How do you track properties in a CRM?

Keeping track of your deals is critical to your success. You need to be able to pull up the key information on a specific deal to make informed comparisons between different properties.

This is particularly useful as it enables you to re-use previous due diligence of the same property or property type on the same street, saving you a lot of time and energy.

Capturing the key information about each property deal (e.g. property profile, the type of offer, the offer submitted, date of offer, expected rental value, expected market value, refurb cost) is essential if you want to do this, but how exactly do you do it?

Keeping track of deals is not an easy task. More often than not you start working with familiar tools like spreadsheets and emails, but the more deals you have in your pipeline, the harder it is to keep track of them all.

You find yourself spending much time searching through files and folders (on and offline) to locate the information you need to compare deals.

The biggest issue is that you are trying to manage all the information relating to your deals (e.g. your analyser, agent emails, property packs, calls, viewings and team collaboration) with a variety of tools that are not integrated.

Keeping track of a deal through all its stages or getting a quick ‘at a glance’ view of key information is almost impossible because your tools can’t communicate with each other.

You need to be able to easily identify each deal, capture the core information, search that information and be able to access and use it again and again if required – with ease.

The tools you have are not working for you. Our solution combines the use of CRM for property and your deal analyser.

In your CRM each deal is an ‘Opportunity’, to review and compare Opportunities they need to be searchable. The simplest way to do this is to use great headings – be descriptive.

Think about what terms you want to be able to search on and use them to name your Opportunity. For example, if you name an Opportunity ‘House, 3 bed, Baker Street, W1, London, £500k’, when a similar property comes up you can locate all the relevant past due diligence with a quick search on any of those terms.

Using custom fields, e.g. date of offer, expected rental, etc. within your Opportunity layout, and not your analyser means that you will be able to locate ‘at a glance information’ easily.

Capture all the core information within your Opportunity, copy and paste the numbers from your analyser, so it holds all the pertinent deal information in one place.

You’ve identified another deal, it’s a 3-bed house in Baker Street, and you want to locate the details of the previous Opportunity to find out who was involved and what activities were taken.

Now, you can search your CRM, locate the previous due diligence and see all the activities that occurred within that Opportunity (agent contacts, emails, calls, etc.).

This is what we call your ‘one version of truth’– always available and easy to find.

If you want to track your property deals in a CRM…

About the author

Steven Lai is a property investor, founder of Super Developments and creator of CRM for Property Success. He is a CRM expert with over 12 years commercial experience of managing sales teams.

Join the CRM for Property Success Facebook Group to ask him anything (about CRM, property or 80's trivia!).