How to Use a CRM as a Real Estate Investor

According to Google Trends, the search phrase “real estate CRM” has taken quite an upward trajectory over the last 12 years. 

‍

‍

For real estate investors and business owners, that’s a good thing. 

‍

CRMs — that is, good CRMs — allow real estate investors to streamline their businesses like never before… creating workflows, accurately tracking seller outreach and follow-up, and managing internal tasks. 

‍

The only problem is, real estate investing is its own beast. It needs a very different CRM than what most CRMs offer.

‍

You don’t just need to be able to manage communication with your leads and prospects. 

‍

You also need to be able to differentiate between (and track separately) property records vs. owner records. 

‍

You need to be able to track, update, and keep clean massive amounts of data.

‍

In an instant, you should be able to know where any lead sits in your sales funnel, how many times you’ve contacted them, and whether you got a response or not. 

‍

You should also know when you last skip traced each record or sent direct mail to each record, as well as which team members tackled which tasks (and when).

‍

These are just some of the requirements of a high-quality CRM for real estate investors.

‍

And it’s what we’re building here at REISift. 

‍

Below, we’re going to give you an overview of what we’ve built and how you can use our CRM to grow (and organize) your real estate investing business. 

‍

Let’s dive in!

Click Here to Get a 7-Day Free Trial of REISift

Step 1. Organize Your Records

Let’s start by taking a look at the REISift dashboard to give you an idea of what we’re working with. 

‍

‍

This is our home base. 

‍

On the left side, we have navigation for getting to various parts of the software and CRM. And on the dashboard itself, we have quick glimpses of various metrics — total records uploaded, vacancy rates, records with numbers, and skip trace status. 

‍

We also have a “Tasks Calendar” on the right side that gives us a glimpse of the team’s to-dos for the month. 

‍

The first step to using REISift is uploading your records. 

‍

Just select the button in the bottom left corner to do that. 

‍

‍

REISift will walk you through some steps to properly upload your new records…

‍

‍

Along the way, you will choose a list to add your records to (or create a new list), add tags (such as a date for when it was skip traced or where you pulled the data from), map your data columns to our software so that everything matches up properly, and do a final review before finishing the upload. 

‍

This software is built specifically for real estate investors and the data they manage — so you should feel right at home with the process. 

‍

Once your records are uploaded, you’ll be able to filter, update, and edit them all (en masse, or individually) under the “Records” tab…

‍

‍

Click on any record and you’ll get a full picture of where that lead sits in your pipeline (i.e. call attempts, direct mail attempts, SMS attempts, RVM attempts, status, phone numbers, location, photos, pending tasks, completed tasks, lists, tags, and lots more. 

‍

Basically, everything you need to know about the record is right here on this page. 

‍

BUT…

‍

We also know that — being the organized real estate investor that you are — you need to be able to view records separately based on property vs. owner. 

‍

And that’s why we’re soon releasing our feature that’ll allow you to sort and filter by owner records. 

‍

‍

Our goal at REISift is to give you a single piece of software where you can upload, manage, filter all of the data you have. 

‍

We don’t want you jumping between spreadsheets to manage your business. 

‍

We keep everything in one place. 

‍

Finally — as it pertains to records — we have the most advanced filtering and list stacking system in the real estate investing niche. 

‍

Filter your records, send mailers right inside of REISift, and keep all your data updated and squeaky clean. 

‍

You can probably already see how our CRM works to make your business run 1000x more smoothly. 

‍

Next, let’s talk about tags. 

Step 2. Create Your Tags

Okay — you’ve got your records uploaded and you’ve got all the information you could possibly want right at your fingertips for those records. 

‍

Now as you start to skip trace and send marketing campaigns to that data, you’ll want to keep everything organized and up-to-date using tags. 

‍

To be clear, there are three qualities that we believe an effective tagging process needs to have…

‍

1. Flexible — Tags should be extremely flexible. With a single click, you are able to add or remove tags inside of REISift. 
2. Fast — Tags should be fast. It shouldn’t take a long time to add a specific tag to a lot of data or even just a single record. REISift makes this process quick and simple. 
3. Insight — The reason for tagging is to give you some important insight into the records that you’re tagging. Maybe it tells you where you pulled the data from. Or maybe it tells you when the data was last skip traced. 

‍

With that in mind, there are a lot of different ways to use tags inside of a CRM. 

‍

But here’s what we recommend for getting started…

‍

• Interest Level — Tag your leads by interest level: cold, hot, and not interested. That’ll allow you to quickly see which records are the most urgent to get in contact with. 
• Campaigns — Whenever you send out mailers, an SMS campaign, cold call, or skip trace, make note of that with a tag. Add something like “SMS Campaign June 2022” to all of the records that are a part of that campaign. This will help you keep track of which records have been sent which campaigns. 
• Source — Where did you get the data from and when did you get it? Keep track of that with your tags by using tags like “Propstream June 2022”. That’ll help you keep track of where your data originally came from. 

‍

As far as your marketing campaigns go, we also recommend organizing your data by the four following buckets: vacant, stacked, ouchies, and equity. 

‍

‍

Here’s how we define those…

‍

Equity — These are prospects with high equity, between 30% and 99%. We specify 99% because we like to create a “Free & Clear” bucket for the 100%-equity owners.

‍

Stacked — These are prospects that belong to multiple lists. A prospect being stacked can indicate someone who’s highly motivated, if, for example, that prospect belongs to your high equity list and your bankruptcy or divorce list. 

‍

Vacant — These are properties that are vacant. This often means that the homeowner isn’t doing anything with the home and they might be more motivated to sell. 

‍

Ouchies — This includes prospects that fall into all of the problem-based data buckets, such as tax delinquency, code violations, probate, divorce, bankruptcy, etc. 

‍

Doing so will allow you to send more specific and targeted marketing campaigns to each different type of motivated seller. 

‍

For phone numbers, you can tag them as one of the four following categories after you’ve tried to contact them… 

‍

• Interest (I)
• Not Interested (NI)
• Wrong Number (WN)
• Do Not Call (DNC)

‍

Creating tags inside REISift is as easy as clicking a record and assigning new tags to it…

‍

‍

Or you can create new tags inside of the “Tags” tab…

‍

‍

The tags are a critical part of keeping your data organized and easy to use. 

‍

After just a few marketing campaigns, most real estate investors get lost inside their data — they’re not sure who’ve they’ve marketed to, where the data originally came from, or when they last contacted each record. 

‍

So leads and deals slip through the cracks. 

‍

Our tags make it so that doesn’t happen. 

Step 3. Manage Internal Tasks

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. 

‍

In the case of real estate, a CRM should be all about helping you communicate effectively with motivated sellers as well as your team. 

‍

The more smoothly your business runs, the more leads you’ll generate and deals you’ll close. 

‍

And that’s why task management was such an exciting feature for us to add to our software here at REISift. 

‍

Under the “Tasks” tab, you can create new tasks, round-robin tasks, recurring tasks, or workflows, assign them to team members, and view a calendar of everything that needs to get done in your business. 

‍

‍

This is a simple but super important part of our software. 

‍

This makes it so that no one on your team gets lost under an avalanche of disorganized to-dos. Everything has a due date, everything is assigned to someone, and workflows are created for each new promising lead. 

‍

Easy peasy. 

Step 4. Record/Update Records in Real-Time

Uploading your data, cleaning it, and tagging it properly will have your business looking super clean. 

‍

But uploading clean data isn’t the same thing as maintaining clean data. 

‍

The more marketing campaigns you send, the more that you follow up with sellers, the more data that you upload, the more deals that you do and leads that you generate…

‍

The more at-risk your business is of becoming a cluster-f*ck. 

‍

So what do you do? 

‍

Well, your entire team needs to be trained on how to use your CRM and what their job is after speaking with a seller. 

‍

Here are some examples of ways to keep your data from getting messy inside of REISift…

‍

After Uploading — Tag your data to indicate where you got it from and when you pulled it. Also filter and organize new data by these four categories for more targeted marketing campaigns: vacant, stacked, ouchies, and equity. 

‍

After Skip Tracing — Once you’ve skip traced your data, tag to indicate the records that you skip traced and when you did so. 

‍

After Campaign — After sending a marketing campaign, tag each record to indicate that it was a part of that specific campaign.

‍

After Contacting — If you get in contact with someone, tag to indicate whether they are interested, not interested, do not contact, or the wrong number. If they are interested and you start getting more information about their property, take notes inside the specific record in REISift. 

‍

After Making Offer — Once you estimate the value of the property, note that inside the record in REISift. Also, indicate what your offer was and whether it was accepted or not.  

‍

After Following Up — Tag the record with an additional contact attempt after each follow-up attempt (this can be done in bulk) to keep track of how many times you’ve tried to contact each record. 

‍

Sound like a lot? 

‍

Once you get moving, it’s super easy. 

‍

More importantly, it’ll ensure that you never again get lost inside of your data. 

Step 5. Create Systems & Processes

Real estate investors have an entrepreneurial spirit. 

‍

And while that’s a good thing, sometimes that means we swing before seeing where the ball is going. 

‍

We just want to get moving. 

‍

BUT…

‍

To build a real estate investing business that helps us truly achieve our dreams of entrepreneurial freedom, we’ve got to have clean-cut systems and processes to keep momentum and avoid clutter. 

‍

That’s exactly what the REISift CRM is built to do. 

‍

It’s built by real estate investors… for real estate investors…

‍

To help you build a business that’s easy to manage and exciting to grow. 

Final Thoughts

CRMs are powerful for streamlining and growing businesses. 

‍

But real estate investors have very unique business models that are different from any other industry or niche. 

‍

That’s why we’ve built our CRM specifically for real estate investors — no corners cut, no punches held back. 

‍

We serve real estate investors like you. Period.

‍

And we’re still in the process of creating the best software on the planet for real estate investors — so expect many new features and updates incoming all the time. 

‍

Hopefully, this guide has given you a better idea of how, exactly, you can use a CRM to grow your real estate investing business. 

‍

If you’re ready for the next step, take our 14-Day Auto Lead Gen Challenge by clicking below.

‍

You’ll learn how to use our software (which Tools 4 REI ranked in the top 10 CRMs for real estate investors!) to get more leads and deals without purchasing more data. 

Join Our 14-Day Auto Lead Gen Challenge Now!