In the highly competitive world of commercial real estate, success hinges on connecting with the right people at the right time.
In today’s fast-paced market, this is more than just a necessity; it’s a critical strategy for any commercial real estate (CRE) firm. Implementing an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is central to this strategy.
A CRE CRM is not just a tool but a vital component that orchestrates complex deal processes, manages intricate stakeholder relationships, and keeps track of all the details involved in real estate transactions, Allowing your firm to close deals more efficiently.
The correct CRM software empowers your firm to streamline operations, manage your property portfolios more efficiently, and significantly improve its prospecting activities.
Understanding the functionalities and benefits of various CRM systems is essential for any commercial real estate business looking to gain a competitive edge and optimize its operations.
What Makes an Effective Commercial Real Estate CRM?
As a commercial real estate professional, choosing the right CRM platform is a strategic decision that can significantly impact your business.
An effective commercial real estate CRM system is different from generic CRM solutions and is designed to address the unique needs of your industry. It enables you to efficiently organize your network, manage property portfolios, and oversee deal pipelines.
Essential features include:
- Advanced Contact Management: Ability to track and manage relationships and follow up with stakeholders, including investors, agents, and clients, while maintaining a comprehensive history of interactions and transactions.
- Deal Pipeline Management: Streamlining the entire lifecycle of a deal, from initial contact to closure, ensuring that every stage is meticulously tracked and managed.
- Document and Deadline Tracking: Keeping a record of all crucial documents and deadlines associated with each deal, ensuring everything is accounted for and nothing falls through the cracks.
- Real-time Reporting and Analytics Dashboards: Providing up-to-date insights into the firm’s operations, helping make informed decisions based on current market trends and internal performance metrics.
- Automation and Integration Capabilities: Automating data entry and other routine tasks to save time, reduce errors, and integrate seamlessly with the firm’s different tools and platforms.
- User-friendly Interface and Customization: Offering an intuitive user experience and the flexibility to customize the system according to the firm’s specific needs.
- Email Marketing and Campaign Management: A critical aspect of any commercial real estate firm is the ability to send targeted marketing campaigns. A comprehensive CRM should offer robust email marketing tools to create, manage, and track email campaigns.
By incorporating these features, a Commercial Real Estate CRM becomes a powerful tool that manages and enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of your real estate firm’s operations.
Benefits of Using a Commercial Real Estate CRM
Implementing a CRM in your commercial real estate business or brokerage brings several transformative benefits:
Optimized Network Utilization: A CRM does more than store contact information; it should transform your network into a dynamic asset. Systematically tracking relationships and organizing contacts and their interactions enables you to quickly identify and engage with key players (real estate agents, partners, property management firms, etc.) for potential deals, fostering growth and new opportunities.
Efficiency through Automation: A CRE CRM’s automation capabilities should extend beyond basic data entry. They encompass complex workflows, follow-up, notifications, lead management, and client interaction, significantly reducing manual labor such as updating Excel spreadsheets allowing your team to spend more time on strategic activities that drive business growth.
Effective Deal Pipeline Management: In commercial real estate, a CRM tool isn’t just a platform to track deals; it is a deal management hub that provides a panoramic view of each transaction’s lifecycle. From initial contact to deal closure, it allows for meticulous milestone tracking and identification of potential bottlenecks, ensuring smooth progression and timely completion of deals.
Unified Data Repository: The CRM is a central repository for all deal-related data. This centralized approach ensures that vital information is not scattered across different platforms but is readily available, reducing the risk of oversight and allowing your team to make swift, informed decisions.
Data-Driven Strategies: Commercial real estate CRM software should process and present data to inform strategic decisions. With real-time analytics, you can monitor market trends comps, track internal performance metrics, and adapt your strategies to the ever-changing dynamics of the real estate market.
Enhanced Client Interactions: The CRM system enables a deeper understanding of client needs and preferences, allowing for tailored communication strategies and integrating with marketing automation platforms to send customizable emails and communication.
Increased Operational Productivity: The CRM drives operational excellence by unifying and automating various aspects of operations. It streamlines back-office processes, reduces the likelihood of errors, and cuts down on costs associated with fragmented and manual systems.
Support for Business Expansion: As your firm expands, so do the challenges. The best commercial real estate CRMs are designed to grow with the firm, offering features and capabilities that adapt to your evolving business needs, supporting and facilitating your growth journey.
By integrating these comprehensive benefits, a CRM becomes an indispensable tool, enhancing the management and long-term success of a commercial real estate firm.
Top Commercial Real Estate CRMs of 2024
Let’s explore some of the top CRM platforms that will stand out in 2024, each offering distinct features and benefits suited to the diverse needs of commercial real estate professionals.
From industry giants like Salesforce to specialized relationship intelligence platforms like 4Degrees, let’s delve into what makes these CRMs the top choices for commercial real estate professionals.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a robust, cloud-based CRM platform widely recognized for its comprehensive capabilities in managing customer relationships. It excels in flexibility, adaptability, and intuitive use, making it an effective tool for real estate investment firms and commercial real estate brokers.
Salesforce enables users to collect, analyze, and access vast amounts of data in real-time from any device. Key features include contact and opportunity management, real estate lead tracking, email integration, and sales forecasting.
Unfortunately, Salesforce is a generic CRM designed for sales teams managing transactional relationships and moving leads down a linear sales pipeline rather than a CRM designed to foster long-term high-value relationships with capital providers, industry experts, developers, realtors, etc.
Salesforce also lacks relationship intelligence, meaning teams must spend hours manually entering data to update the CRM.
Pros:
Comprehensive Functionality: Salesforce offers a wide range of features, including contact management, opportunity management, and lead tracking, tailored for the dynamic needs of commercial real estate teams.
Cloud-Based and Mobile-First Design: It provides the flexibility to access data in real-time, anywhere, which is crucial for professionals constantly moving.
Customization and Scalability: Compared with other customer relationship management tools, Salesforce is highly customizable, allowing firms to add integrations with commercial property listing systems, customer support, project management systems, etc.
Cons:
Complexity and Learning Curve: The extensive features and customization options can be overwhelming, requiring significant time and resources for training and implementation.
Cost: Salesforce can be expensive, especially for smaller firms or those requiring advanced features and customizations. The pricing structure can be complex and might escalate with additional modules and users.
Requires Continuous Management: To leverage its capabilities fully, Salesforce requires ongoing management and updates, which can be resource-intensive.
No Relationship Intelligence: Salesforce still requires users to manually enter data to keep the system updated.
While Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform, its complexity, high implementation, and ongoing costs must be considered. Salesforce might work for larger firms with the in-house resources to maintain it or those needing a highly customized system.
Hubspot
HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that integrates various aspects of marketing, sales, content management, and customer service.
It’s particularly beneficial for firms looking to streamline their marketing efforts, from social media marketing to SEO. HubSpot’s CRM system efficiently tracks and manages interactions with clients and prospects, allowing firms to stay on top of ongoing projects and deals.
Its user-friendly interface and robust sales reporting engine make it attractive for firms aiming to enhance their client engagement and marketing strategies. Compared to other CRMs for deal-driven teams, such as 4Degrees, Hubspot lacks relationship intelligence capabilities, requiring users to enter data and keep the system up to date manually.
Pros:
Integrated Marketing Tools: HubSpot stands out for its robust lead generation and marketing tools, including social media marketing, content management, and SEO.
User-Friendly Interface: Known for its intuitive design, HubSpot is accessible even to those new to CRM systems.
Free and Flexible Pricing Plans: Offers a range of plans, including a free option, making it accessible for businesses of various sizes.
Cons:
Limited Customization: Compared to Salesforce, HubSpot may offer fewer customization options, which could be a limitation for larger firms or those with particular needs not focused on marketing and online lead generation.
Scalability Concerns: While suitable for small to medium-sized businesses, larger firms might find it less capable of handling complex, large-scale operations.
Integration Limitations: While HubSpot integrates well with many tools, certain specific real estate applications may not seamlessly integrate, potentially requiring additional workaround solutions.
Not Real Estate Focused: Hubspot is a CRM for sales reps moving prospects down a sales process. If your firm wants to build long-term relationships with investors, developers, realtors, etc. It would be best if you looked elsewhere.
Buildout
Buildout is a CRM system built on the Salesforce platform tailored to the commercial real estate industry. Designed to manage client relationships and streamline lead management, it replaces spreadsheets, allowing for detailed management of every aspect of the commercial real estate sales pipeline.
With its built-in property data and mapping tools, brokers can track properties and target their efforts more accurately, ensuring they reach the right people at the right time. A database with access to over 8.5 million commercial properties empowers teams with data to gain the upper hand during negotiations and a deeper understanding of market trends. The CRM also includes features for secure data storage, activity reports, automated workflows, and project management, all geared towards enhancing efficiency in deal management and driving forward sales operations.
Pros:
Enhanced Prospecting and Lead Management: Streamlines prospecting with advanced tools, improving lead quality and management.
Large Property Database: Offers extensive data on millions of properties, giving brokers a competitive edge in market analysis and negotiations.
Automated Workflows: Simplifies and automates routine tasks, improving team collaboration and efficiency.
Cons:
Customer Service: Some user reviews mention their less-than-stellar experience with their customer service teams.
Complexity: The range of features and data could overwhelm users new to advanced CRM systems.
Salesforce-Based: While this offers many benefits, it may require additional learning for those unfamiliar with the Salesforce platform.
Still Requires Manual Data Entry: As a non-relationship intelligence CRM, users must manually enter data into the system.
AscendixRE CRM
AscendixRE is a real estate CRM built on top of Salesforce designed for commercial real estate brokers and professionals, offering customization, secure cloud-based access, and a suite of tools tailored to the industry’s needs.
AscendixRE allows tracking properties, listings, sales, leases, and more in one place. The CRM also features smart prospecting tools, an enhanced email marketing integration with Mailchimp, real estate email templates, and automated workflows.
AscebdixRE CRM may have a steep learning curve due to its comprehensive features, and costs can be a consideration for smaller firms. There is no official pricing information on their website. Still, according to other third-party sources, pricing starts at around $100 per user per month, with a minimum of 5 users to get started.
Pros
Highly customizable to meet specific real estate needs.
Cloud-based for easy access anywhere.
Comprehensive property and deal tracking features.
Cons
Reviewers report a User Interface that is not user-friendly and has a steep learning curve due to its comprehensive features.
Potentially higher costs could be a factor for smaller firms or individual brokers.
4Degrees
4Degrees is a relationship intelligence CRM platform for deal-driven teams designed by ex-investors.
Leveraging relationship intelligence or using machine learning and other technologies to understand and interpret the complex web of relationships, 4Degrees empowers commercial real estate professionals to find warm introductions to brokers, realtors, funding sources, prospects, etc. Saving hundreds of hours and allowing firms to source more proprietary deals.
As a CRE CRM platform, 4Degrees is packed with the features and functionality you would expect from a modern cloud-based CRM, including contact and pipeline management, automated workflows, mass email, and a robust reporting engine. Syncing with Outlook and Gmail inboxes and calendars, 4Degrees automates the tedious and time-consuming manual data entry process, giving CRE professionals more time to build relationships and close deals.
Trusted by hundreds of investors worldwide, 4Degrees for commercial real estate integrates with real estate software and applications to streamline origination, management, and operations.
To discover how 4Degrees can make your firm leverage the full power of its relationship network and close more deals, click here to schedule a demo.
Pros
Relationship Intelligence finds warm introductions and makes teams more efficient by automating manual data entry.
Designed for investors, which means there is no need to spend resources customizing the platform.
Customer support and success teams that understand your industry and use cases.
Cons
It is not a traditional sales CRM; if you are looking for a platform to manage a transactional sales process, 4Degrees is not ideal.
Some users have mentioned the User Interface would benefit from a refresh.
4Degrees does not include a native commercial real estate property database.
Freshworks CRM
The Freshworks Freshsales CRM is a generic cloud-based sales CRM that combines sales automation, marketing automation, chat, and telephone functionalities on a single platform. Freshworks was not designed for commercial real estate professionals. Instead, it’s focused on helping sales reps move deals down a traditional sales funnel. Freshworks is a good option for smaller commercial real estate firms looking for a basic CRM to store contacts and property details.
Key features include:
- AI-powered lead capture and scoring.
- Integrated client communication tools.
- Customizable modules to tailor the CRM to specific business needs.
Freshworks CRM supports real estate firms in attracting leads, engaging with them, closing deals, and nurturing customer relationships. Unfortunately, the product lacks relationship intelligence capabilities, meaning teams will spend countless hours per week manually adding data and ensuring all records are up to date.
Pros
Pricing: As one of the least expensive options, Freshworks has a free option and paid versions starting at $39 per month.
It is highly customizable and can integrate with multiple other systems.
Easy to use User Interface.
Cons
Freshworks Is a generic sales CRM that lacks any commercial real estate functionality.
It requires vast customization and integrations to fit the commercial real estate use case.
Users need to enter data manually to ensure the system is kept updated.
Some reviews mention how their customer support and success teams could be better versed in commercial real estate use cases.
ClientLook
ClientLook is a commercial real estate CRM software that simplifies the management of contacts, properties, and deals for real estate professionals.
ClientLook offers advanced contact management, deal pipeline management, and integrations with Google, MailChimp, and other tools from the Lightbox family of products and multiple commercial real estate applications.
The system facilitates collaboration among team members and improves the efficiency of sales and marketing efforts in the commercial real estate sector. Pricing starts at around $100 per user per month.
Pros
ClientLook caters specifically to commercial real estate professionals.
Integrates with other real estate applications.
Cons
Some CRM functionality (user search and mobile app) are relatively easy to use.
Their User Interface is not the most intuitive.
Reporting capabilities could be improved, especially when compared to other platforms.
Choosing The Right CRM
Navigating the complexities of the commercial real estate market demands more than just industry expertise and market knowledge; it requires the right technological tools to forge and maintain vital connections.
Implementing an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is vital for any forward-thinking commercial real estate firm. A specialized CRM streamlines operations enhances deal management, and provides a much-needed competitive edge.
From managing intricate stakeholder relationships to orchestrating complex deal processes, a CRE CRM is more than just a tool; it becomes an essential component of your business framework. With functionalities like advanced contact management, deal pipeline management, and real-time analytics, these systems empower firms to operate more efficiently, manage property portfolios with greater precision, and improve prospecting activities substantially.
The commercial real estate CRMs mentioned above offer unique features and benefits tailored to meet the diverse needs of the industry. Whether it’s the comprehensive functionality of Salesforce, the user-friendly interface of HubSpot, the industry-specific design of ClientLook, or the relationship intelligence of 4Degrees, these platforms support and enhance the operations of commercial real estate firms.
As the industry evolves, staying ahead means embracing new trends and technologies and choosing the right tools that align with your firm’s goals and operational style.
