Custom Real Estate CRM Software Development: 6 Steps Process

Do you want to improve your real estate business operations? Are you looking to improve collaboration and communication between different departments of your real-estate business?

As a real estate business owner, there are multiple tasks, such as property management, lead generation, sales, reporting, and maintaining customer relationships.

We know managing all the core activities of the real-estate business could be overwhelming and tiring at the same time.

To scale your real-estate business, you need to implement a proper system and process. That is where custom real estate CRM software development becomes useful. In this blog, you will learn:

• The complete process of real-estate CRM solution development
• Core functionalities to include in your CRM software
• Cost and timeline of developing custom CRM software
• The technology stack used to develop a custom CRM software

So, let’s get started.

Before directly learning about the development process, let’s first know the market of real estate.

The Growth of the Real Estate Industry

Here are statistics related to the real estate business and how CRM software helps businesses.

• According to GrandViewSearch, the real estate market is estimated to reach USD 5.85 trillion by 2030. As you see, you have a potential opportunity to grow your business in the future.
• According to SuperOffice, by implementing CRM software in your business, you are able to connect in a more personalized way with your customers. This is called a 360-degree relationship with your customers that help you to grow your business.
• As per the report of Nucleus Research, every dollar spent on CRM software provides an ROI of $8.71.

Investing in own CRM software for your real-estate business will definitely help to grow your business. As a CRM solution helps you to streamline your business operations and manage the overall business at your fingertips, it becomes easy to manage your core business tasks. Sounds great? Let’s learn about the process to develop a custom real-estate CRM system.

6 Steps to Develop Custom Real Estate Software

Here is the step-by-step process that you can follow to create your customer relationship management software. Following these steps guide you from planning to implementing your CRM software in your business without facing any critical challenges.

1. Choose a Reliable Software Development Company

   Your first step should find a reliable and experienced software company to develop your software solution. So, what are the ways to find the right software development partner to build custom CRM solutions? Here are the tips to follow for choosing a reliable software partner.

   • Perform research on the online directories websites like Clutch, G2, TrustPilot, and GoodFirms. You can filter companies on these platforms by hourly rate, experience, and expertise and then prepare a list.
   • Looking for software development companies on social media platforms like Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook. Check out their profile, work, and specialization.
   • Ask for referrals from your colleagues, business partners, or professionals who have knowledge of software development.
   • Join meetups, networking, tech events, or conferences of technologies to find and connect with software development companies.

   However, if you don’t want to perform all these tasks, you can contact Space-O Technologies. We are a leading and experienced software development company in Toronto, having experience developing 300+ custom software and mobile solutions.

   We have 65% referral and repeat business from our worldwide clients. Here is a testimonial of one of our clients named Alex Crostorphine who got impressed by the work and overall coordination of the project management.

   

   Once you select a real estate software development firm, your next step would be to discuss your requirements for custom solutions.

   Want to Develop a Custom Real Estate CRM Software?

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2. Discuss Your Custom Requirements to Develop CRM Software

   At this stage, you need to discuss your business requirements with the software development team. You need to provide information about which type of CRM software you want to develop for your real estate business. For example, you need to provide information on the following questions.

   • What are the core challenges that you want to resolve with your CRM software?
   • Which features do you want to integrate into your CRM software solution?
   • Which third-party integration into your real estate CRM software?
   • What is the tentative timeline to implement CRM software in your business?

   The more clear your software requirements are, the more reliable and proper CRM software solution you would be able to create.

   For instance, you might face the following challenges while following the manual process of lead management.

   • You are unable to properly track the data of leads
   • You don’t have any proper system to maintain potential leads for following up
   • You don’t have a proper centralized system to send a targeted marketing message, track interactions, and properly follow up

   These are the challenges just related to lead management, which is just a single section in a CRM, there are chances you might be facing more challenges.

   Depending on the challenges you are facing in your real estate, specify your requirements to a software development company. You must clearly define your requirements and budget for the software development firm.

   Based on your requirements, you get a proper roadmap with information like milestones, approximate costs, and the timeline for your custom CRM software development. This is called a WBS. Get more details about WBS of software project development from this blog. Moving further, let’s decide the features and functionalities of a CRM software.

3. Deciding the Features and Functionalities in Your CRM Software

   Choosing the features and functionality to integrate into your CRM software plays an important role. You need to determine which functionalities to integrate and crucial so your CRM software meets your business goals.

   As there are multiple features available to integrate, choosing the right functionalities increases the ROI of the CRM software. The right features help to improve your data insights so you can improve your analytics, sales, and marketing strategies.

   That’s why to help you decide which are the right features to integrate into your custom real estate software solution, we have provided the list of features as follows.

   List of Important Features to Integrate into a CRM Software
   Property Management	Create and manage listings, monitor the progress of each property, and track property details.
   Lead Management	Managing and tracking leads from the sales pipeline includes lead source, status, and communication history.
   Custom Reporting	Get custom reports as per your specific data requirements criteria, such as sales, marketing, and customer service.
   Automated Notifications	Set automated notifications and send them to clients and users about upcoming appointments, deadlines, and other events.
   Workflow Automation	Automate and streamline repetitive tasks, such as lead nurturing, email campaigns, and data entry.
   Voice Search Integration	Voice assistants allow users to control the CRM software via voice commands.
   Customer Portal	A secure portal for clients to view and check their property details, communicate with agents, and track the progress of the new properties.
   Analytics and Insights	Providing real-time analytics and data insights to help users make data-driven decisions on the platform.
   Predictive Analytics	Perform analysis on the large dataset and make predictions based on the patterns to identify the quality leads by looking at customer requirements.
   Document Management	Manage, store, and share important documents with your customers or agents, such as contracts, agreements, and invoices.
   Mobile Access	Providing access to your whole CRM software on a mobile device.
   Integration with Third-party Services	Integrating CRM software with third-party services, such as accounting, marketing automation, project management, and payment processing services.
   Marketing and Email Campaigns	Create and manage marketing campaigns, track the performance of ongoing campaigns, and communicate with potential clients through email.
   Contact Management	Manage and organize contacts of all your clients and leads that include contact details, property preferences, and communication history.
   Deal Management	Create and manage deals, track the status of deals, assign tasks to team members, and set reminders about deals. This feature helps to manage your entire sales process.

   These are the core features to integrate into your real estate CRM system. To streamline and optimize the process of your real estate business, you need these features in your custom CRM.

   As you decide on the features and functionalities, the next prototype of your real estate CRM software is created. Creating a prototype and design of your CRM software helps you to know what your CRM software looks like.

4. Creating the Design and Prototype of Your Real Estate CRM Software

   Design is an important part of whether you are building a mobile application, web or software application. The aim of the design stage is to create a user interface and visual representation of your custom real estate CRM system. According to your requirements, the design team prepares the visual and functional flow of your custom real estate CRM software.

   After that, a blueprint of your software system is created that includes software architecture, data models, and user interface. Depending on that, low-fidelity wireframes are created. The importance of wireframes is to represent the visual layout and structure of your custom real estate CRM software before its actual design and development.

   Once the design of your custom real estate CRM system is ready, a prototype of your software is created. The purpose of creating a prototype is to test, refine, identify the issues, and save time and money in the whole process of software development.

   A prototype helps to get clear with your objective, design, and functionalities, and assure you whether your custom real estate CRM is according to your requirements or not. Here is a list of activities that are done at this stage.

   • Creating a working model of your custom CRM as it helps to showcase your software’s key functionalities.
   • Performing user testing to check properly the user experience, identify problems, and make necessary changes in the design.
   • Making changes in the prototype based on the user testing results and refining the prototype of your real estate CRM software.

5. Development of Your Real Estate CRM Solution

   Based on the results of the prototype, the development of your real estate CRM software is done. The software development team codes the essential functionalities and features of your software. The primary task is to set up the essential environment for your CRM software development. This includes choosing the right programming languages, choosing development frameworks, and developing tools to use for your CRM software development.

   Further, the coding of features and functionalities is done according to your requirements. In addition, integration of third-party services into your CRM software. Integrating with third-party services allows you to add up the values and functions of your CRM software application. Here is the list of third-party services to integrate into your real estate CRM software.

   • Marketing automation tools: Automate and streamline the lead generation and nurturing process with tools like Hubpost, Marketo, or Pardot.
   • Communication and collaboration tools: Improve communication with your team members effectively with looks like Slack or Zoom.
   • Custom support and ticketing tools: Enhance and streamline the support process to provide a better customer experience with tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout.
   • Accounting and invoicing tools: Efficiently manage customer billing and invoicing directly from your CRM software with tools like QuickBooks and FreshBooks.
   • Payment processing tools: Seamlessly receive money into your real estate company business account with tools like PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net.

   Once the development of your custom real estate CRM system is done, unit testing is conducted to know if your software is working perfectly fine or not. Next, the testing and deployment of your software application are done.

6. Testing and Maintenance of Your Custom Real Estate CRM

   As your custom real estate CRM gets developed, the QA team performs testing on your software. By performing different types of testing, such as unit, functional, and UAT testing, the QA team ensures no issues or bugs are present in your CRM system. The QA team follows the software testing life cycle to ensure your CRM solution works perfectly fine.

   The core purpose of conducting testing is to get a 100% bug-free custom real estate CRM solution for your real estate business. Your custom real estate CRM is then deployed on the cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or Heroku. After that, the integration of your real estate CRM is done with real estate agencies’ business processes.

   So this is the whole process of developing custom real estate CRM solutions for real estate companies. Whether you are running a small or large company, this development process helps to develop software from scratch to the end. Let’s now know about the technology stack to develop a custom real estate CRM solution for real estate agencies.

Technology Stack Used for Custom Real Estate CRM Software Development

Choosing the right technology stack for your real estate software solution is essential as it helps you scale for your future requirements. Here is the list of technology stacks our experienced software developers use to build a real estate CRM solution.

Using the right combination of the technology stack to develop your CRM solution helps you to meet future requirements when you scale your real estate business. As you get clear about the development process and technology stack, now you might want to learn about the cost of development.

How Much Does It Cost to Build Custom Real CRM Software Solution?

The tentative to develop a custom real estate CRM solution starts from $50,000. The cost depends on multiple factors, such as the scope of your project, the location of the development team, integration with third-party services, complexity, features and functionalities you want to include, and testing efforts. Let’s understand how to calculate the cost of development from the following formula.

Suppose, your hired software developer charges $45 per hour. And, the hours for custom development of a small-scale range from 4 – 6 months. So, according to the formula, the cost would range from $28,800 to $43,200 for a custom CRM system for real estate businesses. You can get more information from our blog about the cost of software development.

Now, let’s learn about the timeline to develop a CRM system for real estate companies.

How Long Does It Take to Build Custom Real CRM Software Solution?

The tentative timeline to develop real estate CRM systems would range from 3 to 12 months. The timeline depends on multiple factors which are as follows.

• The size and complexity of your CRM solution
• The technology stack used to develop your software
• The development methodology to develop your CRM
• The features and functionalities you want to integrate
• The experience of the software development team
• The complexity of third-party services integration

Still, do you have questions? Check the next section of the FAQ to clear your doubts regarding custom real estate CRM software development.

Ready to Develop Custom CRM Software for Your Real Estate?

In this blog, you have learned about the complete process of developing custom real estate CRM, the cost of development, and the timeline to develop the solution. As the market of the real estate industry is growing, this becomes the right to invest in technology for real estate professionals.

Optimization of business processes and streamlined business help you to increase productivity and ROI. With the use of a custom real estate CRM solution, your team works more effectively and improves the coordination between different departments.

Are you running a real estate company? Do you want to streamline your business? But not sure what kind of solution you should develop for your real estate business. We are a proficient software development company in Canada, having successfully developed 300+ custom software and mobile solutions for our worldwide clients. Let’s connect to discuss your requirements.