Best CRM for Real Estate Businesses

In the nonstop world of real estate, time is money, so you can’t afford to get bogged down by messy spreadsheets or inefficient tools. As a real estate agent, you need to be able to stay on top of your prospects, organize property showings, manage listings, handle negotiations, match buyers with their ideal houses and keep them updated throughout the process — to say nothing of the amount of paperwork involved.

This is where a quality real estate customer relationship management (CRM) platform comes to the rescue. It can help your real estate business stay organized, streamline the buying and selling processes, manage contacts and, ultimately, close more deals. We’ve closely reviewed dozens of CRM solutions and their features to help you navigate their complexities and find an ideal solution that matches the needs of your real estate company.

The pricing and costs of your real estate CRM will depend on your agency’s size, business needs and priorities. Small agencies, solo real estate agents and companies new to CRM systems might want to start with a free plan from providers, such as HubSpot or Zoho CRM. While limited in their features, free CRMs can help you get started, set up essential processes and determine the tools you might need moving forward. More established real estate agencies will benefit from live demos of top-tier plans offered by many providers.

Free trials also provide ample opportunities to evaluate a CRM solution. The length usually varies between 14 and 30 days but can often be extended if you reach out directly to the provider.

When evaluating the pricing of a real estate CRM, consider additional factors, such as add-ons and higher feature limits. For example, Pipedrive’s LeadBooster live chat and prospecting add-on will add an extra $32.50 per month.

Some companies also charge for CRM implementation, training, data migration or onboarding. For instance, HubSpot offers premium onboarding services starting at $10,000 and Zoho provides a dedicated implementation program, Jumpstart, offered at a minimum of $2,000.

If your agency requires 24/7 customer support or other premium service options, many providers offer them at an additional charge. For example, Zoho’s Premium support package will cost 20 percent of your subscription fee.

The best CRM software providers offer a wide variety of features to help you and your business stay organized, manage leads and close more deals. Real estate agencies, in particular, should look for the following features when choosing a CRM solution.

Contact management

Contacts are at the heart of real estate CRMs. After all, real estate is a people business. Contact management features can help agents bring all their client information — contact details, budget, time frame, property preferences — into one centralized space, so they can build a comprehensive customer profile and match them to ideal properties or buyers.

The best real estate CRMs update contact records automatically based on recent activity, such as email conversations or associated deal advancements. To reduce manual data entry time and help organize their vast contact lists, real estate agents should particularly keep an eye out for features, such as contact segmentation and tagging, custom fields, contact enrichment and business card scanning.

Lead management

Lead management tools let real estate agents capture, organize and generate incoming leads from various sources, such as listing websites, landing pages, inquiry emails, open house forms and social media. Make sure that your CRM tags your newly entered leads so that you can pull up their information easily later on.

Ideally, the system should also create a follow-up action so that each lead can move one step closer to conversion rather than sitting idly in your database. It’s also helpful if your real estate CRM allows you to score leads so that you can focus on the most promising opportunities.

Property listing management

The best real estate CRMs provide agents with an opportunity to keep track of their numerous properties. Product catalogs can be used to store property details and images and share them easily with prospective buyers. Additionally, an integration with a CPQ module will allow real estate agents to send quotes and invoices along with the associated property details straight from the CRM.

Sales pipeline management

There is no point in simply storing contacts if they can’t be turned into deals. The best real estate CRMs support sales pipeline management and offer visual pipelines that can be updated easily with a drag-and-drop. It can be helpful to have multiple pipelines for different property types, sales cycles or territories. Kanban-style pipelines are quite common among real estate CRMs, with some providers offering a funnel and list views as well — it’s important that your system displays the deals in a way that works for you. Some CRMs can also update contacts automatically based on their deal progress and vice versa, saving agents valuable time and ensuring consistency across the system.

Omnichannel client communication

Consistent and prompt communication with buyers and sellers is at the heart of a successful real estate business. A good CRM brings client conversations from across all channels — email, phone, website and social media — in one place, providing valuable context for your next outreach and ensuring timely follow-ups.

Some CRMs offer a unified communication hub, allowing you to not only track but also interact with clients from within the system. Real estate agents should keep an eye on features, such as email sync, live chat widgets and chatbots, web form builders and integration with SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and other relevant communication platforms.

Built-in marketing tools

Promoting your business, services and listings is often just as important as the first property showing and your real estate CRM should offer a range of marketing features to help you stand out from the competition. Ideally, your system will include built-in email marketing services — or, at the very least, relevant integrations — and social media support.

Assess the available email templates and their usability, the system’s ability to send targeted email campaigns and build landing pages and web forms and how easy it is to create personalized marketing experiences.

Automated workflows

Busy real estate agents don’t have time to update CRM details manually or go through the motions of repeating the same CRM tasks. That’s why a good system will take care of data entry and workflow automation, allowing real estate agents to focus on closing deals. Consider whether your CRM can send automated follow-up emails, update deals based on specific triggers, send property alerts or remind agents about upcoming house showings.

Some real estate CRMs offer helpful AI assistants that can suggest the best next actions, flag deals that require immediate attention, pull up all relevant property or client details on a prompt and build entire sales sequences.

Reporting and analytics

Real estate agents need to be able to analyze their past deals and activities to improve future performance and see how far off they are from hitting their targets. Quality real estate CRMs offer detailed reports and visual dashboards that provide an overview of key sales metrics, including sales volume, average commission, days on market (DOM), showings per sale and listing-to-meeting ratio.

It’s important that your CRM allows you to filter reports to pull up and share relevant information easily. AI-powered CRM forecasting tools can also help you better plan your workload, prioritize the most profitable opportunities and adjust your sales and digital marketing strategy.

According to IBISWorld, in 2024, there were 1,535 CRM providers in the U.S. alone. While not all systems are created equal, it can be challenging to find the one that suits your real estate business. Follow the steps below to narrow down your search and home in on your ideal CRM fit.

1. Assess your business needs

To find the most suitable solution for your real estate business, you first need to understand your business goals and reasons for getting a CRM in the first place. Consider using a problem-first approach. Do you lack visibility into your agents’ performance and key performance indicators? Prioritize reporting capabilities in your CRM. Do you feel that some leads are slipping through the cracks due to your long response time?

Make sure your system brings together all your communication channels. Do you spend most of your time on the go and need to keep track of client updates? Mobile CRM apps can be something to look for in your solution. Make a list of your top problems and priorities that you can come back to when evaluating different providers.

2. Do your market research

With the sheer number of CRM apps available, it can be difficult to find the one that ticks all the boxes for your real estate agency. You can start with topical review guides (such as this one) and check user comments on third-party review sites. Pay close attention to specialized solutions and reviews from other real estate agents and industry experts. Some providers will have dedicated case studies, which can help you evaluate relevant use cases and compare business-specific CRM benefits.

3. Ask vendors for a demo or join a webinar

Most CRMs offer free trials that usually vary from 14 to 30 days, during which you can evaluate the product. However, if asked, many providers will also offer a one-on-one demo, especially if you’re considering an Enterprise-level solution or there is no trial available.

Demos provide an ideal opportunity to ask business-specific questions to see if and how the CRM can be customized to fit your needs and to see it in action. You can also join a live webinar or review some on-demand resources. However, while webinars can give you a good idea of the product’s functionality, they rarely focus on real estate-specific use cases.

4. Evaluate key features

During a trial period — or while on a demo call with a vendor — make sure to evaluate whether a system has the key CRM features that address the pain points you’ve identified previously and how well they are executed.

Additionally, ensure that the solution integrates seamlessly with your current setup and programs. For that, review and test their available integrations and note whether connecting them requires an API or technical knowledge. Pay close attention to the provided customer support, security features and general usability.

5. Consider pricing

In most cases, CRM pricing depends on your selected tier. However, consider additional cost factors, such as paid add-ons, feature limits, user allowances and annual vs monthly billing. Some CRMs also charge fees for onboarding, data migration, training and implementation, so make sure to confirm that prior to purchase.

Often, free CRMs can be sufficient for solo real estate agents and smaller real estate agencies while larger businesses might want to evaluate higher-tier solutions. However, pay close attention to features and services that are priced based on a percentage of your license fee — the costs can climb up quickly.

While many real estate agents and real estate agencies are still using spreadsheets to keep track of their clients and deals, having a dedicated CRM system can greatly increase your productivity, streamline operations and free up valuable time that can be spent on closing sales. The following are just some of the top benefits of implementing a real estate CRM solution in your agency.

360-degree customer view

A real estate CRM can help bring all client details — from contact information to property preferences to the latest conversations — into one central space. It allows agents to get the full picture at a glance and use it to personalize their outreach, quickly pull up relevant details on a call, and, eventually, match a suitable buyer with an ideal property. Agents can use custom fields and tags to ensure the information is stored and filtered the way they need it. Additionally, having a central source of client data means that all real estate agents remain on the same page and avoid duplicate efforts.

Generate more leads

A good real estate CRM can take your lead generation and management to a new level. It can help you create inquiry web forms directly linked to the CRM records, set up chatbots to qualify and route initial requests, design landing pages for your listings and even manage your social media outreach. Most importantly, a CRM system will ensure that no potential buyer or seller slips through the cracks.

Elevate client communication

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), there are currently over 1.5 million real estate agents in the US. This means that if you don’t reply to a prospect’s message right away, chances are they will turn to your competition. Having a real estate CRM ensures you can be notified the moment a potential client reaches out to you, regardless of the channel. Each conversation will be recorded in the system automatically, with some CRMs being able to transcribe and analyze each call to determine client concerns and intent.

Get full visibility into your agency’s performance

With a real estate CRM, you don’t need to wait until the end of the quarter to review sales figures — key metrics will be displayed in real-time on visual dashboards and you can run and share in-depth reports in a click. Many CRMs also leverage the power of AI to highlight any risks or pipeline bottlenecks and alert you to emerging opportunities. Most systems will allow you to set up custom reports based on your agency’s needs and even schedule and regularly email top-level insights to relevant stakeholders.

Boost productivity

Manual data entry is a waste of agents’ time and is prone to human error. The same can be said about repetitive tasks. Rather than updating each individual client record, real estate agents can use a CRM to scan the web and enhance each contact automatically with details from their social media profiles. They can set up automated workflows to send post-sale emails, schedule showings, follow up with a quote and run personalized email marketing campaigns. AI-powered real estate CRMs can also help real estate agents save time by creating email templates and generating messages, pulling up property and deal data on a prompt, running sales forecasts, auto-updating client records after a call and more.