Start with the permit
A listing in Dubai cannot be advertised without a valid Trakheesi permit number. If your CRM does not hold the permit number and its expiry as real fields you can filter and sort by, somebody will be tracking expiries in a calendar, and a listing will quietly go non compliant while it is still live.
Then the agent record
Portals publish under an agent profile they recognise. If an agent record has no BRN, or has not been mapped to the portal profile, the listing has nowhere to land. This presents as a publishing failure and gets diagnosed as an integration bug, which is why it wastes so much time the first few times it happens.
The portals, specifically
Property Finder, Bayut and dubizzle. Ask whether the integration is one way or two way. Plenty of systems will push a listing out but leave you forwarding enquiry emails by hand, which is most of the work. Ask how enquiries arrive: webhooks are near instant, polling has an interval, and on a Saturday morning the difference is real.
- Publish, update and unpublish from one record
- Enquiries back as leads, assigned automatically
- Per destination field mapping and validation
- Permit and agent fields carried across
Off plan is not a listing
If a meaningful share of your business is off plan, the CRM has to model a project and its units separately. A project stored as one record cannot answer "is 1408 still available", and that is the only question that matters during a launch. Ask specifically whether holds are atomic, meaning whether the system rejects a second hold on a held unit at the moment it is attempted.
Then the ordinary things
Branches and teams with real permissions. Pipelines you can name. Response SLAs. Reporting scoped to a branch. Arabic with proper right to left layout, not a translated skin. An export, so your data is yours.
Questions worth asking on a demo
What happens when a permit expires? What happens when two agents hold the same unit? How does an enquiry become an assigned lead, and how long does it take? Can a branch manager see only their branch? Can I get my data out? The answers to those five will tell you more than a feature list.