The short version
A general CRM stores a person, a company and an opportunity with a value and a close date. That model was built for B2B sales. Real estate does not fit it: the "opportunity" is a requirement that may match forty properties, the product is a property with a legal status and an expiry date, and the stock in off plan is a live inventory that six people are selling from at once.
What it has to hold
Four record types, connected. A lead with a requirement. A property with its media, owner, permit and publishing status. A project with its payment plan, handover date and unit inventory. And a person, the agent, with the licence details that portals require before they will publish anything under their name.
- Leads with a structured requirement, not a free text note
- Properties with compliance fields and a publishing lifecycle
- Projects with unit level inventory and states
- Agents with licence and portal profile details
What it has to do
Capture enquiries from wherever they arrive, assign them to somebody within minutes, measure whether that person responded, publish listings to the portals without rekeying, and report on the result. Most of the value is in the first two: a lead that sits unassigned for a day is usually lost regardless of how good the rest of the system is.
Response time is the whole game
The single most predictive thing about whether an enquiry converts is how quickly somebody made contact. This is why a real estate CRM should have an SLA concept at all. Not as a reporting nicety, but because it is the mechanism that makes the first call happen.
What a general CRM will cost you
You will build the property model in custom fields, the inventory in a spreadsheet, and the portal publishing by hand. Each of those works until the company grows past the person who remembers how it fits together.