How Real Estate Investors Can Leverage CRMs to Identify Investment Goals

Introduction

Real estate investors in today’s market are looking for properties that meet an exceedingly diverse set of characteristics. Listing websites and aggregators have brought new transparency to property data and investors expect to receive more personalized opportunities that meet their unique investment goals. Filters like façade, heating, and roof type, which seemed impossible 10 years ago, are now becoming the norm, enabling ever-more-specific searches for specific property types.

When directing new marketing efforts at your real estate firm, it is imperative that your communications are customized. Properly segmenting your contacts allows your team to meet investor expectations -- which ultimately results in increased open rates, less unsubscribes, higher conversion, and more closed deals. Luckily, CRM systems can help with segmented marketing lists and custom properties.

Step 1: Associate Custom Properties with Potential Investors

Let’s say you want to organize all of your contacts by asset type and square footage. CRMs allow you to modify client, deal, and company properties to create specific identifiers for your customers. By associating contacts with custom selectors in a CRM, you can now mark one investor, John, as a multi-family investor and another contact, Alice, as a retail investor. By creating a square foot property, you can now mark that Alice only looks for retail properties over 30,000 square feet while John is only interested in multi-family with less than 5000 square feet.

Customizing your properties within a CRM allows real estate professionals to capture data on their clients that is not initially available without the proper implementation. Associating running traits such as price, location, number of units, or even roof type supercharges your outreach and gives you valuable reporting metrics on your client base.  Now let’s see how we can use this structured data in a real-world application.

Step 2: Generate your segmented lists

You’ve just picked up a referral on a new off-market opportunity for a four-unit multi-family in New York City. The family who owns the building is retiring and needs to sell as soon as possible for an upcoming move; but for optics reasons, the family would rather keep the property off-market. You know that you have a variety of clients in your CRM who might be interested in the deal, but you can’t remember all of them by name.

Ideally, you’d like to target anyone in your contacts who looks for multi-family assets under 5,000 square feet. John, from the example above, would be a perfect buyer for this property. With a CRM, you can create an automatic segmented list of clients based on the multi-family selector and the square foot selector to generate a list of contacts, old and new, who have interest in this type of asset. With automation, you can automatically add any new client who with those parameters to the list.

Now that we have our segmented list, it’s time to develop your outreach with a CRM’s marketing functionality.

Step 3: Create Your Marketing Materials 

Many CRMs provide their own robust, built-in email creators that allow you to build custom campaigns on the fly. With drag and drop functionality, you can easily add photos and property details that highlight, in this example, your new off-market opportunity and get it sent to the right selection of clients. Once you’ve created the email once, you can reuse that same template for other marketing efforts in the future. With only a few clicks, your new investment pitch is out the door and in the right clients’ inboxes.

Conclusion

Targeted marketing is the first step when engaging clients for future sales. With proper implementation, a CRM’s custom properties, segmented lists, and email creators provide your team with everything you need to navigate a diverse set of client interests. Not only do these features take away the hassle of meeting unique needs – but they also go a step further and convert these differences into growth opportunities for your real estate firm.