Best Real Estate CRM in 2023

Real estate market in the US remains strong, despite the pandemic

You might be wondering how the pandemic affected real estate business but surprisingly, the market only boomed with positive effects. Lombardo Homes analysed data from more than 50 competitive real estate markets in the US and they found that 42% of the home listings were sold within two weeks.

The housing market has been a strong factor in the economic recovery. Low mortgage rates are motivating new buyers to enter the market. As per the US National Association of Realtors (Dec 2020), housing prices are expected to increase up to 5.5% in 2022 in the US with a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 3.25%. The housing market is also appearing to be very competitive among the millennials.

According to George Ratiu, a senior economist at realtor.com, there is an increasing optimism in buying houses rather than renting.

Economists state that home prices are soaring and are showing no signs of slowing down in 2021.

The top 10 real estate markets 2021 are:

1. Raleigh/Durham, NC
2. Austin, TX
3. Nashville, TN
4. Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
5. Charlotte, NC
6. Tampa/St. Petersburg, FL
7. Salt Lake City, UT
8. Washington D.C./North, VA
9. Boston, MA
10. Long Island, NY

Median listing prices grew to $353,000 in February 2021 showing that the listing prices continued to increase at a double digit rate compared to 2020. (February 2021, Monthly Housing Market Trends Report)

The US housing market plays a supportive and useful role in the economy’s recovery. (Source: US Housing Market Sales & Price Forecast 2021: Will It Crash?).

64% of investors planned to keep on investing in real estate by buying investment properties as rentals despite the pandemic as per a survey from Auction.com.

Source: Norada real estate investment

Top 5 statistics from Realtor.com’s market forecast for 2021:

1. Mortgage rates will remain 3.25% through the year
2. The sales of existing houses will increase by 7%
3. Millennials will drive the increased housing demand
4. Single family housing are expected to rise by 9%
5. The US home prices will reach new peaks up to 5.7%

Zillow, one of the most popular real estate platforms forecasted that by the end of 2021, 6.9 million existing homes will be sold.They claim that mortgage rates are at their lowest level and this is what will contribute to the increased demands and sales.

Source: Zillow

As you can see, the real estate market is booming and offering huge opportunities for real estate brokers. 88% of home buyers still use real estate agents in their purchase. The real estate market is hot right now and this creates both opportunities and challenges for real estate agencies.

Challenges of a realtor: A mailbox overloaded with real estate email leads

A real estate professional have to juggle through so many different things on a day-to-day basis from home sales to lead captures. If this sounds like you, then it’s time to optimize your real estate process within your business.

• Do you have an overloaded mailbox with real estate emails from many different platforms and third-parties?
• Do you have potential buyers who need immediate responses?
• Do you have a list of time consuming administrative tasks, manual and repetitive processes that have to be done on a daily basis?
• Do you need to maintain the client relationship with your real estate leads on a regular basis?

Automating your real estate business becomes primordial and this is where a real estate CRM comes in.

What is a real estate CRM tool?

A customer relationship management is a process or technology that manages all the company’s interactions with potential and existing customers. In other words, it is a sales automation tool to manage your customers’ relationships.

A real estate CRM tool is a way for brokers and realtors to stay on top of their organizations, property management and sales deals. A study by software advice (2019) indicates that the largest percentage of CRM buyers are real estate businesses and agents.

72.5% of real estate agents have a CRM tool in place and it is the key to real estate automation. From the moment that a potential buyer fills in a lead capture form, their information is input directly into the CRM platform.

Use a real estate CRM to increase your productivity and customer satisfaction

From a survey conducted by Real Trends and Boston Logic in 2015, it was found that 96.2% of brokers confirmed that using a CRM tool has increased their productivity. Their productivity in business increased by at least 50%.

Improving efficiency and organization is one of the top reasons why realtors would adopt a CRM platform.

Source: Software Advice, Real Estate Report

Here are the top advantages of using a CRM in your real estate business:

• CRMs are cloud-based which means that you can access your client’s data anytime and anywhere from your work or your smartphone.
• All of your contacts and customer databases are centralized so that you can keep track of all potential leads to build up strong relationships.
• It provides smarter reporting for analysis and metrics with real time insights and a comprehensive view of your current customers and financials.

Example of metrics in Pipedrive CRM

• It helps with segmentation of your leads the moment they enter into your sales funnel. You can segment them by their budget, interested properties or even their zip code.
• Since all your leads and existing buyers are segmented and properly organized, you can follow up with them effectively. You can even use pre-made templates to write your follow up emails and the CRM will remind you about it on a specific date.
• A CRM tool can help you create better and successful marketing campaigns by targeting profitable customers based on their behaviors and preferences. In this way, you will be able to create personalized contents and messages.
• Close more deals with your CRM tool. As per Close.io, realtors who use technology tools like a CRM earn $100,000 or more in gross commission income than agents who don’t.

6 key features to look at when selecting a real estate CRM in 2023

Real estate agency have a lot on their plates every single day from phone calls to open house viewings. The last thing they need is a complicated tool with complex functions.

While choosing the best real estate CRM, there are multiple features and factors to consider. And, thankfully there are real estate-specific CRMs that will manage your sales pipeline automatically and provide task management solutions

CRM features for real estate businesses:

1. Email marketing
2. Sales pipeline management
3. Cloud based
4. Mobile app (IOS/Android)
5. Reporting
6. Integrations with other apps

Top 5 real estate CRM to boost your productivity

Wise Agent

Wise Agent

Wise Agent has been around for a long time and has continuously improved on their features and integrations. Their features range from contact management tools, lead automation to time management and software tools. Wise Agent provides 24/7 live support and even offers A/B testing in their automatic email responders.

Pricing starts from $29/monthly or $299/annually with both packages having the round the clock support.

Follow Up Boss

Follow Up Boss

Follow up boss was founded 10 years ago and since then, 5M leads have been handled on the platform. Leads can be pulled from 200+ real estate platforms automatically. They offer pre-written drip campaigns and you can install the CRM on your android or IOS. Follow up Boss has 3 pricing packages starting from $69 with a free trial of 14 days.

Realvolve

Realvolve

Realvolve is usually called the modern-day agent as they provide tons of customizations with limitless automation. They have powerful features specifically designed for the real estate industry with conditional based workflows to increase the conversion rate.

The subscription starts from $49/month.

LionDesk

LionDesk

Lion desk is for budget-conscious agents as it starts at $21/month. The CRM sets itself apart with their unique features such as the AI leads follow up and click to call that tracks all the inbound and outbound calls. The AI responsiveness is the biggest takeaway and you can try LionDesk for 30 days on a free trial without even providing your credit card.

Contactually

Contactually

Contactually is all about relationship building and marketing. If you are looking for a CRM to maintain your customers’ relationships on the go with powerful automation and integrations, this one's for you. Contactually starts at $69/month with two-weeks of free trial.

Go full automation: use Parseur to collect your leads and send them to your CRM automatically

Parseur is a powerful mail parser software to automatically extract text from emails and automate your workflow. As a visual no-code text extraction tool, Parseur comes with advanced features, facilitating extraction of specific data from your emails, PDFs or Excels.

Parseur automation starts the moment you receive an email from any real estate platforms such as Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com till the data is in your real estate CRM.

Real use case example at Parseur

Let’s take the case of Mark who is a realtor. Mark is doing really good in his real estate business; he has hundreds of leads and potential buyers daily. But Mark has a challenge. Between organizing open houses visits, having leads’ information at hand and maintaining a good relationship with existing clients, Mark needs to stay on top of his game.

Though he does make use of a real estate CRM software, Mark has to manually input specific information (customer name, phone number, property address, price, details, source) in the CRM. Every time a new email lead comes in from the platforms, he published his listings on.

With Parseur, you can automatically extract those details from your emails and export them to your CRM.

How does the data extraction process in Parseur works?

Parseur is free to start with all the features. Once your mailbox is created, send your email to your Parseur mailbox. You can also create an auto-forwarding rule so that all your emails are sent to the mailbox automatically.

Zillow Tour Request email sample

Parseur comes with an built-in library of templates to automatically parse emails from any real estate platform. The parsed results will look like this:

Export the parsed data to any real estate CRM

The extracted data can be sent in real time to your CRM via Zapier. Zapier is a cloud automation tool that connects apps together.

Export the parsed data to Zapier

You can follow our step by step guide in this article on how to create new Realvolve contacts from parsed email data

And just like that! You will have an automated sales pipeline for your real estate agency.

Wrapping up: Real estate brokers should adapt to new market changes

On March 03, 2021 Second Century Ventures announced the members of REACH Australia. REACH Australia is a growth accelerator that accelerates new technology companies in the real estate industry. This shows that the real estate market will not crash during this pandemic.

Realtors will have to adapt to new market changes and explore new ways to serve their clients. One of them is to introduce technology in their business processes so that their manual tasks can be taken care of by robotic automation while they focus on customer value and closing more real estate deals quickly.