of leads so that the right audience is matched to the right property. Not only will this simple step save you time, but it will also help you store the information of the same customer for an upsell in the future. This can be matched with the general tone of aspirations for someone in that demographic group and in the neighborhood where the home has been bought. The leads can then be engaged with targeted campaigns that can appear in the inbox and the social media pages of these people. Knowing what to say will depend on the research and the insights that one gathers from the social media pages of a similar audience group. This would also form a part of the segmentation activities that you carry out. Lead management also refers to lead nurturing, and this can be done using many tools that your typical real estate CRM would make available, including landing pages and others that have a specific call for action.
- Follow-Ups: This is another important thing that the real estate CRM would allow you to do. The call for action would be built into the framework of the CRM so that a successfully nurtured lead and the interaction with the same would lead to a notification that calls for some specific action on your part. This can be of great help for the broker or the developer or even the agent since it would show which leads are closer to conversion and hence they can focus on their core skills and their core engagement for this particular lead.
- Analytics: This is also a very important part of the free real estate CRM that you would use. The analytics and insights can clearly show you the direction of your efforts and what changes may be required in keeping with other industry standards in terms of the competition that you may be facing.