How to Use a CRM System for Your Real Estate Business
One of the things I like to do when looking at a lot of properties is I like to use what’s called a customer relationship management system (CRM). There are several of them out there. There are actually free ones that are pretty good.
One of the ones I recommend is HubSpot’s CRM. It’s a free CRM. It can integrates with just about everything through Zapier.
The nice thing about a CRM is it allows you to manage all the activities that you are doing when searching for a property.
The way I do my whole process when looking for properties is I do the rule of a hundred.
This is where I look at a hundred properties, I analyze 10, I make offers on three, and then I close on one.
When I’m looking at a hundred properties, I am not necessarily recording all those properties in the CRM. I usually just keep those in a spreadsheet or someplace where I can go back and see if I’ve ever looked at that property before.
I use a spreadsheet at first, otherwise, my CRM is going to get really messy and really full of these properties that I don’t want to do anything with.
Once I find properties that I like and that I want to analyze further I will want to start to contact people. That is when I’ll put entries in the CRM.
The CRM will contain lots of information associated with either the seller or the agent trying to sell that property.
In the CRM you can record the person’s name, their contact information, their email and phone number, and the address of the property.
There are many activities that you will want to track for each property. For example, it could be an initial contact and several follow-ups.
There are different stages of where you are with that assessment.
You start in the initial stages. Then maybe you can move it to a stage where you are starting to negotiate. Next, maybe you move it to the next stage where you are making an offer. And then finally you close that property and you close that person.
The other thing I found with a good CRM like HubSpot is that they have interfaces with proposal software. You can actually use that CRM to build a proposal.
If you are trying to create a deck or create a proposal for an investor to come in and invest, the CRMs are very powerful tools.
I liked to use CRMs a lot, and they are very good when you are managing a lot of activities, especially if you are analyzing a lot of properties as a wholesaler.
A wholesaler is going to do a lot more analysis than a fix and flipper is going to do. Usually, the wholesaler is working with multiple cash buyers. Wholesalers are going to be doing a lot of assessments.
When you are analyzing a property, look for a CRM that is going to help you to manage all your activity, and be able to provide you with some kind of management around that activity.
