The 6 Trends We're Seeing in Top Real Estate CRMs

The following is an excerpt from RE Technology's latest Success Guide:

CRM is a constantly evolving category of technology for real estate. Vendors in this category regularly introduce new functionality to improve the breadth of services that agents or brokers can accomplish. Here are a number of new functions and trends that we see emerging across the real estate CRM landscape.

Integration with Google Suite: Office 365

Most real estate brokers, teams and agents are seeking CRMs that have integrated basic or core functionality from solutions like GSuite and Office 365. With these integrations, contact records are synchronized between systems, along with emails sent or received with the contact. Users also have the capability to enter appointments or tasks in either system, and have those events synchronized between the two platforms.

Standalone CRM Is Preferred

Because consumer facing websites are a key area of new customer acquisition, many CRM systems are developed to manage leads from an agent, company, or team website. Over time, the trend to have an integrated CRM from the website provider has given way to separating the website developer from the CRM developer—making CRM a standalone offering that is capable of integrating with any website.

CRM as a Coaching Solution

One of the newest trends with CRM is the ability to integrate the workflow within a CRM with popular coaching solutions like Ninja, Ferry, or any of the other agent coaching programs. These coaching programs typically set agent goals and tasks for achieving those goals. For example, your CRM can reflect a coaching goal like making a certain number of calls each day, week, or month. The system can prompt you to make calls, and even have the call scripts or email follow-up messages preloaded into the CRM.

Social Media Integration for Free and Paid

In terms of return on investment, social media posting (free) and social media marketing (paid) are among the top business development strategies for real estate agents and teams. Within many modern CRM solutions, the ability to post to your Facebook page or pay to boost a social media post is integrated into the platform. This makes it easy for a CRM user to stay in touch with clients on social media platforms or expand your customer base by acquiring new customers from social media.

MLS Integration for Listings

Most CRM systems have integrated data feeds from your MLS to make is easy to share or market active listings, recently sold listings, or market reports with your clients.

Mobile App

CRMs today need to support agent mobility so that key CRM features and functionality are available anytime to the agent. Nearly every CRM is mobile responsive today. Being mobile responsive means that you can use your CRM via your smartphone or tablet's web browser. For the most part, this is fine.

More advanced CRMs are offering mobile apps that you can download from the App Store or Google Play. These dedicated mobile apps are becoming more popular because they optimize the mobile experience. A key feature of dedicated mobile apps are notifications. Much in the same way that your phone can alert you to a text message, CRMs with mobile apps do an extraordinary job of alerting you of important reminders that are coming from your CRM.

Download Success Guide: CRM to learn more about CRM trends, how to evaluate a CRM, and more.