Why Having a Real Estate CRM Is Important

How much do you value your client relationships? 

At least for anyone working in the real estate industry, there’s nothing more valuable than giving each client a personal, trusted experience. It’s foundational to success. However, while this is easy enough to do when your team has only a handful of accounts, what happens when you want to scale upward? How can you maintain these trusting relationships while growing your client base?

Figuring out how to build your business and respond to rapid market shifts without losing your personal touch isn’t a new challenge. Real estate professionals have long turned to CRMs to fill this gap. Yet whether because they aren’t comfortable with the technology or are nervous about making a change, many still aren’t aware (or convinced) of the benefits a good real estate CRM can bring.

So let’s dive into exactly what you can get from adopting real estate CRM software in your business – and why they have become essential to showing your clients how much you value them.

What Is a Real Estate CRM?

A real estate CRM, also known as a customer relationship management system, is a software tool designed to help efficiently manage, organize, and analyze crucial client information, interactions, and processes. 

Real estate agents, brokers, and other professionals can use it to do things like enhance communication and collaboration, track leads and prospects, and streamline processes. In some cases, it can even help them save time by automating repetitive tasks.

For example, simply by storing and managing your client contact information, a CRM system can help you track interactions, schedule follow-ups, and ensure you never forget anything by maintaining a record of all client-related activities. Or by generating reports and analytics on various metrics, such as lead conversion rates or team performance, a CRM can help your team better evaluate their performance and identify new trends and opportunities.

In short, by enabling real estate professionals to optimize their workflow and gain more meaningful insights, a CRM for real estate can help improve customer service, increase client satisfaction, and drive business growth. It delivers value through efficiency.

6 Main Benefits of Using a Real Estate CRM

Like any good tool, a real estate CRM can be used in many different ways and for many different purposes – the only limit may be your own creativity. That said, the following are some of the top benefits most real estate teams can get out of using a CRM.

One-stop Information Database

Real estate may be all about “location, location, location,” but experienced agents also know that a good part of it also comes down to timing. If you can’t match a property with the right client in time, you may miss out on a lucrative opportunity – and maybe even a long-term relationship.

Real estate CRMs can help you avoid situations like these by consolidating every relevant piece of information within a single platform. This is especially important as your business expands and your operations become too large for any one person or team to manage. Plus, with the ability to search and filter through your database, your team can get quick and easy access to property information, leads, and relevant deals. This will help make you more responsive and enable you to find the ideal properties for each one of your customers.

Prioritize Leads for Maximum Value

Not all leads are created equal. Some may just be dabbling with the idea of purchasing a home, while others may already have their cash in hand and be ready to buy. Even for the most seasoned Realtors, the path from nurture to close will be different for every lead. That’s why one of the most valuable benefits a real estate CRM offers is its ability to distinguish high-value leads from those who may need more attention.

For example, Sierra’s CRM can draw from multiple sources of information – such as price, location, property type, or even day of the week – to help you determine the person on your team best suited to follow up. Or, based on data and behavioral triggers, it can even automatically take action on certain leads, such as sending them lists of properties they may be interested in. All this will help you properly allocate your resources more effectively, enabling you to put your focus where it matters most so you can maximize your chances of closing.

Effective Lead Management

Manually managing multiple leads at once can sometimes feel like a juggling act, but once you move into dozens or even hundreds of leads, you may feel more like you’re getting buried. By providing you with a centralized system for lead data (such as which ads they clicked or properties they viewed), as well as the ability to keep track of all communication history, a quality real estate CRM will help streamline the process of capturing and managing your leads.

This isn’t just convenient – it can also allow you to develop more targeted lead nurturing strategies. For instance, by separating out leads with certain qualities or needs, level of engagement or by lead source, you can be more proactive in how you approach and communicate with them, giving you an advantage over other real estate agents. This will help enhance your lead conversion rates and, over the long term, improve your overall sales process.

Automated Marketing Campaigns

Marketing your business can often feel like another job. And while there are plenty of marketing tools and services out there, they can often turn into yet another tool to manage, further complicating your workflow. Instead, by integrating your real estate marketing campaigns alongside your lead generation and management efforts, a real estate CRM can greatly simplify how you promote and sell your services.

The benefits of this can especially be seen in marketing automation. For example, Sierra CRM users can select specific triggers for different marketing actions, allowing them to streamline their marketing efforts while also making them more effective. This could be as simple as sending out a birthday message on a specific date, or as complex as assigning them a new Action Plan after they have clicked on a certain number of properties. The result is more personal and timely communication with your clients, as well as more consistent messaging across campaigns.

Enhanced Customer Data Organization and Analysis

As you scale your business, your list of leads will continue growing as well. Even if you’re using a real estate CRM to create a centralized database of all your client information, it’s likely that a good number of these leads will fall by the wayside. However, customer data organization is just a first step. With a modern CRM solution, you can also apply powerful analytics in order to unearth leads and opportunities you may not have otherwise thought of before.

Consider the example of Buddy Blake, owner of Buddy Blake Real Estate Team in Wilmington, NC. Using machine learning and predictive analytics integration with his Sierra CRM system, he was able to automatically pull out high-grade seller leads and create a separate pond for his team. This kind of data-driven analysis enabled his agents to work much more effectively than they could on their own, resulting in more closed deals and better customer relationships. Or, in Blake’s own words, “This was gold we didn’t know we had.”

Improved Productivity and Scalability

Your core activities – reaching out to have personal conversations with leads, checking in with your existing clients, supporting the people you work with – shouldn’t have to be sacrificed as you grow. This is the main reason why so many real estate professionals adopt CRMs while they scale: doing so allows them to keep building and nurturing trusting relationships, even as the number of these relationships increase.

For instance, the ability to automate repetitive tasks and workflows, like moving deals through your sales pipeline or even cold-calling qualified leads, is a chief way CRMs can help enhance productivity alongside scalability. Also, by making it easier to share client information, assign customers to the most appropriate agents, and generally enhance collaboration and communication, CRMs can help drive further improvements. Benefits like these are invaluable to growing real estate teams that don’t want to sacrifice the value they’ve long delivered to their customers.

Elevate Your Real Estate Business with Sierra Interactive’s CRM Solution

Finding more leads and converting more customers doesn’t have to come with more hassle. Sierra Interactive is designed to help growing real estate teams – from the small and scrappy to the already established firms – continue closing deals and forming long-term customer relationships. 

Integrating our CRM into your workflows gives you:

• Powerful automation tools for simplifying and streamlining your everyday business processes.
• Comprehensive lead generation and management capabilities for unearthing new customers and keeping them as lifetime clients.
• Unparalleled marketing capabilities, from email and SMS to dynamic IDX websites, that put your sales people and properties in the best light.
• Access to an expert team of developers and real estate professionals who can help your agency continue to grow.

Schedule your free demo to see what we can do for you today.