Real Estate CRMs: How to Choose (and Use!) the Right One for You
- Published on
- 32 min listen
- Matt McGee Editor, Agent Resource CenterCloseMatt McGee Editor, Agent Resource Center
Matt McGee is HomeLight's Agent Resource Center managing editor. He hosts HomeLight's weekly podcast, The Walkthrough, which delivers actionable, no-hype advice from the best real estate agents and top industry experts in the country. He previously served as Editor-In-Chief for three Third Door Media digital publications: Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and MarTech Today. Matt's a Pepperdine University grad who's been surrounded by real estate his entire life: his wife and sister are active agents, as was his dad for almost 50 years.
Smartphones and spreadsheets are okay, but you won’t be able to compete with the top-performing agents and teams without your own customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
The right CRM will help you grow and run your business. If you use a CRM correctly, you and your agents will never wonder again what you need to do when the workday begins. But much like other real estate tech tools, there are a lot of CRMs to choose from.
In part two of our real estate technology podcast series, Rivers Pearce — one of BoomTown’s early employees — explains the four features that every good CRM should have. He also talks about how to choose or change CRMs, and whether the franchise-provided CRMs have enough horsepower to run your business.
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Links and Show Notes
- w8less – Rivers’ digital agency specializing in real estate marketing & technology
- History of the frisbee
- History of bubble wrap
- History of Play-Doh
- NAR 2020 Member Profile
- G2: Best CRM Software
- Capterra: CRM Software
- Join our Facebook community for The Walkthrough listeners
- HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
- Subscribe and listen to The Walkthrough: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube
Full Transcript
(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host) Did you know that the frisbee was a pie tin before it was a Frisbee? I’m serious. There was an East Coast bakery owned by the Frisbie family. People would buy their pies and then play catch with the tins when there was no pie left. The family name was on every pie tin, and the frisbee was born.
Did you know that bubble wrap began as a textured wall covering before people started using it as a shipping protector?
Play-Doh was created as a wallpaper cleaner before kids started playing with it and a toy was born.
All of that is true. Throughout history, we’ve used products in ways they weren’t intended to be used. In real estate, you might be tempted to use your phone and/or a spreadsheet as your CRM. Our guest today has a suggestion, don’t. You’re going to need more than a phone and spreadsheet if you want to take your business to the next level.
CRM stands for customer relationship management, and it’s one of the five must-have tech tools that you need to run and grow your real estate business. That was one of the takeaways from part one of this series last week. Today, in part two, we’ll go deep with one of BoomTown’s first employees about how to choose and use a CRM.
This is “The Walkthrough.”
(INTRO MUSIC)
Hey, everybody. I’m Matt McGee, editor of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center. Welcome to “The Walkthrough.” On this show, you’ll learn what’s working right now from the best real estate agents and industry experts in the country. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents, and we’re on a journey to find out how great real estate agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable. You can get involved in the show in a couple of different ways. Leave a voicemail or text me. It’s (415) 322-3328. You can send an email to walkthrough [at] homelight.com, or find me in our Facebook listener community. Just go to Facebook, search Homelight Walkthrough and the group should come right up.
Do you have a CRM? I was surprised earlier this year when the National Association of Realtors 2020 member profile came out. It included this nugget: 36% of Realtors rarely or never use a customer relationship management tool. If you caught part one of our Real Estate Technology series last week, you know that a CRM is one of the five must-have tech tools for real estate agents.
Rivers: You can have a business, you can certainly run a business and have, like, a single agent kind of business with a spreadsheet of your contacts and maybe trying to use your phone. Okay. But if you want to actually scale and grow your business and have that kind of system that is doing work for you behind-the-scenes and in the middle of the night and those kinds of things, you have to have a CRM in place. There’s just no way you’re going to compete with the top performing agents and teams out there without it.
Matt: That’s the voice of Rivers Pearce, a guy who is uniquely qualified to talk on this subject. You’re familiar with BoomTown, right? The super-popular real estate CRM. He was BoomTown’s 10th employee and worked his way up the company ladder over almost nine years there. Today, Rivers is the CEO and co-founder of w8less, a digital agency that specializes in real estate marketing and technology. Rivers knows the ins and outs of the CRM industry, and he knows what it’s like in the trenches from having worked with many of the most successful teams and agents in the country.
On today’s show, you’ll hear Rivers talk about what you should look for when choosing a CRM and when you should think about upgrading it, how to understand the layers of sophistication that you’ll find in different CRMs, whether the franchise-provided CRMs are good enough to run a real estate business. And at the end of today’s conversation, we also have some general tech questions from our Facebook listener community, things like virtual staging and virtual showings technology among others.
So, all of that is coming up. Let’s get started with part two of our Real Estate Tech series today, a deep dive on CRMs with Rivers Pearce.
(BEGIN CONVERSATION)
Matt: Everyone asks, what is the best CRM? But I don’t think there’s an answer to that. If you ask 10 agents you might get 10 different answers. So, let me ask it this way. What makes a good CRM? What should agents look for when they are in the market for a CRM?
Rivers: Yeah. I will answer that first question if you don’t mind.
Matt: Go ahead.
Rivers: The best CRM is the one you use. That’s what it comes down to. Now, what do you need to look for? A lot of CRM now is pretty much commoditized in the sense, but you absolutely need to be able to catalog name, address, phone, and pertinent attributes for that person, or people, or company. I think you also need to have, at the very least, you know, the ability to set follow-up reminders, log tasks, you know, take notes on the phone call, or a conversation that was had. You need to be able to tag, you know, so to come up with a simple, straightforward tagging schema or architecture. I’ve seen people have thousands of tags. Well, that doesn’t work, you know. Have something that really works for your business. And then potentially categorization. Some people would say tagging and categorization are the same, but, you know, think about it in the sense of being able to say cold, archived, dead lead, or hot, nurture watch, you know, those kinds of things, cold, warm, whatever, those kinds of categories. And then within that, maybe a tag is like second home, vacation, you know, move up, downsize, apartment, those kinds of things, right? So that you can… What is…?
A database allows you to…It’s a database, so it allows you to get all the information in one house so you can quickly engage with that information to do something, right? And so, a good tagging strategy that allows you to go in and say, “I want to see all my leads that are second-home buyers in this ZIP code and this price point. Send me that.” And then from there, I think a great CRM has to have some sort of communication component, either built-in or an integration to a marketing automation suite where you could say, “All right, now send this whole group an email for this specific listing,” you know, those kinds of things. So, you want to be able to pull something out and then do something with it, right? Whether it’s getting on the phone, sending texts, sending emails, door-knocking mail, whatever that might be.
Matt: So, if I heard that, just to recap, make sure listeners caught that too. So, basic contact information, a scheduling/reminder sort of component as well, tagging and classifying all your leads so that you know who’s doing what, and then the communication, like actually being able to act on these people and communicate with them, send them an email, a text, whatever it might be.
Rivers: Yup. And the ones that would be integrated say into an IDX type of platform as well, you know, you’re going to get that extra kind of juicy stuff around the properties. They’re looking at the price points, they’re looking at how often they’re coming to your website. Those kinds of things can be obviously very, very insightful. Because, ultimately, a CRM is just allowing you to catalog and organize your information or your database, your clients, your prospects, and then a good CRM, in my opinion, you should sit down every day and not say, “What am I going to do today?” Right.
Matt: Exactly.
Rivers: I sit down and my task list that I’ve already…you know, everything… I know who I’m calling, why I’m calling them, what I’m doing. You know, you eliminate that first hour of the day of figuring out what the heck you’re doing.
Matt: Yeah. That goes back… We had Jackie Soto and Elmer Morales on many episodes ago, and that was the point they made too. And I thought it was such a great one that when you’re using your CRM correctly, you never wonder what you’re supposed to do on a given day. It’s all right there in front of you, who you’re supposed to contact.
Rivers: Absolutely. And you know, as well as I do, people like that, like, they’re not coming in at 8:00 figuring out what to do for the day.
Matt: Right.
Rivers: So, they’re coming down and getting to work immediately, and probably had automation going on all night, right? So, if you’re starting your day and figuring out the first two hours what you’re doing, you’re going to lose because everybody else is already way ahead.
Matt: Yeah, exactly. You’re way behind. One of the challenges with CRMs in my head is that there’s different levels of sophistication with them, aren’t there? Right? Like, I feel like there’s some really basic ones. There’s some sort of…I don’t know if mid-range is maybe the word to use, but they sort of go up in sophistication. You know, you worked at BoomTown for years, that I consider to be as full-featured as any out there, and it has competitors as well. Can you speak to the different levels of sophistication at CRMs, and maybe some of the ones that you would put into each level?
Rivers: Yeah. So, we’ll start at the top then, right? So, when you talk about a BoomTown, Commissions Inc, KV, you know, those level platforms, yes, they have CRM components, but I would call them sales and marketing suites, right? They’re sales and marketing platforms because an integrated website, IDX, CRM, marketing automation, you know, agent accountability tracking, those kinds of things, right, that’s going to be kind of table stakes for those types of platform. That’s not for everybody, right? Because you’re talking thousands of dollars just to kind of get in the door on some of these programs. But if you’re looking for something that’s integrated platform-wise, those are going to be where you would look.
The next level down would be your kind of pure-play CRM that are for real estate. So, the best example of that would probably be something like Follow Up Boss, where they’re not in the website business at all, right? You can put a pixel on your website, it’ll pull that information in, but they’re selling a CRM, and it plugs into your email, right? So, it’s like those kinds of things but it’s built for real estate, so it has tagging and things in it that are real estate specific. Another one would have been Contactually, but Contactually is with Compass now, so I’m not even sure that’s a standalone product anymore.
But then you’ve also got, you know, just generic CRMs, everything from Salesforce, Zoho, Copper, Sugar, people use monday.com. I mean, there’s a bunch of different ways to use those, but those are not going to be real estate specific. And so, unless you’ve got something that really you can set it up and keep yourself accountable on it, has all the bells and whistles that any CRM is going to have, but it’s not necessarily going to have kind of that typical real estate workflow baked into it from the way it was designed and built, to begin with.
Matt: So, an agent looking at all these options need to figure out first and foremost, what I need, do I need the full suite? Do I need the website, the whole nine yards? Or do I need something that is just, you know, maybe a little less expensive, just focuses on the real estate?
Rivers: Right. Like, if you’re trying to get out of my iPhone is my CRM or my spreadsheet is my CRM, if you’re trying to get out of that world, the next…you’re probably not ready for a big suite kind of program, a platform, right? So, the next step there is moving into a standalone CRM where you’re at least getting out of the spreadsheet, right? You know, at least you’re getting out of your phone being your CRM.
Matt: What about as an agent’s database grows, is that something they need to consider? Like, if I have 2,000 people in my database, I might need X as my CRM, but if it gets up to 20,000, 30,000, or more people, there are new things I need to think about?
Rivers: Yeah. Great question. I think the first way to look at it is, you know, there are platforms out there that are for lead generation, what I would call click to closing, lead generation, nurturing them through the pipeline, into a contract, and closing that deal. Then you start building a database of past clients, people that you’ve closed deals with. And as that starts to grow, sometimes I do see people that once they get 20,000, 30,000, sometimes 100,000 people in a past client database, that is a bit of a different animal from a business perspective, right? The communications, the marketing materials, the things that are going out to that group might be very different than the people that are in the buy cycle, that are in a purchase mindset.
And so, in that regard, I have seen people, you know, take their sales marketing platforms and the CRM integrated solutions, and then once somebody closes the deal, they may leverage something like a Salesforce, like a true powerhouse CRM on the back end for all that other stuff, right? If you’ve got a 20-year-old brokerage, you got probably tens of thousands of past clients, not leads necessarily, past clients, right, people that have done business with you. I mean, that’s where you really should be spending a lot of your time anyway, right? So, you do need something there potentially to split things out a little bit, but that’s really only when you get into that next level. Most of the platforms out there nowadays should be able to accommodate multiple thousands, if not tens of thousands of leads for your marketing purposes.
Matt: If you’re an agent, where do you go to learn about all the CRM options that are available? Are there websites that list this sort of stuff that…you know, a directory of CRMs?
Rivers: Yes and no. I mean, there’s nothing really super-specific in the real estate world that I know of. There’s like G2 Crowd, there are…Capterra, I think is another one, that are just general technology informational kind of comparison sites. But I think you’ve got things like Inman. You’ve got, obviously… Got to run a quick Google search and, you know, there are some lists of things out there, and then, obviously, talking to… What I’ve seen work for most people best is find somebody that’s either your coach, your mentor, somebody in your office that you want to be like, and as my friend, Tom Ferry, says, “Just rip off and duplicate. Do what they’re doing,” right? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. It’s not rocket science, right? So, if somebody is doing a good job, it’s something you like, ask them what they’re using. I mean, you know, real estate can be a little competitive but, you know, that’s my advice for it. Talk to the people in your office, or a coach, or a mentor.
Matt: One of the other things we should talk about too is that some of the big franchises are getting into the CRM business as well, right? KW has the KW command platform. RE/MAX has a platform, I believe. Does C21 and the others? What’s that landscape look like right now?
Rivers: Yeah. They all do now. They didn’t 5, 10 years ago, you know, but I think that a lot of the big franchises recognized that they needed to have something in place, at least for the larger agent base, right? Your 5 to 20 deal a year kind of agent that may not have the money or the desire to have their own tech stack. All of those platforms are better than anything you could be doing in the spreadsheet, iPhone, as your CRM world, right? Again, if they’re offering it, use it, right? Unless you need something that is like your tech stack that you’ve got to have to take with you as you move to different franchises, or brokerages, or whatever, you know. All of those programs, what RE/MAX did with Booj, what KW has built, they’re really pretty sophisticated platforms now. I can’t remember exactly what the Realogy umbrella is doing these days, but there’s certainly platforms that they offer. And I know Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices has one now, EXP I think works with KV and CINC, you know. So they all have something that they can at least offer, if not, it comes as part of the program.
Matt: Do you have any sense how good they are? Like, are they developed enough at this point that you can run a business with them?
Rivers: I think so. I will say that I do know that if you’re one of the big top-performing teams and you’re doing…you know, if you’ve got multiple offices, 50, 100 agents, you’re doing 500 transactions a year, I don’t know about that. I don’t know anybody at that level that’s really leaning in and, like, just getting rid of all their own tech stack and going with a franchise solution. I don’t know if it’s built for that group. As a single agent, as a starting out, you know, a small team, absolutely, it can certainly be plenty of horsepower for you.
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Matt: I think a lot of agents probably are afraid of the idea of switching, right, from one platform to another. They may not be happy with their existing CRM, but they’re reluctant to change because, “Oh, my gosh, that sounds really challenging.” How do you handle that debate, that internal debate that you’re having?
Rivers: It is definitely challenging, I would say. You first take a step back and say, “Okay, well, why do I want to change?” If you feel, and I’ve seen this before a million times is, it’s never really the technology’s fault if you’re not closing deals, right? If you’re not getting business, you need to take a look at your operations, at your team, at your scripts and things like that because the technology is not going to just do that for you or be a hindrance to that, right? So, that would be the first thing is if you’re blaming the tech, take a step back and look in the mirror and say, “Well, is it really the tech or do I just actually need to use it, right?” Use it better. If there’s a feature that you’re missing that isn’t going to…like, those are the kinds of things once you’ve established that, “Well, hey, I really want this thing and this technology doesn’t offer that, so I need to find something else,” or, “I’m not seeing a positive ROI.” That could also be due to your inability to actually close deals, maybe, you never know, but just being…you know, I always want people to take a look at the mirror first because it’s typically not the technology’s fault.
The change is difficult in the sense, if it’s pure CRM it’s not as daunting from a change perspective because the consumer is never interacting with that CRM, right? They’re interacting with you through that CRM, so you just want to make sure that your information can easily be extracted into a CSV and uploaded into the new platform.
Now, if you’re using a suite like say in BoomTown, KV, that has a database of people that are used to going to that website — so making that migration can be a bit challenging from a consumer perspective. And you have to be very careful that now you’re asking them to move to a different platform, set up a new profile, you know, you may have people that don’t get those emails and they have bookmark links, and then that website might go dead. Like, there are some things there that can be challenging, but people do it all the time, you know.
So, again, they’re all going to work if you use them for the most part, right? But kicking our tires around on a CRM can set you back quite a bit if you’re not… Like, if you really get into and you’re doing it and it’s not working for you and you need to move on, yes. But unless you’re giving it 110%, there’s these people that just hop around to these things all the time, and what you see is their business never really scales, right? They do 100 transactions a year and they’ve been trying to do 150 for the last three, right? It’s because they don’t necessarily commit to something, and that follow-through is really what it comes down to.
Matt: Let me go to a couple of questions that came in from listeners in our Facebook community about CRMs. And this one from Abby Walters, I laughed when she shared it with me. I think there’s so much truth here. She said, “How come every time I ask an agent, ‘Do you have a CRM that you love?’ Everyone says, ‘Well, this is the one I use, but I don’t really love it?'”
Rivers: Yeah. That is a great question.
Matt: It’s true.
Rivers: I just had this conversation with a client of mine last week and it was the same thing. “Well, we’re using it, but I hate it.” I was like, “Okay, well, you know, I think a lot times what that comes down to is people don’t like being held accountable. They don’t like actually having to do things and see that they have these things, like that can be a piece of it, right? It’s like big brother or dad is watching over your shoulder or something.” So, you know, the bottom line though is there’s pretty much feature parity across the board with these these days. Now, 5, 10 years ago, it wasn’t so much like that. You’d have…somebody would have something that was very unique to their thing, but I think at the core nowadays, like, if you can’t find the CRM you like, you might be in the wrong business. It’s just part of doing business. There’s not any bells or whistles, I think, that are going to make one thing that much better, or…you know. I’d love to hear what all the things they hate about these platforms are.
Matt: Right. Right. We also had quite…it’s more of a statement and I’ll turn it into a question for you, Rivers. This is from Eve Courson in Colorado Springs. She says, “I struggle sitting in front of a computer typing all the client data into the CRM. Someone please develop a way to talk or dictate the client info into the CRM.” So, to turn that into a question, are you aware, is there any movement towards voice capabilities, you know, being able to talk into your phone?
Rivers: I think if that’s a problem for you, obviously, uploading a database from a spreadsheet or something would be the best way. It would all just go into the system and formatted properly and everything has its place. Getting from the kind of legacy system into a CRM is one thing. If you’re using a platform that’s integrated with the front-end website or as an offsite lead form that would live on a website or somewhere, all that information is automatically going to pipe into the CRM for you when somebody fills that out. The only thing there might be an option for some people if you’re using say like call tracking software, for example, like CallRail or Invoca or some of these call tracking providers. A lot of them do have capabilities to integrate with CRM where when the phone call comes in, it will populate name, address, phone, and various information that it can find that’s associated with that phone number, you know, like white pages information, and populate your CRM for you in that regard. But as far as dictating information in, I’ve not seen anything like that.
Matt: Okay. And then there’s a question as well from Raylene Lewis, who is in College Station, Texas, and a previous podcast guest on “The Walkthrough.” She wants to know, what are your thoughts on the future of virtual staging and virtual showing technology? So, that’s two things that have really come to the forefront here in the last six months or so because of the pandemic. So, what are your thoughts on things like that?
Rivers: So, let’s address the virtual showing technology first. I would say that there was a time, as recently as three to six months ago, where I was like, you know, “That’s a nice-to-have,” especially if you’re dealing with foreign buyers, you know, or a lot of second-home buyers. You know, a few years back, we would talk about, “Hey, buy Oculus headset, load it up, send it to your buyers in China,” those kinds of things for that luxury level. Certainly, a nice-to-have, right? But now, you know, there are plenty of markets where there’s just no…even now there’s no open houses even happening, so you better have something in place. It’s not a nice-to-have for a lot of people now.
And if you have a prospective client let’s say that wants to list their home with you and you don’t offer a virtual showing kind of program, and they don’t want people in their house, you’re probably not going to get the listing. So, it’s kind of, like, you better have something in place to do it that’s more than just an iPhone kind of thing, right? There’s plenty of software to do it now. And I know the cameras are expensive and things like that, but there’s services that will come in and set all that up and do it for you. I think it’s the cost of doing business now.
As for staging, obviously… I’m a big fan of the virtual staging world. The cost has come down quite a bit these days. Manually staging is expensive and requires a bunch of people to go in and out of a property, and there’s some people that are not going to like that. And plus, you’re just kind of directionally giving somebody what a room or a home could look like. So, I think the virtual option is a great way to go. And people…you know, we live in 2020 in a very virtual kind of oriented world. Some of those things… Like, people have expectations like, “Oh, this is virtually staged but I get the idea.” Some of them look real, you know, so I’m a big fan of it.
Matt: Yeah. I was kind of skeptical the first time I heard of virtual staging and like, “Yeah, that just seems like it might turn out cheesy or low rent maybe, but…”
Rivers: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. Like, some of it is really high-quality and really lets you envision what the house, what the room might look like.
Rivers: Yeah. And I think you can also…you could customize it for somebody that wants to buy the house, right? It gives you a lot more options there as well. So, I’m a big fan, and I know that a well-staged home typically sells faster and for more money.
Matt: And for money. Yeah.
Rivers: So, it’s also a must. Like, if the question is virtual stage or nothing, virtually stage, for sure.
Matt: Are there any other technologies that are on your radar, things that you’re interested in seeing how they develop, and maybe agents should be keeping an eye on as well?
Rivers: Nothing right now, to be honest with you. I’ve been spending the last year really focused in on that unsexy world of operational technology, of API integrations, of actually getting your tech stack to talk to each other, and data visualization. The real estate world, in my opinion, is quite far behind on a lot of those, so you get wrapped up in all these front-end consumer sexy things, but you forget about the stuff that actually makes your business run. That’s what I think is very exciting, and I think more agents would benefit from really focusing in on that side of their business because it creates efficiency, it creates processes and things that allow you to scale, right? So, nothing really, I think. I would hate to throw a bunch of things out there to get people excited about something. What you find in real estate a lot is, again, they chase these shiny objects around and they’re still struggling with just using a CRM, right? So, until somebody has got that stuff down, you shouldn’t be thinking about shiny stuff.
Matt: Rivers, this has been really great. Thank you so much. CRMs are such a huge pain point for real estate agents. To sum up the conversation, what would you want agents to take away just in terms of finding the right CRM, and then I’d say even more importantly, using the CRM?
Rivers: I know this sounds harsh, but I dare you to try to compete in 2020 and beyond without having a CRM in place, right? And that means you have to use it. The agents that are growing, and building businesses, and taking your business, you know, the people that are always complaining about so and so is always getting all the business. I guarantee you, they’ve got an airtight operational infrastructure, not only of CRM technology and other technology in their tech stack, but an airtight process and protocols, and they hold themselves accountable. They hold their team accountable. CRM is not… Obviously, I’ve said it for years when I worked at BoomTown, if BoomTown did all this for me, do you think I would be working there? I would be a BoomTown client and just press a button and make money, right? That’s not how it works. You have… These are tools, they’re technology, that’s it. So, use it. If you use it, it should work for you.
(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host) I think that’s a great point to end on. You can’t expect the CRM or your tech stack to do everything for you. You still have to hold yourself, your team, etc. accountable, and you need the right processes and protocols in place to grow and compete in your market.
Hey, thanks so much for these past two episodes, Rivers. Really, really great stuff. I think we’re going to rely on Rivers as one of our go-to tech people in the future here on “The Walkthrough.”
Let’s do some takeaways from today’s show. This is what stood out to me from the conversation about CRMs.
Takeaway number one. Rivers says there are four things your CRM must have at minimum. Number one is a way to catalog your contacts, name, address, phone, and so forth. Number two, a way to tag and categorize your contacts. Are they buyer or seller? Are they looking for a second home? Are they investor? Things like that. Number three, you need a reminder or a task system to help you follow up with all your contacts. And then number four, the CRM should have some kind of communication tool, a way to email or text your contacts when you need to.
Takeaway number two, when you are using your CRM correctly, you should never wake up in the morning and not have something to do. If you’re writing notes and setting reminders in the CRM, it’ll tell you every day, “Contact this person and ask them about X. Follow up with this person and talk to them about Y,” etc. You wake up in the morning, fire up your CRM, and there’s your list of stuff to do first thing in the morning.
Takeaway number three, understand the different levels and types of CRMs that are out there. Some are generic and built for a wide variety of businesses. Some are real estate specific. That would be ones like Follow Up Boss and Contactually. And then some are both real estate specific and full marketing/CRM suites. That would be things like BoomTown or Commissions Inc, and there are others. So, Rivers said to be aware of those differences and also understand that as your database grows, you might also outgrow your CRM.
Takeaway number four, as far as the franchise provided CRMs go, Rivers says they’re probably not being used by the big super successful teams or agents, you know, the ones doing 500 transactions a year. But he says, as far as he knows, they do have plenty of horsepower for smaller teams and solo agents.
If you want to connect with Rivers, if you want to ask him a question about something you heard today or on last week’s show, he is in our Facebook listener community. So, just go to Facebook, do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough, and the group should come right up. If you want to get in touch with me, you can also find me in our listener community, or you can send me a text, leave a voicemail. The phone number is (415) 322-3328. You can also send me an email, that’s walkthrough [at] homelight.com.
So, that’s all for this week. Thanks again to Rivers Pearce for joining me, and thank you for listening. My name is Matt McGee, and you’ve been listening to “The Walkthrough.” Why do we do a weekly podcast? Because at HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great real estate agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.
Go out and safely sell some homes, everyone. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.
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