Real Estate CRM Development: Best Way to Boost your Business

Real estate industry is considered to be one of the most successful businesses in the world. Realtors sell so many houses and apartments that it seems that they do a perfect job and experience no issues. But in fact, it is not quite true. Apart from challenges caused by the pandemics and economic deterioration, most real estate companies struggle because they lack specific technological tools to streamline their work processes, unload employees, and boost efficiency of sales teams. 

Let’s take a quick look at the statistics demonstrating how real estate agents and technologies are related. Here are some facts worth of attention: 

As you can see, some tools and technologies are rather popular among real estate agents. But what if we tell you that what you already use may not be enough? What if there exists something better like all-in-one software for effective communication, contact management, lead generation, marketing automation, data organization, and business processes automation? And that software is a custom CRM for real estate. 

In this blog post, we would like to discuss with you some common challenges every real estate business experiences, ways how these challenges can be eliminated by custom software, and how and at what cost a real estate agency can build a custom CRM system.

The true power of CRM for real estate businesses

To begin with, let’s talk about the role of technology in real estate. After taking a look at statistics overview, we discovered that real estate industry will bring around $12,6 billion to management software by 2025. This information proves that there is a growing demand for real estate software, including customer relationship management software. Business owners became more aware of digital transformation and the power it brings to their companies. 

In case you still have any doubts whether it is a good idea to invest in custom real estate CRM software, you probably don’t know how this software can be used to your advantage. Here at our company, we had several clients naming the same issues. Specifically, their real estate agencies suffered from: 

• Ineffective manual processes and employees overload;
• Numerous human errors keep constantly happening;
• Poor customer service because some of the client requests get lost;
• Disorganized data leads to loss of documentation;
• Inefficient collaboration of departments. 

Some of our clients tried to address all these issues using different ready-made solutions, but they didn’t offer processes unity and turned workflow into something rather messy.

We will talk about the flaws of ready-made solutions a little bit later, and now let’s finally discuss how custom real estate CRM software can become your game changer. Let’s see what processes it can drastically improve. 

Create a pipeline of potential customers

When it comes to working with potential clients, cloud-based CRM for real estate proves to be the most effective tool. Thanks to custom CRM, real estate professionals can keep information about every potential client in one place and access it anytime to interact about emerging opportunities. 

When all the information is safely stored and well organized, it gives you a chance to initiate better email marketing campaigns and create templates to generate leads and close deals faster. And thorough analysis of all client data helps identify their preferences and behavior to improve your selling process and strategy. 

Improve invoicing and billing management 

In 2021, it is no longer efficient to have a separate system for managing billing and invoicing. Now one CRM software can process client requests, help your employees provide clients with all necessary financial documentation, and even collect all invoices and bills and link them to clients’ profiles. This means that no information will get lost and handling billing requests will be a much easier process. 

Manage commissions of real estate agents 

For a growing real estate agency, it is crucial to ensure that all real estate professionals get fair commissions for their job. And CRM can become a rather helpful tool to manage commissions on a regular basis. Using a real estate CRM system, agents can add information about their recent deals and new leads, insert all the necessary information and wait for their reward. It’s as easy as ABC, and yet it promotes real estate agents motivation and engagement. 

Perform advanced property management 

It is hard to stay in control of all property objects your agency sells. Therefore, you need a reliable tool for managing property, add crucial notes and information, and even create property groups. With CRM, all these tasks can be automated to the fullest. The real estate CRM software has a range of tools that let your agents:

• Create separate property files and accumulate all information in one place to edit and update it in the future.
• Filter property objects using advanced search and find any necessary records in no time. 
• Group property objects according to certain criteria to offer more similar options to clients.
• Add tasks, deals, images, and even videos showcasing the property to use all that information for presenting the property to clients. 
• Manage property owner files, insert, edit and access all contact information, and even schedule e-mail marketing campaigns or perform effective communication. 
• Centralize and improve management of properties located in different places. 

Eliminate all booking errors 

Surprisingly,  many real estate companies perform booking manually these days. So all information about the booking can be found only in a notebook of a certain agent. But what if there is a situation where there are two bookings of a single unit?

This can lead to financial losses and a decreased level of customer satisfaction. Refunds, lost deals, and even bad reviews – all these things can influence your business reputation. And you definitely do not want that. Therefore, it is important to organize automated bookings as soon as possible.

Thanks to the custom real estate CRM software, booking will no longer be a headache. You just create a list of areas and properties, book a certain time frame and forget about confusing situations once and for all. All booking details will be saved and accessed by other agents so they can keep them in mind while creating their schedule. 

Improve analytics and forecasting 

We couldn’t emphasize enough how helpful advanced analytics and forecasting can be. Real estate businesses depend on client demands, but what’s even more significant is creating that demand and market trends.

With a customer relationship management system equipped with forecasting and analytical tools, any agency can boost its business and generate more revenue. Here is how you can make use of the aforementioned advanced features:

• Analyze your payments and revenue streams;
• Analyze your maintenance cost and overall agency expenses; 
• Forecast future revenue and expenses using different methods;
• Forecast your budget and make data-driven decisions on how to spread it;
• Analyze different data related to properties, clients behavior, sales pipelines, all closed and possible deals, and many more. 

Why a ready-made CRM is not enough for running a successful business 

By now, you may be very interested in custom real estate CRM development, and yet you may have some doubts about it. After all, there are so many great ready-made CRM software like Zoho, Zillow Premier Agent CRM, Pipedrive, Close, or The Wise Agent on the market. So do you really need to invest your time and money into something so serious as real estate software development? 

It would be unfair to say that every company needs a custom real estate CRM software, because in fact small agencies can successfully work using ready-made solutions. They are easy to integrate, they offer a certain level of customization, and employees can master them effortlessly. 

But if you own a large agency that is supposed to grow in the near future, then custom real estate CRM software is a must for you. Custom solutions are more scalable, adaptable to your business processes and easy to integrate with other solutions used by your employees. Speaking about ready-made real estate CRMs, they may lack a lot of options that you need. On top of that, they may have the following cons: 

Must-have features of CRM software for real estate

Now that you know about all the cons that off-shelf CRM software for real estate has, chances are you started considering custom development. And the first and foremost thing you need to think about is a functionality you would like to implement in your custom real estate CRM software. 

Therefore, our  team decided to share with you our own list of must-have features for the real estate CRM. We have implemented them in many custom solutions and our clients got back to us with positive feedback. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at all of the features. 

How we perform CRM development and delivery for real estate industry

Here at our company,  we offer high quality development services with a little bit of extra. So in case you decide to go with our team, we guarantee holistic market research that will help you identify the best feature set, the most suitable tech stack, and the best third-party services that your CRM for real estate should have. 

Apart from real estate CRM software development, we also offer a Discovery stage that helps you to polish your ideas and requirements, and get well-written technical documentation, such as specifications, project vision, project roadmap, wireframes, and even a creative design concept. Besides, we specialize in development of other types of software, for example, real estate ERP software.

Together with Altamira, you can complete development of a custom real estate CRM system from scratch, following the defined requirements. Once it is done, we help you with integrating your CRM into your workflow and we can even conduct training sessions with your employees to teach them how to use your new CRM.

And last but not least, we can ensure your CRM maintenance after the implementation. So all future improvements, the expansion of the feature set or even cloud migration can also be completed by our team seamlessly. 

Our team has all necessary specialists to develop CRM software among which there are: 

• Business Analysts who perform the discovery stage and explore possible development risks;
• DevOps specialists who help with system administration;
• Software architects who make different elements of a CRM work together perfectly;
• Front and back-end developers who write clean code and perform integrations;
• QA specialists who complete manual and automated testing;
• Designers who create a unique and user-friendly look of your CRM;
• Scrum Masters who manage the project and are responsible for communication between you and all team members. 

Since our team delivered several CRM systems for real estate companies, we can easily integrate the following industry specific features into your future solution:

• Tools for advanced property management;
• Lead tracking and management options;
• Functionality for billing and invoicing; 
• Marketing tools for your promotional campaigns;
• Task management options;
• Powerful analytics; 
• Feedbacks and reports visualization;
• AI-powered chatbots or other options;
• Live streaming for effective onboarding and corporate education. 

Real cost of custom CRM development

Custom development of CRM software is a costly venture. And if you are still wondering how much money you actually need to build a feature-rich solution from scratch, then the chart below will be of use to you:

As you can see, you need to be ready to pay $50,000 per month for development and the average duration of your CRM creation can be up to 4-5 months. You will also need a range of technical specialists to complete your project, so it is better to hire a cohesive team like Altamira where there are all required technicians. 

The development cost may seem enormous, however, there is one more way to get a great CRM and reduce your expenses. You can consider MVP development that will require less time and money and will give you a chance to improve your real estate CRM and expand its feature set in the future. MVP is a great way to try out a custom solution and see how it influences your business.

FAQ  

To summarize

All in all, custom CRM is a must-have tool for a successful real estate agency. The true power of a custom CRM is that it is tailored to meet your particular business needs and address your unique challenges. Thanks to this solution, real estate businesses can transform their workflows, speeding up operations and making them easier and more productive. 

And what’s more important, a custom CRM can make your business approach more client-oriented which leads to increase of sales and revenue, improvement in customer retention and satisfaction rate. If you’ve made a final decision to build your own CRM for real estate, don’t forget to incorporate a wide feature set, preserve high security standards, and think about mobile optimization, of course. 

It is not an easy task to develop such a complex solution for business, so choose a technical partner like the Altamira team that has experience in building CRMs for real estate and offers high quality services at reasonable prices.

And remember, a custom CRM is an investment in the future of your real estate business which will pay off really fast. As of now, CRM pays back $8,71 per each dollar spent on it.