CRM for CRE: Three Must-Have Features for Real Estate Brokerages
To learn more about how Bullhorn can help real estate companies, read this review of Bullhorn CRM for Real Estate by Craig Rowe of Inman News: http://www.inman.com/2015/06/18/bullhorn-should-make-a-lot-of-noise-in-the-crm-space/
Success in the world of real estate brokerages is largely determined by the strength of your relationships. But with a wide variety of properties to manage and a large group of contacts that you need to keep in touch with (including owners, lessees, and vendors), brokers can be hard-pressed to maintain all their relationships. But it’s simply not necessary to vainly attempt to keep up with each of your contacts through traditional means.
Customer relationship management technology has come a long way, and it represents a huge opportunity for real estate companies that can benefit from its functionalities. But while a CRM system can certainly be a huge advantage for commercial real estate brokers, it can be difficult to ascertain which system is best for your company. However, by ensuring that your CRM has three crucial features, you can put your real estate brokerage in position for years of success through the nurture of beneficial relationships.
1. Email Tracking
Your brokerage needs to stay on top of vital information regarding property timelines, your clients’ vendor preferences, and possible lessees. But it can be daunting to realize that you must dig through months or even years of emails in order to retrieve the data and intelligence that you need. With a CRM that has the proper capabilities, though, you can avoid the entire painful process.
A CRM with email tracking functionality can track every message sent to or received by clients and prospects, giving you the data you need to take action. With data proactively presented to you through a centralized dashboard, you don’t have to worry about figuring out exactly where you stand with a property owner or vendor. By integrating email services like Gmail and Outlook, an excellent real estate CRM system can use important communications to feed intelligence to your entire staff in order to bring your company’s performance to the next level.
2. Intelligent Analytics
All that email tracking, however, won’t mean anything for the effectiveness of a commercial real estate CRM unless it has the necessary analytical capabilities to show you what that harvested data means for your business. A well-configured dashboard will be able to present its users with intelligent analytics that will give your brokers quantifiable measurements into the likelihood of deals closing, prospects being converted into clients, and leads growing into opportunities. Without these analytics to provide intelligence to your company, your staff can spend hours each day on time-wasting manual data entry.
But if the real estate CRM used by your brokerage has sophisticated reporting functionality, your pipeline and conversion rates will benefit as your brokers find it easier to proactively address issues before they begin to impact your bottom line. Stagnating relationships can be quickly noticed and addressed, and you can easily see which member of your staff has the best, deepest relationship with a startup prospect that’s about to go public and needs more space, giving your company the best chance to get ahead of your competition and close a deal.
3. Comprehensive Mobile Functionality
If you work in commercial real estate, you simply can’t be tied down to your computer in order to do business. Meetings don’t just happen in your office, but also in various properties or at clients’ offices. Your company’s staff should have the ability to retrieve important data regarding clients and prospects on the go, no matter where they are.
With a real estate CRM that gives you full mobile functionality, you can do everything that you might normally do with your CRM in a desktop setting: access records, add and edit notes, make sure colleagues are notified as you update records on the fly. When you’re in a meeting off-site, you shouldn’t be at a disadvantage because you don’t have the data resources that you need at your disposal, and a comprehensive mobile CRM can help you to avoid such issues. If a CRM doesn’t offer full mobile access on smartphones and tablets, it simply isn’t suited for the dynamic environment of real estate.
A Fully Loaded Real Estate CRM
Bullhorn has custom-built a CRM for Real Estate for the needs of commercial real estate brokerages. Bullhorn’s Real Estate CRM has a centralized dashboard that features real-time customer and opportunity intelligence fed by automatic email tracking. It also allows members of various teams to collaborate easily and effectively from anywhere at any time via mobile devices. The interface is intuitive to use in order to streamline the adoption process, saving valuable time for your company. Additionally, Bullhorn’s relationship management platform for real estate has open APIs that make unlimited integrations possible, allowing your firm to integrate necessary parts of your existing process into the CRM.
Its dashboard gives users full visibility into business processes and account health, with intelligent analytics that give decision-makers quantifiable measurements on the likelihood of deals closing, prospects being converted into clients, and leads growing into opportunities. It saves hours per day that might otherwise be used for data entry and busy work, and will even indicate opportunities for upsell with existing customers, giving your commercial real estate brokerage a steady stream of business.
Download our full whitepaper on the benefits that a real estate CRM can offer to your brokerage: A Blueprint for Success: Four Ways a CRM Can Help Your Real Estate Brokerage Grow