As someone who’s closed a real estate sale or two before, I’m sure you’ll agree how unforgiving the industry can be without the correct tools at your disposal.
Did you know that a whopping 88% of real estate agents coming into realtor jobs don’t make it past their first year? And a meager 10% of those who do stay make it up to the $100k+ club.
The truth is, using good real estate CRM software is especially beneficial if you’re planning on joining the big fish earning 6-figures. And taking a look at the stats, it’s not hard to see why.
Two out of 3 agents earning $100K+ use a commercial real estate CRM software, compared to just 35% of those bringing home under $35k per year. Having the correct tools to streamline the hyper-competitive world of the real estate industry can be the decider of whether you’ll be able to swim with the big fish or get swallowed up by something bigger swimming by.
That’s because today’s customer expects all the bells and whistles when it comes to service. To stand a chance against the fierce competition, you must be serving potential clients up a platter that’s juicy enough to make them want to stay.
A platter made up of the best elements of an outstanding real estate team – a team of realtors who are diligent, organized, keep up with every industry update & change, and remember every detail about their clients, no matter how minor.
That’s not to say that each real estate agent on your team should remember everything they’ve been told about a potential client off the top of their head (as impressive as that might be). But it is to say that this important information about your valued clients should be stored somewhere where you can refer back to at a later date.
This is where having a quality CRM system comes in handy. A quality CRM tool will help you and your team effectively store important facts about potential buyers and sellers and can help you deliver a service that wows. This makes pushing prospects down your sales funnel much faster and with far fewer hick-ups along the way.
How to Choose A Quality CRM For Your Real Estate Business?
In this article, we’ll be covering what makes the best CRM for real estate, along with:
- What key features your real estate CRM and commercial real estate CRM software should have
- The benefits of leveraging a real estate CRM software
- An overview of some of the best real estate CRM software on the market today
Let’s get started, shall we!
What Key Features Should My CRM Software Have?
There are many different features available for both real estate CRM software and commercial real estate CRM software. Here’s what to expect from a good CRM system.
A Traditional Real Estate CRM System
A decent real estate CRM system is non-specific in its use and generally has many functions and features that make it ideal for most industries. You’ll generally find these common features integrated into them:
Email integration
Email integrations are a must-have for every successful real estate professional and are crucial for an efficient email marketing campaign and contacting clients seamlessly. It’s able to integrate seamlessly with most email service providers, including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. This can be especially useful if your real estate agency firm isn’t using apps like Slack to communicate.
Interaction tracking
An invaluable core feature of every good CRM system, especially if clients will be speaking to many different agents as they’re pushed down the sales pipeline. Interaction tracking allows you to store the talk history with a client and document it for future conversations.
Contact management
This core CRM platform feature allows you to securely store client information, including their name, address, social media details, emails, and additional notes about them. This can be handy if you’ve learned about a particular dislike or preference they have.
For example, remembering they support a particular sports club could help you make a personal connection with them, positioning you as a friend and giving you something other than just business to talk about when you call.
Note that there are many different layouts for this feature across many other CRM platforms, and not all of them make sense to everyone. Shopping around is advised to ensure you find one that’s understandable for you and your team.
Lead management
A lead management feature helps enhance lead generation. Layouts vary from system to system, so it’s wise to trial your CRM tool before parting with any cash or rolling it out to your entire team.
Pipeline management
If your real estate business is large, there’s a good chance that your sales funnel is quite long. This is where a pipeline management tool can help streamline the sales process by tracking the status of each potential client, from the initial contact to a closed deal.
Sales & Marketing Reporting
Depending on what package you’ve selected for your CRM solution, you may or may not have this feature. If you do have reporting as part of your current package, it can offer you valuable insights into the performance of your real estate firm over periods of a day, up to a full calendar year. This is particularly useful for keeping your real estate business on track.
A Commercial Real Estate CRM Platform
In addition to the features listed for a traditional real estate CRM, a commercial real estate CRM has real estate-specific features that make them uniquely helpful for any realtor or real estate professional. These can include:
Proposal and Document Management
This feature helps you create and share proposals and other important documents easily with potential buyers and other realtors or agents on your team.
Listing Management Tools
Listing Management tools allow the average real estate agent to track properties and match them with potential buyer needs accurately. This helps to speed up finding properties to fit what your potential buyer is looking for.
Data Duplication Removal Tools
This tool will help prevent your system from running slowly by automatically clearing the temporary database files or junk files that clutter up your hard disk.
Integrability
These allow seamless integration with 3rd party tools to all necessary applications and programs to help consolidate data.
Customization Capabilities
These allow you to alter or add specific features of your choice to your CRM software. Customization ensures your system is specifically tailored to your company’s needs, helping your real estate business operate more effectively.
What are the Benefits of A Customer Relationship Management Software?
We’re currently living in an age where a customer’s expected level of care from their chosen real estate broker is nothing less than exceptional and hyper-personalized.
This is forcing realtors across the nation to step up their game in order to remain eligible to compete in the hyper-competitive real estate market.
There are a few good reasons why the best real estate professionals in the game use a real estate CRM.
Complete Management of Your Real Estate Business
Using a real estate CRM system, you’ll be able to manage your real estate business entirely from one platform. Many real estate CRM systems are mobile and desktop compatible, allowing for 24-hour access to the platform.
This feature makes it simple for any busy real estate agent to contact their clients and respond quickly to clients at any time of the day.
Keeps Real Estate Agents Organized
A commercial real estate CRM tracks vast amounts of data. This includes business and advertising metrics, and property data, helping agents efficiently find the properties their clients are interested in.
It helps attract new clients and communicate with them at the right time, all from the CRM system. And it lets you know when it’s getting close to their purchase date!
A good CRM system will also help keep you on top of marketing campaigns, allowing you to track campaign types and view associated data to quickly figure out what’s working and what’s not, with increased clarity.
Deals and Lead Management
If you’re managing more than one deal at a time, it can often feel like you’re juggling many balls at once. For some, this can go specularly well. For others whose strength doesn’t lie in multitasking, it can end up a disaster.
A good real estate CRM tool can help with this by allowing you to keep track of each client and where they are in the sales cycle. You’ll be able to stay in control of your conversations and not get confused with who’s doing what and when.
You’ll also be able to communicate with leads who contact your company quickly through different mediums thanks to email automation and the ability to sync your social media platforms.
This not only helps to remove some of the anxieties faced by your potential buyer, but it also ensures they’re not lost to competitors faster off the mark.
Many Real Estate CRMs Have Built-In AI
Many commercial real estate CRMs have AI built-in to the software to help predict customer trends using past customer data. This allows your team to make smarter business decisions when it comes to finding a potential client and close deals with greater levels of efficiency.
A real estate CRM also integrates the top property websites and makes them available to realtors in one easy-access place.
Finding properties for potential buyers with specific specifications is also much more time-efficient as there’s no longer a need to click through multiple property websites individually. This is especially invaluable to new real estate brokers, giving them a competitive edge in the market.
Another cool feature is the ability to connect the data in your CRM to your marketing automation. This will help you track factors contributing to lead volumes, such as demographics, campaign ROI, and lead time.
Simplifies Document Creation and Distribution
This is especially helpful as it assists real estate agents in creating deeds, contracts, and closing statements. It then distributes them to clients and colleagues with speed and ease. The system will safely store these documents in the cloud for you and pull essential data from contacts stored within the CRM.
You can manage your deadlines for transactions and give others who are part of the deal access to this information, too.
A Quick Money Saving Tip:
Many CRM platforms offer a free version of their software. Some platforms also provide free trials of their paid platforms, allowing you to try them out before buying an annual or monthly subscription. It’s advised to try these out first to see how their features work for you and your team.
Note: If you find your current CRM platform is expensive to maintain, doesn’t store your data in the cloud (typical of legacy systems), is too confusing, or lacks integration, it’s probably time to upgrade.
Let’s take a look at some of the best real estate CRMs currently on the market today.
The Top 11 Real Estate CRM Platforms in 2022
There are a ton of CRM companies out there that work well for both a small real estate businesses and a large enterprises. Understandably, that can make finding the best customer relationship management tool for your company a little overwhelming and time-consuming. Luckily, we’ve done all of the legwork for you!
Here’s a list of some of the best real estate CRM software on the market today:
1. REthink CRM
Benefits:
REthink is a popular customer relationship management tool that helps to give real estate agents back their most precious commodity – time. It does this by revolutionizing the way brokers and agents buy, sell and lease properties. Built on Salesforce, the world’s most popular CRM tool, REthink allows users to manage their entire business from their desktop or mobile device, helping them:
- Better manage their properties
- Gain better insights into their real estate company
- Improve lead generation and close more deals
Rethink also offers a high level of customizability of their CRM system, allowing users to match it to their existing sales process to help boost sales and generate more business.
Drawbacks:
Both a blessing and a curse, the high levels of customizability of this CRM tool can make it easy for inexperienced users to get lost. There are also many customer reports of having back and forths with the company and many third-party difficulties if users want to change the system interface.
Pricing:
It starts at $99/per user/per month
2. IXACT Contact Real Estate CRM
Benefits
The IXACT Contact Real Estate CRM saves you and your team time by automating repetitive menial tasks like uploading posts and listings and sending out emails and text messages.
IXACT Contact real estate CRM solution manages your active business by helping you better organize your contacts’ information. This allows you to keep in touch with and nurture your potential buyers throughout the sales cycle. All of this helps put you in front of mind the next time past clients need a good real estate broker again.
That’s why agents who have used the IXACT Contact CRM have seen an average increase of 55% in their GCI.
Drawbacks
One of the drawbacks of the IXACT CRM platform is that their website is not very personalized or interactive.
Like most CRM platforms, it can take a while for new users to learn how to use it. One example of this is its inability to add extra details into text and social media campaigns easily. This can distract those using the platform for the first time from the necessary tasks they need to take care of daily.
Pricing:
- $39/per feature/per month
- A free trial of the platform is available
3. Espresso Agent CRM
Benefits:
One of the best things about the all-in-one dialer and CRM tool Espresso Agent is that it is a specialist in providing real estate agents with highly effective lead generation tools.
Lead generation tools speed up the process of connecting and identifying FSBO and expired listing leads which are especially helpful if you’re working with clients with smaller budgets or a real estate investor looking for a property they can flip quickly. These deals tend to be the most profitable as almost 40% of expired leads re-list their properties with new agents, while a whopping nearly 70% re-list with a listings agent after just 4 weeks. This perfectly demonstrates the importance of data accuracy and timing to ensure realtors have the best opportunities to win listings and close deals.
The platform also benefits from advanced email and video marketing capabilities, easy management of user conversations, and neighborhood search features (available as an add-on and integrates easily).
Drawbacks:
While not receiving too many complaints from its users, this platform was guilty of a few annoying CRM quirks. First, it occasionally has the wrong number for a contact, naturally leading to confusion and frustration on the realtor’s side. Second, it can lack in the photo department for listings, making it more challenging to get a feel for the property before viewing it. Lastly, the website can be difficult to navigate at first, though this improves with repeated exposure.
Pricing:
- Silver package: $199/per user/per month
- Gold package: $259/per user/per month
4. BoomTown CRM
Benefits
BoomTown has some great features, including storing all leads in one place for easy tracking and the ability to attend their annual conference, where they educate their clients on the latest industry updates.
BoomTown also allows a real estate company to see what their clients are looking at on the Zillow website, giving better insights into customer buying behaviors. The overall goal at BoomTown is to make every real estate agent successful.
Drawbacks:
One of the drawbacks of this real estate software is its inability to edit logs after submitting them. This can be a real pain when it comes to basic human errors like typos or forgetting to change the client’s name when copying and pasting from other logs. To fix this, you’d have to start over and resubmit a new log.
There’s also no option to input where you’d like to close a deal or where you are currently at in the process, nor is there an option to favorite current clients to find them faster.
Pricing:
- Advance: Custom pricing
- Grow: Custom pricing
- Core: Custom pricing
- Launch: Custom pricing
5. Salesforce CRM Software
Benefits
One thing that makes the Salesforce CRM software so popular is that it’s highly customizable, and you can access it 24/7. At just the click of the button, real estate agents using the platform can make changes and add fields effortlessly with the help of a Salesforce admin.
There are seven clouds on the real estate CRM, and all of your data stored within them is connected. Plus, it lets realtors create custom fields and reports to create unique layouts for each department.
Realtors can create business flows inside the platform, and Salesforce seamlessly updates your CRM for you three times a year with their metadata-driven software architect.
The fully integrated platform also gives all of the departments within your company one shared 360° view of your customers and accounts.
Drawbacks
A common complaint about Salesforce is its CPU usage and loading time. Users whose technology can’t handle it have to close and reopen the Salesforce page and tabs multiple times in a day. If you have many tabs or sub-tabs open, the webpage will slow down.
Pricing:
- Sales essential edition: $25/per user/per month
- Professional Edition: $75/per user/per month
- Enterprise Edition: $150/per user/per month
- Unlimited Edition: $300/per user/per month
6. iNCOM Real Estate CRM
Benefits
iNCOM Real Estate has a full-featured CRM that allows you to completely automate tasks, generate new leads and close more deals. The marketing automation tools allow users to effectively manage their marketing and potential clients, while its effective lead generation has built-in landing pages for you to use. Both branded and unbranded options are available at no extra cost. It also uses the IDX network to provide your visitors access to over 100,000 property listings, including those from your own property listing board.
Drawbacks:
The only notable con users describe with this real estate CRM system is that there is no choice in the standard email template.
Pricing:
Contact the vendor for a custom quote.
7. Brivity Real Estate CRM
Benefits:
Brivity is the only CRM that guarantees success in real estate.
One of the best things about Brivity is that it allows for automation of up to 50% of your daily tasks, including lead capture and transaction management for deal closing. Automate the emails and texts you plan on sending out through auto plans, and simply worry about replying to leads after they respond to your automated message.
You can personalize Brivity’s CRM to how you need the system to complete these tasks and even add instructions for other team members to help keep everyone updated on the current sales cycle. This will save agents precious time and energy, which can then be redirected to your potential buyers.
It’s also a complete CRM system, meaning it provides everything you need in one place, removing the need for other 3rd party systems for listing alerts, marketing, and transaction systems.
Drawbacks
The Brivity CRM platform experiences glitches from time to time. Also, many software update requests cause the system to run slowly.
Pricing:
Contact the vendor for a custom quote.
8. Contactually by Compass CRM
Benefits
Contactually by Compass is exceptionally user-friendly, keeping their clients top of mind. The system is very intuitive as no prior training is needed to use the CRM system.
The platform comes with a mobile app that allows you to dial contacts and note down important information using the notepad. This helps you not to let cold or warm leads slip through the cracks.
You can also create email templates to automate drip campaigns, track open email clicks, reply to emails, and create tasks. And you’ll be able to do so from your preferred email platform or the CRM itself while still having access to the email history in both.
Drawbacks
There’s a lot of focus on email features with the Contactually by Compass CRM, and not as much on social channels. Email marketing automation programs suffer from poor granularity, plus there’s no control over the actions in the program after you’ve kicked off a campaign.
The system also doesn’t provide much reporting on deal tracking or the pipeline-interface. The learning curve can be pretty long-winded if you want to create functions that allow you to make a specific “call” task or set a particular “tag” when a recipient clicks the email.
Pricing:
- Professional: $59/per user/per month
- Accelerator: $99/per user/per month
- Concierge: $399/per user/per month
9. CINC Real Estate CRM
Benefits:
Over 50,000 real estate brokers use the CINC CRM to help power teams, drive more business and turn leads into repeat customers. The platform is easy to use, providing handy reminders that tell you what you should be doing and when (great for if you have to contact a lead for a specific time or show up for a scheduled viewing).
It features simple marketing automation, allowing you to schedule emails, texts, and social media messages to send in bulk. It also comes with a website making it easy for you to transfer leads to and from the platform, and offers simple integration with external apps and services.
Drawbacks:
A common complaint about the CINC CRM is that you can only assign AutoTracks and campaigns to your own assigned leads rather than to your team’s central pond. The caller ID feature doesn’t come as standard, so you’ll have to pay for an upgrade to let it come from your virtual CINC number if you don’t want your potential buyers or clients to be confused when they get a call from you.
Pricing:
Contact the vendor for a custom quote.
10. Follow Up Boss CRM
Benefits
The Follow Up Boss CRM offers great integration and can automate your emails and text messages. It shows you what tasks you should be focusing on and when and sorts through your prospects, creating lists as it does so.
Drawbacks
The help button blocks part of the screen, which can be annoying. As with many other CRM software tools, the learning curve to mastering the platform can be steep.
Pricing:
- Start: $49/per user/per month
- Grow: $69/per user/per month
- Dominate: $99/per user/per month
- Platform: Contact the vendor for a custom quote
11. Zoho Real Estate CRM
Benefits
Popular with over 150,000 businesses, including brokerage firms, the Zoho CRM platform gives real estate agents the ability to spend more time speaking to and helping potential clients and less time performing menial, repetitive tasks with workflow automation.
Zia, their built-in AI-powered sales assistant, helps manage your business with referral tracking fetching information, creating predictions, and interpreting data. Zia can also increase lead generation and better organize leads, allowing your team to be more effective in closing deals. Zoho’s CRM offers built-in gamification for their users, including productivity games and accurate forecasts of potential revenue to increase productivity. It’s also a tightly integrated platform with omnichannel support offered to customers through phone, email, live chat, and in-person meetings.
All of this gives businesses and their teams the ability to increase productivity and build strong, long-lasting customer relationships.
Drawbacks
It can be challenging to delete users on the Zoho CRM platform. It isn’t easy to preserve the deleted user’s emails and other data while getting rid of the user profile.
There can also be difficulties in email tracking and deliverability issues. Template tracking can be problematic, as you will often see who opened your emails but not how many times the email was opened.
Customization of the platform is limited, with not many filters available to apply to data sets which can help lower bandwidth consumption.
Lastly (only a problem if your business doesn’t use English), the Zoho CRM platform only has features like the Zia sales assistant available in English.
Pricing:
- Free Plan $0/for 3 users/forever
- Standard Plan $14/per user/per month
- Professional Plan $23/per user/per month
- Enterprise Plan $40/per user/per month
Final Verdict
What is the Best CRM for Real Estate Brokers?
Well, that depends on what you’ll be using the CRM system for (i.e., marketing or workflow automation), in addition to whether your brokerage is a small business, mid-sized, or a well-established corporate enterprise.
What’s considered the best real estate CRM by brokers is usually based on their potential clients’ needs. Some CRM systems are simple and easy to use, while other platforms are more complicated but offer a variety of unique features.
Budget size is also an important factor to consider when choosing a CRM tool for your real estate business. Many CRM platform providers offer free versions of their platform or provide free trials of their paid services. It is always a good idea to try out the trial versions, as they allow you the opportunity to see how a particular platform performs for your business before you part with any hard-earned cash.
Automate Incoming Real Estate Leads with Parserr
Are you looking for even more ways to improve the organization of your real estate business? Parserr’s email parsing tool may provide the assistance you need!
Parserr will pull your incoming lead data directly from Zillow, emails, web contact forms, and more at just the click of a button. After your lead data is extracted from the source, it will automatically be directed to the CRM of your choice.
Parserr can also help improve the organization and management of your real estate brokerage by speeding up your workflows. Using Parser’s Zapier and Power Automate integrations, you can integrate all of your incoming lead data to hundreds of 3rd party applications, completely eliminating the need for any manual entry on your end.
Contact Parserr today to start streamlining your real estate business with email parsing automation.
