Choosing a CRM for Real Estate Developers
4 things to look for in a CRM for new home development
Choosing the right CRM has a major impact on revenue.
That’s true across industries, not just for real estate development. But for real estate developers or sales teams in particular, CRMs facilitate the relationship between your sales agents and buyers, and even helps track the most successful marketing campaigns and sources.
The big names in customer relationship management are Salesforce and Hubspot, to the point that it can be difficult to name any others.
But the reality is that there are many CRMs available on the market. Especially in an industry as specific as real estate project presale, having a finely tuned CRM that was created for specific markets by industry experts can have a profound impact on how well the technology performs.
Let’s take a look at the 4 major aspects that makes up a CRM well-suited for real estate developers.
1. Industry specificity
In the case of real estate development, a generic CRM often proves to be too expensive, too unspecified, and too complicated for efficient use. Customizations are difficult to set up, and upkeep takes too much bandwidth both during and outside of a project launch.
Real estate developers, and teams working on selling a new development projects, need specific functionality in a CRM in order to properly conduct their business and successfully sell out a project. It’s not just contacts and sales management on individual inventory units.
Contracts are a unique aspect of real estate sales that can’t be overlooked, but most CRMs don’t have this feature as a matter-of-fact simply because it’s niche to the real estate industry. Not to mention the specific instances where multiple contracts are on a unit, or the matter of recission periods, verifiers, approvers… the list goes on. And that’s just contracts!
While it’s certainly possible to custom-build these aspects, that’s time and cost that doesn’t have to—and shouldn’t—come out of pocket.
Industry specific CRMs for real estate developers will have these already integrated into the system, and will have the support systems in place to facilitate your team as they adapt to the technology.
2. Multiple Project Database and Comparison
Whether you’re working on multiple new development projects at once, or dealing with them in succession, developers need to be able to look at their portfolio as a whole, as well as have the capability to compare individual projects.
Because each project might be handled by a different team, if you’re using project marketers, or even have slightly different operating processes, like a townhome project versus mixed-used condo towers, the technology needs to be able to keep up with the separate — but not entirely isolated — projects.
Essentially, a good CRM for real estate developers needs be able to support multiple projects (or what Salesforce calls an ‘instance’), all within a singular company portfolio.
This means that when your sales agents are entering information or updating contracts for a particular unit, the inventory information stays within the right development project on the platform. This helps you maintain data organization, so you never have to wonder whether the data was attributed correctly.
At the same time, you want to set up each project under the umbrella of your company portfolio, to allow for a greater complexity of data analysis.
Looking at purchase patterns across your portfolio of developments identifies the critical sales trends of best selling units. Demographic information about prospects versus purchasers provides a more detailed and accurate view of the market rather than relying on your pre-development research alone.
The development portfolio is an important source of information. A CRM for real estate developers needs to provide managers with the ability to access data from each project, in order to give a whole and accurate picture.
3. Sales Revenue Tracking and Performance Breakdowns
Part of managing a real estate development project involves tracking overall sales revenue. Sales managers are looking at how inventory is moving, as well as individual team performance. How is each member contributing to overall sales revenue? And what can be done to help facilitate each agent on the development project?
The right CRM for real estate developers and project marketers needs to provide information around successful sales outreach and campaigns. It also helps if the manager can break down the data by completed deals and sold inventory by agent.
User roles can help with this, giving team managers and developers access to look at each agent’s campaigns and contributions. Doing so allows a real estate team manager to get a feel of the pulse of the team, and better understand the areas where an individual excels. That’s how real estate development projects can sell out most effectively — by running optimized campaigns with a team where each leverages their strengths.
As well, each individual agent needs to be trained to input their campaigns and interactions, to help make sure that the database is both accurate and up-to-date. A CRM for real estate developers needs to play its part for individual agents as well. An intuitive platform won’t tax an agent’s already strained time resources. The easier to is to use, the more likely it is that your sales team will regularly input their information into the database, creating robust data for developers and project managers.
4. Comprehensive, Flexible Reporting Options
A CRM is a database — and your database is worth nothing if you can’t get your data out in a useful form. Any CRM worth its salt needs to have robust and customizable reporting.
Real estate developers are looking at several factors in order to understand the success of a development project. Sales numbers and inventory sold, of course, but also the types of interactions that led to a sale, the marketing efforts that contributed the most leads, and the most successful campaigns by the agents.
This is the data that not only allows for the success of the particular project, but will help developers achieve success in future projects.
A CRM for real estate developers needs to be comprehensive enough to support data from all aspects of the project, from contacts and inventory, to sales interactions, registrations, and more.
To achieve this, it’s important to have functional and flexible reporting functionality. For example, a real estate developer might want to know what types of marketing campaigns in a certain city was most effective for generating leads. They might run a report through the CRM database, asking it to cross reference lead sources with the registration city.
This only works if the CRM itself is a broader platform with greater functionality; and if the reporting allows for that type of customization.
Picking the Right CRM for Real Estate Developers
When deciding on a CRM, it’s important for real estate developers to consider all the capabilities that they will need. If the system is a generic CRM with customization options, developers need to weigh the cost. Customization and maintenance of software, whether that’s a newly created proprietary system or a on-market option, ultimately becomes a hefty cost for real estate developers in both time and money.
With new technology and innovation arriving all the time, real estate developers need to keep an eye on available software and how it can help to support and grow their current programs.
The right CRM has all of the capabilities that a real estate developer needs, as well as the tools that the sales and marketing team will use to actual run the presale or lease up programs.
Keeping ahead of new technologies in real estate helps developers gain a better understanding of their team, their projects, and their campaigns, and ultimately helps them to grow a stronger business.
Spark is the #1 software for new development projects. We’ve created the most robust presale and marketing software available, specifically built to serve the new development real estate industry.
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