So you’re searching for the best real estate CRM. You already know why you need a CRM but making a final choice can be overwhelming. The last thing you want is to test a CRM and find it doesn’t do everything you need to run your business. In this article, we’ll focus on CRMs for real estate agents.
Being a real estate agent in 2024 is one of the hardest sales jobs because you need to keep track of so many things. Residential real estate, in particular, is extremely challenging to manage because you’re dealing with the public, which is practically everyone who will ever need to buy, sell, or lease a property.
It’s not that you need to or should try to sell to everyone, but you need a system to keep track of everyone you have an opportunity to speak to about real estate.
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Real Estate CRM Benefits
First, a CRM allows agents to store all client information in a single, easily accessible location, helping agents keep track of their client’s property preferences, communication history, and other essential details. With all this information at their fingertips, agents can provide better service to their clients and improve their productivity.
Centralized database: A CRM allows agents to store all client information, such as contact details, property preferences, and communication history, in a single, easily accessible location. This can help agents manage client relationships more effectively and improve productivity.
Second, a CRM can provide agents with valuable insights into their business. Many CRM systems include analytics and reporting tools that can help agents track their performance and identify areas for improvement. For example, an agent can use a CRM to see which marketing efforts are most effective or which clients are most likely to buy or sell a property. This information can help agents prioritize activity and improve their performance.
Automated tasks and reminders: Many CRM systems include features that allow agents to automate routine tasks, such as sending follow-up emails or scheduling property showings. This can help agents save time and stay organized.
A CRM system can help real estate agents streamline workflows, improve client relationships, and grow their businesses. By centralizing client information, automating routine tasks, and providing valuable insights, a CRM can help agents work more efficiently and effectively and ultimately achieve success in their careers.
Marketing tools: Some CRM systems include marketing tools that can help agents promote their services to potential clients. For example, some CRMs allow agents to create personalized email campaigns or manage paid social media advertising.
Analytics and reporting: A CRM for realtors provides agents with valuable insights into their business, such as which marketing efforts are most effective, which clients are most likely to buy or sell a property, and how much revenue they generate.
There are so many CRMs that real estate agents could use. Here will give a couple of examples from simple to complex.
Pipedrive CRM for Real Estate Agents
While it’s not specifically a CRM for Realtors, Pipedrive is a simple yet powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform, that helps agents manage their sales pipeline.
Pipedrive offers a range of features specifically designed for sales teams, such as visual sales pipelines, customizable deals and activities, and integrations with other business tools.
I think Pipedrive is a very versitile sales focused CRM. What I mean by sales focused is they way Pipedrive is designed to give you forward momentum, to always prompt you to the next action you need to take in order to move the deal forward.
I like how Pipedrive always prompts you for the next action in the sales cycle, which keeps you moving forward. This simple but powerful UX design is where Pipedrive shines.
Pipedrive is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, and is known for its simple and intuitive interface, which makes it easy for users to get up and running with the platform quickly. It offers various pricing plans to meet the needs of different businesses, and provides support and training resources to help users make the most of the platform.
The simplicity and power of Pipedrive lies in it’s ability to prioritized sales activity. It accomplishes this by always prompting your on the next activity to make the deal move forward.
If you are an agent who makes a lot of phone calls and sends a lot of email, yet you feel constant resistance from your current CRM from these basic communication tasks, you may want to give Pipedrive a try.
Unlike some of the industry-specific full suite platforms, which might offer a lot of real estate marketing features, Pipedrive gives you essential sales and contact management in a clean and easy-to-operate package.
Pipedrive is my favorite easy-to-use CRM for salespeople who use the telephone. It really does feel like it was made by salespeople for salespeople.
Follow Up Boss CRM for Real Estate Agents
Follow Up Boss is one of the most popular CRMs for realtors. It’s a platform designed specifically for real estate, that helps agents and teams manage their leads and customers.
With Follow Up Boss, businesses can track and manage interactions with their leads and customers, automate follow-up tasks, and integrate with other tools to improve their sales and marketing processes. Follow Up Boss is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, making it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.
I used FUB for a few months when I worked with a friend on his team. I liked it and thought it did some things really well, but I felt you needed a lot of third-party integrations, which made it expensive.
KW Command CRM for Real Estate Agents
Keller Williams Command is a real estate technology platform developed by Keller Williams, the largest real estate company in the United States. The platform is designed to help real estate agents manage their business and stay organized by providing tools for managing leads, listings, opportunities, and transactions, as well as for marketing, collaboration, and the IDX website. Keller Williams Command includes a CRM, a lead generation and tracking system that integrates with Facebook, Google, and Twitter to push out ads and capture leads. It also contains a suite of other tools like Designs to help agents create marketing assets quickly and grow their business with improved productivity.
KW Command is a tool available to KW agents and brokers exclusively.
How I use Keller Williams Command CRM
I’ve been using KW Command since it launched in 2019. It’s been my primary CRM for the last 5 years. It’s not because I think KW Command is the best CRM for real estate out there. Answering the question of which CRM is best for realtors is a long and complicated process that I don’t have time for.
Testing and migrating between CRMs is not something I have time for, so I decided to use KW Command as my primary CRM. Now for full disclosure, I’m not saying you should do the same or that what I did was the right thing to do for myself even.
I think people waste a lot of time researching and testing tools. Eventually, after a lot of testing, researching, and working with CRMs for the past 20 years, I’ve concluded that adoption and usability are the two main areas to successfully leverage a CRM tool.
I believe technology is important for real estate agents, but I think it’s way overrated. If you have a good work ethic, are focused on brining value and providing good service I don’t think it really matters all that much which CRM you use because they more or less all do the same thing. Of course, some systems do more, and some do less.
I prefer Pipedrive over KW Command as a strict sales pipeline CRM. I like Pipedrive way better for making follow up calls and moving opportunities forward. But Pipedrive doesn’t have the real estate-specific marketing and website features that come with Command.
At one point I was using KW Command as my marketing hub and Pipedrive as my sales CRM. The problem was without an assistant, I had a hard time keeping two systems updated.
The most vital problem you need to solve, regardless of which CRM you choose to use, is whether you will use it. Adoption is the name of the game when it comes to CRMs. It’s not going to matter which functions and capabilities a CRM has if you don’t log into it often and keep it updated.
Another critical factor in choosing a CRM is that the technology is tied to a brokerage, such as Keller Williams and KW Command. How are you going to manage your customer data if you have a falling out and decide to switch to another brokerage?
I was aware of this when I committed to using KW Command as my primary CRM. In my case, I don’t have any desire to move around and try different brokerages, so I felt comfortable using KW Command, knowing that if I do make a move in the future, I’ll need to migrate all my customer data into a new system.
Price was another reason I went with KW Command. Since it’s free or covered with my monthly office fees, I thought, why bother paying for another system even if it’s a bit better in some aspects?
I felt regardless of which CRM I go with, they will probably never meet my expectations, so I’d rather be on one that is integrated with the office I’m using to process my transactions.
Because the adoption of back-office transaction integration is required, it serves to support my belief that adoption is the most important factor for CRM success.
KW Command Weaknesses
After using KW Command Crm for the past five year I reconigize it has some major weaknesses.
Lead capture and landing pages are far behind other leading read estate crms like Chime, Brevity, and Real Geeks.
Salesforce CRM for Real Estate Agents
Salesforce is another CRM I’ve had experience with, but not for real estate. After using SF for over 10 years I’d say Salesforce geared more towards for large corporations and would need some extensive customization by a developer to optimize it for real estate. The nature of real estate involves a high volume of personal accounts. Salesforce, out of the box, is more structured for managing organizations with multiple contacts.
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