Real estate investors often have seller leads from direct mail, cold calling, SEO, online ads, email outreach and a half dozen other marketing campaigns. They need to track all communications with each one of those leads, and follow up with each one many times, often over the course of months or years. They need to track how much they spent on each campaign, how much they earned on them.
You could try to duct tape a business system together from spreadsheets and sticky notes. Or you can just use a real estate CRM.
A customer relationship management or CRM system automates your business lead flow from pulling prospect lists all the way through closing and beyond. It organizes prospects, tracks communications with them, manages follow-ups and helps move leads through the sales pipeline.
Still, just having a CRM doesn’t necessarily mean using it effectively to run and scale your business. Here’s how to use a CRM for real estate businesses.
Setting Up Your Real Estate CRM
“How do I use a CRM for my real estate investing business?”
The foundation of your real estate investing business is buying low so you can sell high. That means finding off-market sellers willing to accept a low price in exchange for a quick, certain sale.
So, your real estate CRM starts at the beginning: filling it with leads.
All real estate CRMs let you import leads from spreadsheets, lists or databases. Some (like, cough, REsimpli) even let you pull lead lists directly from public records like foreclosure filings and delinquent property taxes.
Once imported into the CRM, each lead has its own file that includes details like the owner name, property address, contact information, mortgage balances, the lead source and of course your own notes.
Like to kick it old school by driving for dollars? Great — REsimpli’s mobile app lets you attach photos and notes to the properties while you’re in the field.
Having a single database of leads lets you organize and sort them. You can easily filter for duplicates, so you don’t waste money sending several direct mail postcards to the same address by accident.
By stacking multiple lists, you can find the most motivated sellers. For example, you can find the overlap between the list of foreclosures and the list of non-owner-occupied properties, to target those owners most likely to take an offer for a quick sale.
Connecting Lead Generation & Marketing
“How should I set up a real estate CRM for seller leads?”
You’ve started importing lead lists or pulling leads directly into a real estate CRM. Now you need to start marketing to them.
The best real estate CRMs integrate marketing directly, so with a single click you can start leads on a direct mail campaign, or email, or cold calling. In fact, REsimpli has an AI agent that can do the cold calling for you. Prefer making the calls yourself? Its built-in dialer comes with unlimited calling minutes.
But reaching leads is only part of the equation. You also need to know which marketing channels are bringing them in.
Set up the CRM correctly, and it will track where each lead came from. For example, you can give different phone numbers and web addresses on your direct mail than you put in your email outreach campaigns.
You can also set up a seller website in just a few minutes, using real estate website templates. From there, you can start running online ad campaigns and SEO campaigns to it, and good CRMs are smart enough to automatically tag where those leads came from.
Tracking Leads Through the Sales Pipeline
“How do I organize contacts, properties, and deals in a CRM?”
When a new lead reaches out to you, your CRM should automatically update their lead file. You can track leads through stages like:
- New Lead Response
- Contacted
- Qualified
- Appointment Scheduled
- Offer Made
- Under Contract
- Closed
For example, a homeowner responds to a postcard you sent, and enters the pipeline as a new lead. A phone conversation confirms their interest in selling and their equity in the home. The lead moves to the qualified stage and you — or your AI agent — schedules an appointment to see the property.
By tracking leads at each stage in the pipeline, you can immediately spot stalled leads and prioritize your efforts in getting back in touch with the most promising leads.
Automating Follow-Up
“How can I automate real estate lead follow-up in a CRM?”
As leads come in, each one needs to go on a follow-up automation.
For instance, a lead calls you and leaves a voicemail, or better yet talks to your AI agent to answer your most pressing qualification questions. It goes on an immediate response automation, with an aggressive schedule for your team to contact.
If they don’t respond to your calls, texts and emails, a smart real estate CRM will automatically transition them to a more moderate follow-up campaign. After a certain amount of time, the CRM should move them to a long-term drip campaign automation if your team still can’t reach them for a human-to-human conversation.
These automated follow-up campaigns involve everything from texts to emails to phone calls from either your team or an AI agent. On longer-term drip campaigns, they often include the occasional direct mail postcard.
All the while, your real estate CRM lead management should automatically log and track each communication. That includes both outreach attempts and responses from the lead.
Ideally, your real estate CRM setup is smart enough to incorporate AI to personalize the drip campaigns and outreach. With its complete log of all past communications, it won’t ask questions you already know the answer to, and will include details of past conversations in its communication attempts.
Managing Offers & Contracts
“How do I track a real estate deal from first contact to closing?”
You’ve walked the property, negotiated a sale price and made an offer! What now?
The real estate investor CRM workflow should include logging the offer, counter-offers, negotiation terms, due diligence deadlines and the offer status. That too involves an automated workflow with communication schedules, including texts, emails and assigned phone calls from your team.
When you and the seller have both signed a contract, it too goes into the lead file automatically. REsimpli lets you send and e-sign contracts directly within the CRM, for example. Other relevant documents and files, such as photos and appraisals, also go into the CRM file. The real estate CRM moves the lead into a new automation, designed to get you to the closing table. That includes communications and reminders as you work with lenders, appraisers, title companies and more.
While a thoughtful real estate investor CRM workflow helps you automate and coordinate these communications, it can’t replicate your own judgment and human connections. Ultimately, you still need to confirm with the lender, title company, closing agent and other actual people that closing is moving ahead on schedule.
Managing Buyers
“Can the real estate investor CRM workflow also help me sell or wholesale the property?”
The best real estate CRMs also help you sell the property or wholesale the contract. For example, REsimpli lets you maintain separate databases for wholesale buyers, letting you differentiate them by geographic areas, property types, buyer preferences and purchasing criteria. That helps you match specific properties to the best buyers in your database.
With the click of a button, you can also email or text your buyer lists with the details of your latest available property. If you don’t get an offer as quickly as you want, you can follow up with certain segments to offer a discounted price or other incentive.
Measuring ROI
“Can the real estate CRM setup tell me which marketing channels work best?”
A good real estate CRM should track where each lead came from, so you know how each marketing campaign is performing. You can track the cost of each marketing campaign, whether you bought lead lists directly through a CRM like REsimpli or paid for them somewhere else.
Because the CRM also tracks your contracts and closings, it can automatically calculate your return on investment (ROI) for each marketing channel. You can view your cost per lead, cost per deal and the ROI for each marketing channel.
A quick look at the CRM’s accounting and you might discover that you earn $5 for every $1 spent on direct mail campaigns, but only $1.50 for each dollar spent on online ads. At a glance, you’ll know exactly where to scale back your marketing budget — and where to double down.
How to Use a CRM for Real Estate
The best real estate CRMs almost completely run your back office for you. That lets you and your team focus on the big picture of marketing campaigns, conversations with sellers, offer negotiations and getting deals to the closing table.
Because you don’t need to spend much time updating databases or sending texts and emails to leads, you can close more deals. You can keep your team a lean machine, since the CRM does so much of the work for you on auto-pilot.
Want to see exactly what a state-of-the-art real estate CRM can do? Take REsimpli for a test drive, with a 14-day free trial. You’ll be shocked at just how much the CRM can take off your plate, while focus on the human element of real estate investing.
