The Real Estate industry is ripe for innovative disruption and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technologies are playing an important role in empowering both Developers and Brokers, to enhance the ‘Customer Buying Journey’! Implementation of such an end-to-end technological solution, will also make you stand out as a professionally managed organisation, besides improving your internal efficiencies.
Having implemented CRM for Real Estate (Brokers and Developers) across the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates and India, there are clearly diverse requirements, but in this article, I aim to cover some of the high level processes that are common to all, and can be achieved with minimum configuration.
Inventory Listing & Management
For every Real Estate Broker or Developer, it is important to list and manage your Inventory in a secure platform (not spreadsheets!) that can be shared and published for online access via a website or landing page. Your property inventory can be listed by Project Category (Commercial, Residential etc.) Project Site, Property Type, Area and other useful details, separately curated both for internal usage as well as for external consumption. It is important that Listings have a single source of truth and is managed only in one platform with seamless integration to websites. This will ensure there is no possibility of duplication or data inconsistencies.
This will also facilitate the ability to quickly search the Listings for current status, as illustrated below:
Sales and Marketing Activities
It is important that all Activities from Calls to Viewings and follow ups are scheduled and completed in your CRM. Based on a closed Activities we can then trigger a workflow to automatically update the Pipeline and schedule the next logical step.
Email/SMS Templates can be created to promote Project Sites overall, as well as offer promotions on specific Property Units. Any such Campaign needs to be sent to a qualified list which can be easily generated based on Closed Activities (Viewings, Calls, etc.) linking Leads/Contacts to specific Project Sites and Units.
All activities will be visible by Lead, Project Site and individual Units.
Social Media engagement can play an important role in profiling and qualifying Leads and we illustrate below how this might look, with integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram!
Document Management
There are various Forms and Documents that will need to be sent to a Contact during their journey from a Lead to a Customer and the CRM should have all of these set up and ready to be sent, either manually or through an automated workflow. In all cases, they should be personalised using Merge Fields and where feasible, integration with digital signatures can facilitate online legal progression. Also, these Forms and Documents should be created in various templates (SMS, Email, Letter) with internal approvals if required, so the appropriate outreach can be initiated.
Post-Sales Management
The customer journey does not stop with a successful sale and it is important to provide an equally professional experience for client liaison, on-boarding, snagging lists, warranty and maintenance services. This is where your CRM will facilitate collaboration between various departments, ensuring knowledge is transferred seamlessly and issues are resolved methodically.
Integrations
It is important to choose a CRM that enables a single sign-on from a single vendor to achieve as much as possible without 3rd party integration. Where there are gaps, please ensure that commercial off the shelf (COTs) integrations are available, preferably with native and bi-directional API usage. We work with well proven solutions for sending SMS, making/recording Calls, sending Email/Social Media Campaigns, geo-Tagging and other integrations that work directly from your CRM.
Portals
Nowadays, it is essential that your CRM supports the use of Portals, so that part of your database can be published for external access and updates. There are many use cases where external users, from Customers, to Brokers, and Contractors, may find it useful to view your database of properties, assigned tasks etc. and update it where relevant.
For more details, please email ravi@mercerlal.com and I will gladly share my experience with CRM solutions for the Real Estate market.
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