CRM in Real Estate Industry
Like any industry, Real Estate has its unique needs and requirements but a major aspect that distinguishes this industry’s brokerages and sales agents is the sheer vitality of trust building with existing clients. When a buyer or seller has a property need, he is most likely to contact the broker that he’s previously had a successful business relationship with.
That is not all; referrals play an important role in the success of a real estate agent. Most people like to have someone on board who they can trust; after all home, buying is a long-term investment and the last thing a person needs is an uncomfortable living space. When it comes to relationship building and giving clients an incredible customer experience, there is no better choice than SugarCRM for the Real Estate industry.
The CRM needs of Real Estate Agents and Brokerages
A real-estate agent or property manager needs a CRM platform that provides him or her with insightful and proactive notifications on a single screen at the start of the day. From a single look, he/she wants to be able to tell if there are potential prospects looking to lease or buy property.
Moreover, the agent wants to know what activities he needs to do in order to take hot leads further down the Sales Funnel. He should also be able to tell if there are any future renewals due and whether he stands a fair chance for that particular renewal by visualizing client satisfaction. The CRM should tell if the client is dissatisfied and what steps he should take to retain business with them.
This is not at all an exhaustive list of the functionalities that a Real Estate CRM should have. Before moving to the video demonstration of SugarCRM for Real Estate, let’s revisit some must-have features for a Real Estate CRM and see how SugarCRM fares with respect to all of these.
Must-Have Features for Real Estate/ Property Management CRM
1. Mobile functionality
Needless to say, your Sales agents without mobile capability are like soldiers without swords. Mobile capability in a CRM lets real estate agents take advantage of the organization, efficiency, and accessibility of a CRM while they are on the move. Cloud-based SugarCRM provides the capability to track customer activity and timely updates by using SugarCRM mobile App or simply using a browser on their mobiles and tablets.
2. CRM should be built around Sales Agents — Not the Other Way Around
Remember, we talked about the vitality of relationship building in Real estate industry and for this reason, a Sales agent should be able to have every tool he needs at his disposal. SugarCRM is designed on the i2i philosophy to provide customer-facing individuals with the most individualized tools that help them close deals.
Furthermore, SugarCRM provides the most flexible platform to Sales agents who can easily customize workflows and dashboard interface to enhance their productivity and save time. With SugarCRM, a sales agent can have all the information he needs including past behavior and preferences of the client before making an informed pitch- making closing deals all the easier.
3. Data intelligence
SugarCRM is well on its way to becoming the most intelligent CRM on the market today. With SugarCRM, Sales teams can view all the gathered customer data across all customer touch-points including Emails, Social Media and other interactions and clearly view the insights into possibilities of closing deals.
Not only this, SugarCRM lets the Sales agent know the stage of buying process a client is in. This insight can help Salespeople identify whether he should focus on lead nurturing or move towards closing a ready prospect.
4. Email Tracking
In order to give real estate agents a 360-degree view of all the clients and prospects, Sales agents need to track every message sent and received from a client. Modern CRMs like Sugar provide the whole customer journey tracking. This gives them an opportunity to have a clear picture of where they stand and what step they should take next. Moreover, they prefer to sync their Email Services like Gmail with Sugar which helps them operate everything from a single platform instead of juggling several windows and tabs.
5. Unlimited Integration
Real Estate brokerages have several software working simultaneously to ensure smooth and integrated business functioning. Real estate agents find it quite difficult to keep their eyes on several platforms to get all the information they need. Solution? Software integration!
SugarCRM has an open-source architecture which allows almost any other software to seamlessly integrate with SugarCRM and that too in a cost-effective manner.
In our experience, most brokerages demand integrations like Gmail for Email services, QuickBooks for accounting needs and Box.net for data management. What Sugar does is make it easy to operate everything from within the SugarCRM dashboard and keep all the platforms synced and updated in real time. This increases the productivity of the whole team and lets them focus on relationship building with clients instead.
Why Companies choose SugarCRM for Real Estate: Short Case Studies of two Companies
One metric that gauges the success of SugarCRM for Real Estate is the extent of individualization it provides the brokers and real estate agents. This, in turn, translates into a personalized experience for prospective home buyers and sellers. Below I discuss short case studies of two companies that adopted SugarCRM for Real Estate management and succeeded as a result.
1. Selangor Dredging
Selangor Dredging, a Malaysian based property management company chose SugarCRM for Property management needs. They knew that they could take their motto of “Driving Excellence and Building Lifelong Relationships” further with Sugar.
Selangor Dredging wished to improve its Sales and improve its customer service at all levels. It wanted a CRM solution which could integrate with its property management system and streamline all processes related to Property Management. Moreover, the company needed visibility and actionable insights from customer data which could be utilized for reporting.
Achievements after Implementing SugarCRM for Real Estate needs:
Once Sugar Professional was deployed, firstly the company was able to optimize marketing, Sales and Support processes. It increased its Sales by 50 percent, reduced customer complaint response time by 80 percent and reduced the manual report generation time and hassle for Sales.
2. UEM Group
UEM group was a real estate and investment development group comprising of 2000 employees. They needed a solution to improve performance in all their departments including Marketing, Sales, Customer Support and Finance and a solution which could integrate with their existing Property Management Solution. In addition, they needed a CRM which will assist them to track and report customer activity across all channels to formulate effective strategies.
Achievements after Implementing SugarCRM for Real Estate needs:
Within six months of SugarCRM implementation, they were able to increase Sales productivity by 30 percent and reduce customer response time by 5o percent. Moreover, the UEM group saved $200,000 annually in administrative costs by automating its processes and of course went on to create extraordinary relationships by implementing SugarCRM for Real Estate Management.
The Bottom Line
The adaptability of SugarCRM makes it fit the exact needs of brokerage firms and realtors. It provides a fully loaded platform for Sales agents to help them make the best decisions and assist them in creating truly extraordinary relationships with clients. For this reason, property management companies across the globe are utilizing Sugar’s capabilities and increase their profitability by as high as 50 percent.
