What is CRM in Real Estate And Why is it Important? [2024 Update]

Think about all the activities that you handle on a daily basis as a real estate broker, agent or a channel partner. From answering project enquiries and conducting site visits to completing paperwork and closing deals, the list goes on. In addition to this, you also research the market segment for every project that you want to target, segment the leads, and formulate a follow-up plan. 

With extremely hectic schedules and leads coming in from various sources, managing all property-related information does become difficult. But what if we tell you that there is an integrated solution for handling the entire sales pipeline, right from capturing leads to viewing a consolidated performance report? 

Customer Relationship Management or CRM in real estate is a software that integrates technology with client strategy in order to maximize customer relations. While CRM is already employed in multiple industries in a number of ways, the real estate industry in India and across the world is not oblivious to it. Let’s understand how this software can benefit you, as an agent. 

Problems Faced by the Real Estate Stakeholders 

Although the sector has relied on the traditional “pen-paper” based solutions for a long time, the use of technology in real estate has benefitted all stakeholders tremendously. However, there still are many challenges, specifically in customer management, that need to be addressed. Some of which are: 

• From location and USPs to pricing and floor plans, every project has its own set of specifications. Identifying and positioning the differentiators for a specific target audience is a challenging task. 
• With so many projects available, ideating, running, managing, and evaluating the performance of lead generation campaigns can become confusing. 
• Leads are generated from different sources such as web forms, social media, online ads, etc. Identifying the leads that are more interested, segmenting them, and nurturing the leads is often problematic. 
• Being a capital-intensive purchase, maintaining the records of property documents and recording client-agent interaction is another pain point. 

This is where CRM in real estate comes into the picture. Let’s now understand how. 

What is CRM?

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a tool that helps real estate companies capture leads, interact with existing clients and perform post-purchase nurturing. Being both an aspect of business and of technology, it helps you segment and nurture leads, schedule meetings, address customer queries, and manage inventory. By handling multiple activities in one place, CRM scales up your efficiency and aids you in establishing strong relationships with customers. 

How is CRM in Real Estate Solving these Issues?

From lead nurturing and customer query redressal to campaign management and generating invoices, CRM helps you complete your sales cycle efficiently. Enlisted are some of the benefits of adopting CRM in real estate companies. 

Lead Management

As an agent or a channel partner, you market projects through online or offline platforms. These include landing pages, social media (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), property listings on other company handles, Youtube Ads, etc. With leads being generated from various sources, CRM in real estate allows you to constantly track, manage and push the leads in your sales funnel.

Another bonus advantage of lead generation using CRM is that it provides a centralized platform for the management of all lead-related activity, including tracking of leads by channel partners and agents. Additionally, the CRM for real estate provides really valuable insights into the analytics of lead behaviors and their performance. This generally helps in identifying trends and patterns in the market; such insights can be very helpful to optimize lead generation throughput.

Agents and channel partners can establish trust and credibility with their leads by providing a personalized experience and timely follow-up. This can lead to higher conversion rates and repeat business, which can lead to higher conversion rates. Agents and channel partners in the real estate sector need CRM to generate leads. Using the power of a CRM, they can generate high-quality prospects, enhance lead interaction, and ultimately propel sales and revenue expansion. A CRM can help agents and channel partners stay ahead of the game and achieve success by offering a centralized platform for handling leads, streamlining processes, and offering insightful data and analytics.

Getting multiple leads can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is a good prospect for the business, but on the other hand, the inflow of many leads can cause confusion and havoc. So to prevent real estate businesses from losing leads due to an overwhelming amount of data, many real estate websites allow prospective buyers to communicate with the real estate agents who are in charge of selling the properties using CRM software programs, which can allow businesses to communicate rapidly with those potential clients. You may also encounter potential clients who are looking to purchase a new home in the future. CRM software allows you to keep track of these future clients and communicate with them as they get closer to their anticipated purchase date.

Lead Segmentation

Based on factors like income, location, property choice, etc, CRM software segregates leads into different groups and distributes leads to respective agents. Using this data, you can offer relevant information to the buyers through different communication channels. For instance, if an email was sent related to a project but the buyer did not proceed further, you can send additional details related to the same project or can even share details of a project that falls in the same location-price category. 

Sales Prioritization

Quite often, you spend a lot of time interacting with leads who, in the end, did not purchase a property. This generally happens when you don’t have a collective audience insight i.e. you are unable to deduce the highest priority clients.  This issue, however, can be addressed if CRM in real estate is adequately employed. 

CRM collects data and analyses the liking of anyone who taps on pitch links with the help of algorithms. Based on details such as, demographics, location, property types, financial status, etc, it becomes clear if a certain property will work for a client or not. This will help you identify the prospects that need to be approached first. 

Precise and Effective Marketing 

For every project, the target demographics are very different. The strategy will further vary based on the platform you want to advertise on. So whether it is a drip-email campaign or a social media ad, CRM in real estate equips you with all the demographic knowledge you will need to design advertisements and property pitches. 

Analyzing Performance Reports

To make your business more profitable, you might want to understand how different campaigns are performing, from where more leads are generated, deals that you have closed on a quarterly basis, so on and so forth. Since CRM stores all data centrally, it can generate weekly, monthly or yearly reports. This will help you identify the loopholes and key gaps, thereby improving your strategies. 

Strengthening Client-Agent Relationship

Whether it’s through phone calls or social media, or for plots and commercial projects, you can receive property inquiries from various marketing campaigns. CRM captures these queries and helps you address them accordingly. 

Infact, some CRMs also come loaded with auto-responders that send answers to a customer’s query even when you are not physically available. This ensures that there is no lead leakage and all queries are resolved timely. In addition to this, CRM provides a platform to connect and communicate with prospective clients in a timely manner. This also includes homebuyers who are looking to purchase a new home in the future.

The algorithmic data collection and analysation process of CRM invokes a detailed understanding of the prospects choices and preferences. Therefore, by offering personalized solutions for each proposal or a pitch, CRM in real estate agents’ processes aids in establishing client-stakeholder relationships, thereby converting leads to clients. 

Increased Efficiency 

CRM software is very versatile in nature. It allows you to integrate social media platforms, calendar schedulers, service desks, and other automation tools at one place. This not only improves information sharing between various internal teams, but also provides better services to clients. Besides, CRM in real estate allows viewing detailed customer trajectories. 

Retaining Customers 

Keeping the interests of existing customers and evaluating the likes of prospective clients is important to engage and retain the customers. For example, not sending new offers to clients who are interested in a particular property can be disadvantageous for a business.

CRM in real estate helps overcome this difficulty by constantly scheduling the interaction timings of the agent with their clients. This can also be achieved by the CRM automatically sending personalised proposals to each client every time a new offer or property listing fitting their choices or preferences arrives. Hence, CRM in real estate not only enables an influx of new customers but also helps you in retaining these customers and keeping their interests in the industry alive.

The Future of CRM in Real Estate

The future of CRM in the real estate industry is poised to be affected by the emergence of advanced machine learning and neural network models. With the help of these technologies, CRM will experience its evolution with tools like predictive modeling of data, By incorporating large amounts of customer data into an AI model, CRM would be able to create customized analyses of different markets. These tools would enable real estate professionals to predict market shifts and gain insight into customer behavior and market trends.

The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning in CRM is not just about analytical capabilities. Real estate professionals can create highly personalized marketing campaigns and property suggestions by understanding customer preferences. This personalization not only increases engagement and customer satisfaction but also positions real estate companies at the forefront of a more connected, efficient, and client-centered industry. The future of real estate customer relationship management is about seamlessly incorporating these technological advancements to enhance client connections and operational effectiveness, making it a thrilling prospect for the sector.

The real estate industry has marched into a technological revolution and is actively participating in it. CRM software, in particular, can improve client-agent interaction. While client queries will be addressed timely, real estate stakeholders will be able to manage their campaigns, improve their pitches and proposals, and maintain customer relationships. Most importantly, CRM in real estate organizes all the tasks efficiently, thereby saving your time and resources.