Relationship Intelligence Driving Real Estate Deals

A commercial real estate customer relationship management platform is a necessary tool for real estate industry leaders. Whether you are a small business with just one or two realtors or a large brokerage within the commercial real estate industry, your CRM is crucial to managing and tracking all of the complex parts of your transactions—and the relationships that led to those transactions.

A commercial real estate CRM tool functions as the foundation for building and nurturing invaluable connections in an industry dominated by the quality and depth of your relationships.

CRE professionals can use their CRMs for much more than storing contact data, including:

• Easily getting a bird’s-eye view of the entire deal cycle, the quality of your relationships, and the speed of deal flow.
• Recording and updating buyer and seller details, as well as any interactions your team has with these contacts. The most efficient CRMs will even automate this process, saving your team hundreds of hours annually.
• Viewing appointments, meetings, and other calendar events, including client birthdays and other important dates.
• Managing listings across portfolios and quickly comparing buyer requirements to listings, so you can match prospective buyers with the right properties.
• Streamlining leasing processes if your services extend beyond the sale.

The commercial real estate business needs so much more than an Excel spreadsheet. They need a customer relationship platform that helps them manage the human side of doing business, while also being able to track, manage, and analyze your “data exhaust”—details from email communications, meetings, and calls—to make more informed data-centric decisions. The right CRE CRM makes business development and sales easier.

As a broker or a real estate agent, your focus needs to be on your professional relationships, not on navigating the software to manage those relationships. Robust CRM tools will offer features including automatic data capture and relationship intelligence—insights into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals—as well as traditional features like lead management and email marketing functions. 

If your firm is growing, you might find that team members have created their own temporary contact and deal management solutions for a CRM like scattered Excel spreadsheets. The challenge with this approach, however, is scaling these processes when information is siloed and inaccessible across the team.

When you can rely on your CRM to function as a single source of truth, everyone on your team involved with a deal can access the same information in real time. Using a CRM with relationship intelligence takes this a step further and enhances your ability to connect with the right person at the right time and bridge new connections. Consolidating your data and translating that data into actionable information is a key part of a commercial real estate CRM.

Relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity allows commercial real estate businesses to take their dealmaking to the next level. It gives you all the benefits of a CRM, but also enables your firm to use that data in new and more powerful ways. By eliminating data entry with automated data capture and enriched data—pulled automatically from industry sources across the web—real estate agents and brokers are freed to focus on finding and nurturing relationships that can lead to won deals.

Combining this data with analytics also gives your commercial real estate businesses the ability to review and learn from the metrics that matter to your bottom line. Tracking and monitoring team performance, your current deal pipeline, and historical deal data together with your contact histories gives you more context into every deal. Learn key details about your wins and losses so you can continuously improve your dealmaking process.

The first thing to consider when you’re evaluating commercial real estate customer relationship management platforms is to determine which problems or challenges you are encountering with your current solution—whether it’s a series of spreadsheets or a CRM system.

For example, many teams struggle with CRM adoption; is your team using the platform you’re already paying for? Starting from what’s currently not working will illuminate what you need to look for in your next solution.

Here are some common concerns that real estate professionals might experience with their CRM software.

1. Does the vendor have adequate customer support? Quality customer support is essential to have in an emergency but should also help ensure you are using your CRM optimally. If you only have email access to support, and each response takes 24 hours, a problem that might take 10 minutes to solve can quickly drag out over multiple weeks. Brokerages and CRE offices are fast-paced environments and waiting for a customer support response could slow down your workflows at a crucial point in a deal. Ideal customer support options will not only include service support but will also provide insights and best practices to help further tailor your CRM solution to your needs.
2. Does the CRM address our specific use cases? Understanding what you expect to use your CRM for can help you narrow down the number of choices for your new solution. Common features that real estate agents are searching for include marketing automation, pipeline management, prospecting, and other aspects of the sales process. If you deal with property managers and lease expirations, you want to make certain that your CRM facilitates these processes or works well with your other software tools.
3. Does the platform offer integrations? In today’s technology-driven world, many real estate professionals rely on a complex tech stack to support their dealmaking efforts. If you use software such as Outlook, Mailchimp, or Slack, you’ll want your CRM to sync with it seamlessly. If you’re hoping to deploy a new CRM, choose one that helps further consolidate your data management by collaborating with your existing software.
4. Does the platform’s pricing fit our budget? Of course, cost is often a factor when you are evaluating the best customer relationship management software for your CRE team. If you are a small business, or a boutique brokerage, a simpler, less expensive software solution may be a better choice at this time. Most CRM vendors’ functionality scales with pricing, however, and teams that opt for a free option solely based on pricing often find their other requirements aren’t being met and end up paying more for additional software to fill gaps, or to fix the damage incurred by a limited feature set.
5. Is it easy to launch the CRM and onboard new users? Time is one of your most valuable assets, and your CRM should protect it, not waste it. If the platform requires significant training or extended onboarding to accommodate complex customization, it may not be worth the time it takes to set up. The amount of training required to use the platform also directly impacts whether or not your team will adopt it, especially if it requires hours worth of manual data entry to maintain. This makes finding a customer relationship management solution that automates data collection a must.

Commercial real estate brokers choose Affinity because they want to stay ahead of the competition, and a CRM solution that combines automated data entry with relationship intelligence is the best way to manage deals that depend on long-term relationships. 

Affinity’s enriched datasets also expand your team’s access to data outside of your own network and help fill in information gaps your team may otherwise spend time filling manually including job titles or geographic location.

These time-saving features allow real estate teams to harness their attention on what’s most important to winning deals—building and sustaining quality relationships. The platform’s user-oriented design is built to be as easy to use as a spreadsheet, so whether your team wants to reach out to contacts on the go from a mobile app on their iPhone or Android they always have the information they need at their fingertips. 

There are a range of solutions for CRE teams, from Microsoft Dynamics, which isn’t quite a CRM, to ClientLook CRM, designed specifically with commercial real estate professionals in mind. If you’re interested in an easy-to-use, automated platform designed to give you the sophisticated insights your team needs, you can talk to an Affinity team member today.

Your CRM is the foundational technology of your tech stack. That’s why Affinity offers integrations with some of the most commonly used software tools in the commercial real estate industry. Additionally, with custom integration options, Affinity can connect to any of your most important tools. Connect with an Affinity team member today to get started.

Industry-leading commercial real estate teams including Prologis, JLL, Tishman Speyer, Cushman & Wakefield, and hundreds of others trust Affinity with their most important dealmaking data. Learn more about what Affinity’s customers are saying.

1. Automated relationship intelligence enables teams to be more effective, prospect smarter, and close more deals. By accurately capturing all of your team’s interactions and communication data across your collective netowrk, Affinity ensures you can confidently and quickly understand the contextual details of every relationship in your CRM.
2. Fast time to value and flexible deployment make it easy to get started. Affinity can be deployed and ready to use quickly—sometimes in as little as days—and it’s easy to customize in-house, so it always works for your needs and at your speed. 
3. A user-oriented experience leads to high adoption rates. Affinity is as simple to use as a spreadsheet and offers the sophistication of a purpose-built dealmaking tool. Automation further improves the user experience by freeing your teams from the drudgery of manual data entry and allowing them to focus on their next opportunities. 
4. An affordable price point makes it more accessible to teams of all sizes. Affinity not only helps save your team money by saving them time, it also has a lower monthly cost than similar CRE CRM platforms.