Real Estate Customer Relationship Management Solutions (CRM) are becoming increasingly popular amongst realtors and real estate agencies as they help in easy lead management, communication and also have integrated performance tracking capabilities. They help in better managing leads, agents, lenders, transactions, documents along with having built-in features for analyzing traffic and sales metrics. From our analysis of the currently available solutions, we present a few essential features of a Real Estate CRM that would certainly help you better manage your real estate marketing efforts. 

1. Complete Real Estate Lead Management

A Real Estate CRM should offer end-to-end lead management capabilities, right from lead acquisition, nurturing, engagement, communication, and conversion. This ensures that you can access the entire lifecycle of a lead’s association in one place, and can use various communication tools to engage the lead better, and track the effectiveness of your lead engagement strategy. 

• Lead Segmentation  

Lead Segmentation is an important aspect of monitoring lead profiles. It helps categorize the leads based on their interest and inclination towards a transaction, helping you better prioritize leads for more efficient and directed lead engagement. Inclusion of easy filtering options and integrated communication tools help you reach out to a specific category of leads in a faster manner.  

• Importing and Exporting Leads 

If you are migrating from a different real estate CRM platform, or have an accessible digital database of leads, you should be able to easily import your existing lead into your new CRM system, instead of having to re-enter the lead details. Also, the CRM platform should help you easily export your leads so that you can use it for analysis or with a different tool-such as mass-mailer software or a dialer. 

• Lead Allocation 
  

Lead allocation is a feature which is essential when you have multiple real estate agents and would want a system to distribute leads amongst them. You should be able to modify the distribution rules and also be able to transfer the leads between agents. This ensures that your allocation is balanced, and can also be customized as per the lead’s requirement or the agent’s experience, and also in cases where you would want to segregate leads among agents.  

• Lead Search Activity 
  

Having an analysis of a lead’s search activity would give you a direct assessment of the lead’s property requirements, which would help you in communicating better with your leads. You can use the search activity as a starting point to customize your interactions with the lead by sharing property updates based on their search interests.  

• Lead Appointment Calendars 

Having integrated calendar applications help you create and manage your schedule by factoring your lead appointments. Some real estate CRM’s also offer you the facility to sync your CRM calendar with your external calendars from Google, Outlook, and Exchange Server. This helps you have a consolidated calendar from where you can easily manage your schedule.  

2. Agent Management 

If you are running an agency with multiple agents, it would be quite helpful to have a centralized dashboard from where you can manage your individual agent accounts. The system should facilitate adding and editing agent profiles, access permissions, and also help in tracking an agent’s performance.  

3. Integrated Calls, Texts and E-Mails 

 Real Estate lead engagement is a communication driven exercise where you would need to be in constant communication with your clients over the phone, or through texts and emails. Ideally, do opt for a real estate CRM that has integrated calling, texting, and email features so that you would not need to switch to a third-party application while accessing the contact details of your leads. This helps you save time and helps easily track communication activity as a reference. 

• Bulk Text and E-Mail Campaigns 
  

Bulk emails and text messages help you in your direct marketing campaigns so that you can reach out to multiple leads at the same time, without having to individually communicate with them. Your real estate CRM should help you easily create and manage such campaigns, and also include features to help you create email and text templates for your marketing campaigns.  

4. Automated Real Estate Drip Marketing Campaigns 

A drip marketing campaign is an automatic communication workflow that is designed to execute at a set frequency or in response to a specific action from a lead-such as attending an open-house or registering in your website. Drip marketing campaigns are a combination of emails, texts, and calls– designed to be executed for selected leads. This feature helps you easily engage your leads and automate the communication workflow; so that you do not miss any essential communication that would help you better engage the lead. We suggest that you invest in a real estate CRM that helps you create automated lead engagement campaigns so that you never miss on an opportunity to interact with your leads. 

5. Reporting and Analytics

Reporting utilities in a real estate CRM should include ways to easily track and monitor your website traffic, lead acquisition, contact sources, agent performance along with your sales and marketing efforts. This helps you better analyze your business and build improvement strategies by identifying focus areas. 

The above are a few essential features of a real estate CRM which you should consider investing in to better manage your real estate marketing efforts. You can also explore additional features that are built on the above features, and choose a CRM solution that best matches your requirement, workflow, and marketing strategies.