Are you ready to take your Real Estate CRM “To The Cloud”?

As a real estate professional, you are out of the office a lot. When you are out, having access to everything you need to conduct your business in a professional manner is critical. You field numerous phone calls during the day from clients and prospects that are depending on you to give them info and advice. You have daily lists of people you need to contact, from leads to vendors to clients, and have to have their contact information readily available at your fingertips. Heck, you even want to use your time wisely, sometimes knocking out a quick marketing project or newspaper ad, while sitting at a quiet open house or broker tour. Without truly being "mobile," none of this is possible.

Enter cloud computing. Unless you live somewhere that the internet does not exist, I would venture to guess that you have at least heard of cloud computing. Cloud computing is the newest "hot item" that has everyone buzzing. Cloud computing has given rise to a new breed of savvy companies (such as ours) that allow the "everyman" to have tools in their arsenal that were once only available to those mega corporations that had millions of dollars of infrastructure, and teams of IT people to support it. If there is any proof out there that cloud computing is the wave of the future, all you need to do is look at the "old companies" that have been offering things like CRM solutions to REALTORS® for years, and see how they are scrambling to ride this very popular wave.

Given the fact that you have these "new young bucks" taking the industry to a new level, and at the same time as the "old dogs, working on learning new tricks," there are some big differences in offerings. It is safe to say that not all cloud solutions are the same and that there are no universal offerings that are standard to all these solutions. To those ends, here is a brief list of some key things to consider when evaluating a cloud computing CRM solution and deciding if it is right for you.