What Is a Real Estate CRM and How Can Bitrix Help?

If you're working in the real estate business, you might want to rely on a CRM to manage your workflows. This type of software will enable you to better organize your contacts, automate processes, boost your efficiency and maximize your income. In this article, we'll explain to you what a real estate CRM is and how you can benefit from it. Plus, we'll recommend to you top-notch software that you can try for free and that should perfectly meet your needs.

Functionality of a Real Estate CRM

Customer relationship management software is a database that allows you to carry out the following tasks:

• Store all the information related to your workflows in one place

• Review and analyze the history of your past activities

• Plan your future activities

• Assign tasks to other team members

• Monitor the productivity of your staff

• Adjust your workflows on the go to always meet the deadlines and achieve the desired goals

• Link the profiles of your clients, partners and other types of individuals to relevant properties

• Plan and execute marketing activities

You can cope with these tasks without a CRM. But this software can save you a lot of time and effort and give you a competitive edge over other businesses in your industry.

How Can Different Types of Professionals Use a Real Estate CRM?

The target audience of a real estate CRM is:

• Realtors and real estate agents

• Real estate administration teams

• Property and client marketing teams

• Sales and closing teams

• Customer service and support crews

Below, we'll explain how each group of professionals can benefit from this software.

Realtors and Real Estate Agents

If you're a realtor or a real estate agent, you might need a CRM to:

• Find information about the real estate you're working with and use this data to secure the most profitable deals

• Get to know all the participants of the market better

• Build on your previous interactions with the other participants of the market

• Recommend the optimal properties for each client to boost your income and the level of client satisfaction

A CRM enables a real estate agent to compile a portrait of their customer persona as well as get to know more about each client. How old is this person? What do they do for a living? What's their income level? Which types of real estate objects are they interested in? Why did they choose your services over your competitors? You'll get the answers to all these questions and will be able to use this data to generate actionable insights for your further business activities.

Real Estate Administration

The more streamlined and efficient administration processes are, the more successful a real estate business becomes. You might want to install a CRM for your administration team to achieve the following goals:

• Add properties to the database and manage them

• Make sure all your team members get access to the same information

• Store the policies for setting up appointments, interacting with clients and managing other aspects of your workflows

• Report on your revenue, closures, clients and other relevant metrics

If your business is only getting started and you need to cut down costs, you can use Excel or Google Sheets instead of a CRM. But as you begin to scale, you'll need to switch to more powerful software.

Property and Client Marketing

Your team members who are in charge of marketing and promotions will use a CRM to:

• Detect the properties that require the most active marketing

• Segment your audience to target your marketing campaigns more precisely

• Improve the quality of your marketing messages

• Monitor the progress of your marketing efforts to maximize your ROI

• Generate more leads

Top CRMs contain built-in tools that facilitate marketing through various channels and on various platforms.

Real Estate Sales and Closings

Your team members who strive to close the deals will appreciate the fact that the CRM helps them to:

• Collect a large amount of information related to the deals and manage it efficiently

• Represent the interests of your business and your clients

• Make sure your company complies with the laws as well as the requirements for signing contracts and managing documents

• Interact with real estate attorneys, mortgage companies and other third parties to improve customer experience

The CRM will come in handy during all stages of the buying or selling process: from the moment when the client gets in touch with you for the first time till the day of closing the deal.

Customer Service and Support Crew

Your support crew needs a CRM to:

• Attend to clients who need a consultation

• Inform clients about the progress of their deals and transactions

• Create personalized responses

• Automate and accelerate the process of providing customer support

With the help of a CRM, you can create a knowledge base for your website. Your clients might want to use it before getting in touch with your support crew. Ideally, they should be able to find answers to the most common generic questions without third-party help. Only when they need a personalized response, they might want to contact the support. Your knowledge base can contain information about the history of your company, your fees, your staff members, the laws that the consumers need to be aware of and so on. As your clients submit queries to your support crew, you'll be able to detect the most popular questions and add answers to them to the knowledge base.

Benefits of a Real Estate CRM

Below, we'll analyze the eight primary benefits of a real estate CRM for your business. We'll list the goals that you'll be able to achieve quicker and more efficiently thanks to this software.

Boost Lead Generation Efforts

Here is how a CRM works:

• When you get a new client, you save information about them in the CRM

• Every time you interact with this person, the database cell with the information about them will be updated

• You'll be able to get to know the following parameters of each of your leads: demographics, lead time, campaign ROI and so on

• Each time you'd like to inform the client about your new services, or properties, or promotions, or something else, you check the information in the CRM and personalize your message accordingly

• To better understand each lead's intent, you can connect your website and your social media to your CRM

• AI-powered CRM can help to anticipate new leads' behaviors by analyzing the purchasing and selling patterns of individuals with identical characteristics from your database

• You can customize the CRM so that cells look and function as you need

You can update information in the CRM either manually or automatically. Top CRM can integrate with other business software. You might be able to import your contacts and other data from Excel, your email client and other apps. When the customer reaches out to you or your get in touch with them, the CRM will automatically add the information about this contact to their cell. The best CRMs have built-in contact centers that enable you to make audio and video calls as well as send emails, text messages and documents from one dashboard.

Simplify Document Generation

Closing statements, deeds and contracts are just a few examples of papers that real estate professionals need to deal with. A CRM can store a huge number of documents in a well-structured format so that you can easily find the necessary ones. When composing a new document, you can draw important information from the CRM. Your team members won't need to search for valuable data from various sources and process it manually. Such an approach should reduce the impact of the human factor and minimize error risks. Many CRMs support electronic signatures and enable you to add them to your documents.

Standardize Approval Workflows

A CRM will allow you to standardize and streamline your business processes. Approval workflows suggest that agents should sign off on certain required actions throughout set stages of a process. With the help of a CRM, you can create workflows for as many processes as you wish. The managers of your company will be able to track the progress of each process and automate tasks related to each phase of each process.

For instance, to get a contract approval, an agent needs to:

• Collect specific documents

• Add contract-related data to the CRM

• Wait for sign off from a specific manager

A CRM allows you to incorporate all these actions into your approval workflows to standardize them.

Automate Business Processes for Efficiency

Here are examples of tasks that you can automate with a CRM:

• Notify certain types of professionals about certain types of events

• Create a new contact in the CRM each time a new client submits a query through an online form on your website

• Send out promotional and congratulatory emails

• Follow up on clients

• Auto-log interactions with customers

If there are too many tasks in the pipeline, they might slow down the process of moving toward closing the deal. Thanks to automation, you'll be able to focus on tasks with the highest priority and get rid of all the rest.

Enable Advanced Security Features

Real estate professionals deal with large amounts of sensitive information. They need to keep it 100% confidential for two reasons:

• Build trust with their customers

• Comply with the requirements of the regulating bodies

CRMs have the following security features:

• Event monitoring

• Encryption

• Field audit trails

• Alerts on phishing and malware attempts

• Firewalls

Security comes to the forefront when real estate businesses integrate cloud technologies into their workflows. Most CRMs today are available in a cloud format and have mobile apps that are compatible with iOS and Android devices. The best solutions also have on-premise versions. On-premise software requires lengthy installation — and if you opt for a cloud, you can start working with a CRM immediately. To maintain on-premise apps, you'll need to hire or outsource an IT team — and if you stick to a cloud, the developer will take care of all the technical aspects. On-premise software is better protected from hacking attacks than clouds because criminals can't reach it from outside your office.

However, we don't mean to say that cloud-based CRMs are not secure! You just need to make sure they comply with all the industry regulations and allow you to protect precious data from both external and internal threats. To boost the internal security of your data, you can:

• Categorize all your team members into several groups

• Specify access rights for each group, so that each professional can access only that data that is relevant to their competencies

• Prevent unauthorized users from accessing your CRM

When choosing a cloud-based CRM, you should make sure it will make regular automated backups of your valuable data. If something goes wrong, the solution will restore the information from your most recent backup. You either won't lose any data at all or will lose just a tiny part of it.

Handle Customer Profiling

The better you know your clients, the more accurately you can personalize your services and offers for each of them. You should know the demographics and psychological portrait of each of your clients as well as their buying ability and purchase history. It might take you a few years to compile such a profile — but your efforts will be highly likely to pay off. When gathering this information, you can rely on your own data as well as facts that you can get from third-party sources. Plus, you should take into account the internal and external factors that impact your clients' behavior.

Facilitate Checklist Management

To complete real estate transactions, you need to go through specific processes. For instance, as you've sold a property, you should explain to the new owners the policies of moving in. Without a checklist, you might forget to inform your clients about some meaningful details. A CRM will ensure that you tick all the boxes and provide the clients with all the necessary information.

Create Integrated Marketing Solutions

As was said above, many CRMs feature built-in marketing tools. Plus, you might be able to integrate this software with third-party marketing solutions. Here is what you might be able to do thanks to such an integration:

• Built exhaustive customer profiles

• Find the leads that are the most likely to convert

• Identify the optimal day and time for sending out your marketing messages

• Detect the preferred communication channel of each client

• Compile efficient marketing content

• Personalize this content for the individual taste of each of your clients

• Send out marketing messages right through your CRMs dashboard

• Set KPIs for your marketing team

• Measure the efficiency of reaching the KPIs

• Generate insightful reports

• Fine-tune your marketing strategy with the help of the reports

• Facilitate the process of onboarding new marketing professionals

Once you finalize a marketing campaign, you should feed insights on it back into the CRM.

Which CRM to Choose for Your Real Estate Business?

Dozens of CRMs are available on the market. Most of them are versatile and can be tailored to different industries, including real estate. One of the top products in this niche is Bitrix24. Its CRM can store an unlimited amount of data and enables you to flexibly customize its cells. The built-in contact center is equally good for internal and external communications. Bitrix24 allows you to automate your workflows and perfectly copes with all the tasks that were described in this article. It's an ideal solution for:

• Lead management

• Omni-channel marketing

• Project and team management

• Remote work

• Client and service communication

It contains over 30 tools for sales, marketing and administration. You'll be able to use live chats, web forms and VoIP telephony to engage with your clients. It will be easy for you to build landing pages, run marketing campaigns and track actionable metrics. Your team will be able to create, edit and share documents in one place. Your employees will appreciate the opportunity to manage leads and deals in an intuitive drag-and-drop manner. This software is perfect for real-time sales management and online collaboration.

You can use Bitrix24 either as a cloud or on-premise solutions. Plus, it has a handy mobile app for iOS and Android. You can try the basic functionality of this product for free. At any moment, you'll be able to upgrade to one of the three paid plans. The cheapest one costs $39 per month and accommodated 5 users. The priciest one costs $159 and accommodates an unlimited number of users.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you better understand the functionality and importance of a real estate CRM. This software should enable you to automate your business processes, streamline your workflows, better manage your data and boost your revenue. The CRM should come in handy for most of your team members: from the support crew to marketing specialists, from your administrators to your sales department. When choosing the best solution for your business, you might want to opt for Bitrix24.