The Importance of a CRM in Growing Your Real Estate Business

The Importance of a CRM in Growing Your Real Estate Business

March 18, 2019

Build Your Business, Follow Up, Real Estate Technology

Success in the real estate business is dependent on relationships. When a real estate brokerage doesn’t have the right setup to manage relationships – with current, past and future clients – agents lose business. Yet in any successful brokerage, nurturing relationships in an agent’s real estate sphere of influence usually takes far more time than money.

Ugh. Time. Something busy agents are typically short on, right?

But consider this: According to the NAR, agents making more than $100,000 a receive nearly one-third of their business from referrals from past clients. They get another 34% from repeat business. Interestingly, this top earner group also invests 22% more on their CRM solution than the average agent.

Agents making $100,000 or more a year invest 22%

more on their CRM than the average agent.

Why the correlation between CRM and bigger paychecks?

A real estate CRM, or customer relationship management system, enables brokerages to increase agents’ efficiency and productivity by letting the system do the heavy lifting. Rather than using components of multiple separate tech platforms to email clients, follow up on web leads, track contact details, and notes, and manage contract workflows, CRM’s enable agents to roll all that activity into one system in a much more efficient manner. That’s why top agents who deploy a CRM often see cost reductions of over 30%, while exponentially improving productivity through integrated capabilities of systems like ZipperAgent.

Research shows agents are more likely to sell to a past client or someone who was referred by a previous client. CRM’s make it easier to segment and target these special groups of leads with timely, relevant messages and campaigns – even when the agent is busy doing something else. This is important because when it comes to selling their home, only 28% will use the same agent that helped them buy their home. Top agents take the time to set up their CRM and optimize their automated drip campaigns to ensure that they nurture both past and possible clients and systematize who they need to follow up with and when. Staying top of mind in this way eliminates the risk clients will forget about them and provides them with the tracking data and automated triggers to provide the right services at the right time.

Follow-up

As I mentioned, real estate is built on relationships. Relationships are built on timeliness. Yet real estate agents are notorious for letting timely follow-up fall by the wayside during busy periods. It’s hard to grow your business when you’re letting leads slip through your fingers. CRM’s increase agents’ responsiveness with new cold leads generated online by automating queries by sending triggered, timely email responses within seconds. According to the Harvard Business Review, those who attempted to reach web-generated leads within an hour were nearly seven times likelier to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those who waited even 60 minutes.

“Your ability to make money is tied up in your ability to

follow up with the people that you’re ultimately trying to serve.” –

Travis Robertson, Real Estate Coach, Speaker, and CEO of Don’t Settle Group

Since agents can automate so many of their daily tasks within the CRM, from lead follow-up and nurturing, to contract management and document filing, top-earning agents don’t need to devote as much office time to repetitive administrative duties. They instead use that time for showing properties, meeting with leads, and other productive income-generating activities.

Less time searching for a sticky-note with a lead’s phone number or managing a pile of contracts with the aid of a real estate CRM increases agent productivity by upwards of 50% at most brokerages. It’s no wonder that making a CRM work harder for them is a secret of top agents in this industry, and why brokerages who offer a real estate CRM system show a 26% increase in transaction sides per agent over those who don’t. if you’re ready to see your business grow, talk with one of our experts today.