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Ask any top-performing real estate agent what their go-to, must-have, can’t-live-without tool is, and chances are they’ll say a great real estate customer relationship management (CRM) system. However, there are so many different real estate CRMs on the market, it’s hard to know which is the best one for your individual needs. We put together a list of our top seven picks and explain why each one could be the best CRM for your business.
Methodology
Our Close team has decades of real estate experience, and we’ve used and analyzed plenty of different real estate CRMs. To put together our list, we looked at dozens of real estate-specific CRMs and analyzed each one for pricing, features, integrations, ease of use, and interface. We also took into consideration any additional systems for marketing, analytics, transaction management, pipeline management, and automation.
7 Best CRMs for Real Estate Agents, Teams & Brokerages
(Prices as of February 2023)
Best Overall Real Estate CRM: LionDesk
LionDesk does the fundamentals really well and offers unique add-ons that are perfect for real estate professionals. Plus there’s a full-featured, 30-day free trial. LionDesk demonstrates a consistent commitment to upgrading products and rolling out new features, such as video messaging and their artificial intelligence (AI) assistant “Gabby.” We also love that the customer service delivers prompt answers via phone and email. We now measure every other real estate CRM against LionDesk’s incredible value and affordable cost.
Related Article
LionDesk CRM Review: Is It the New King of the Real Estate CRM Jungle?
LionDesk Pros & Cons
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Why We Chose LionDesk
LionDesk Pricing
The value here is outstanding. We recommend the basic CRM package, which is $39 per month ($33 per month if billed annually). This includes generous monthly email, text, and video text credits, bulk texting, marketing campaigns, Text2Sell, white label email domain, transaction management, Facebook lead generation, and a custom number.
The upgraded CRM Premier includes landing pages, a single dialer, and a discounted multiline dialer, and is $139 per month ($83 per month billed annually).
Our Favorite Feature
LionDesk’s Lead Assist feature, specifically the AI-driven text responder known as Gabby, is our favorite new offering. Gabby automatically follows up with leads promptly, naturally, and with an uncanny ability to sound genuine and interested. In fact, many people can’t initially tell if they are texting with a live person or a bot.
Related Article
Is the Real Estate World Ready for an AI Assistant? LionDesk Thinks So
Is LionDesk Right for You?
Sophisticated automation, video texting and email options, landing pages, and AI responsiveness make LionDesk worth your time and money. LionDesk also offers a 30-day, full-featured trial, so whether you’re ready to change up your existing software or need your first real estate CRM, LionDesk is a stellar option.
Try LionDesk
Best Lead Nurturing CRM: Top Producer
Top Producer is one of the OGs in the real estate CRM space. Sometimes, being a product originator can mean you’re outdated, but that’s not true for Top Producer. We’ve been impressed by their ability to keep up with the changing world of real estate professionals while also anticipating future needs.
Many real estate CRMs offer an IDX feed as a part of their features, but Top Producer takes this a step further, connecting directly with your MLS to access all of that crucial data. Most IDX feeds pull about 20 data points for each property. Top Producer’s MLS feed pulls closer to 300 pieces of information for every current listing, sold property, and expired listing.
Related Article
Top Producer CRM Review + Video Walk-through
Top Producer Pros & Cons
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Why We Chose Top Producer
Top Producer Pricing
Top Producer offers three different tiers. The costs depend on which plan you choose and whether you plan on paying annually or monthly, but pricing starts at $109 per month per user. Top Producer also offers add-ons. You can get a website for $35 per month and lead routing tool FiveStreet for $20 per month. All tiers require a one-year commitment.
Our Favorite Feature
If you’re running a team or dealing with a high volume of leads, a product like FiveStreet is a must-have. The lead response and management tool offers next-level tracking for real estate professionals who want to know where leads are coming from. It also offers the ability to assign leads custom paths to get to the right agent (or, if you’re operating solo, it will help you prioritize your follow-up efforts).
The real power comes from the analytics. Imagine what you could do if you could generate a report that would tell you how agent performance varies based on lead type, response time, and how far leads are getting in the funnel.
Is Top Producer Right for You?
If you want to get to the next level when it comes to providing market-level data to your contacts via an MLS integration, or if you have a team where your lead routing needs some work, definitely give Top Producer a closer look.
Try Top Producer
Best CRM-Website Integration: Sierra Interactive
If you plan to scale as you build your business, you’ll want a CRM that comes with an integrated real estate website builder that generates leads, automatically populates them into a sophisticated CRM, and provides high-end lead conversion tools. Sierra Interactive is that unicorn, all-in-one sales ecosystem. It’s a powerful CRM with expert lead generation options, ad management, and stylish website design.
Sierra Interactive’s websites are some of the most advanced in the industry, and because they are so well integrated with the CRM, attracting leads and nurturing relationships through automated communication is easy and straightforward.
Sierra Interactive Pros & Cons
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Why We Chose Sierra Interactive
Sierra Interactive Pricing
Sierra Interactive’s pricing is on the higher side—just the CRM is $299 per month. But if you really want to take advantage of the fully integrated ecosystem, you’ll want to upgrade to the CRM + Website package that starts at $399 per month, plus a setup fee that ranges from $250 to $500.
Our Favorite Feature
The website’s advanced lead generation and capture capabilities actively add leads to your CRM, which is where the nurturing begins. Each lead can be assigned an “action plan,” which is an expertly timed drip of emails, texts, and voicemails customized to the lead type. While every real estate CRM in our list offers some form of automation, Sierra Interactive takes this set-it-and-forget feature even further. In one demo, we saw that a live action plan had more than 2,500 leads and a 61% response rate.
Is Sierra Interactive Right for You?
Sierra Interactive is an advanced end-to-end solution for agents who have some years of experience and a healthy budget for leads. Its real estate CRM is a good stand-alone product, but it really shows off its power when paired with Sierra Interactive’s sophisticated lead-generation websites.
Try Sierra Interactive
Best CRM for Lead Generation: Market Leader
Market Leader is primarily a lead gen company, but it also offers a CRM that is so good it needs to be included in the conversation. The real kicker? You can integrate the Market Leader CRM with virtually any real estate lead source, not just what’s native to the platform. Market Leader also happens to be The Close’s first choice for real estate lead generation companies, which automatically makes its CRM worth a look.
Market Leader Pros & Cons
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Why We Chose Market Leader
Market Leader Pricing
Since Market Leader is first a lead generation tool, the costs depend on leads, not on the contact management features. Access to the Market Leader platform starts at $139 per month, but you’ll spend an additional $25 per lead or more depending on your market. Most Market Leader agents pay around $350 to $400 per month to get started. Each additional seat is $89 per month (which includes a subdomain and CRM access).
Our Favorite Feature
The fact that Market Leader can guarantee a certain lead volume every month is critical. After all, your CRM shouldn’t be a static collection of contact information. Think of it as a growing, living database that needs to be constantly fed new contacts to fuel the growth of your business. Market Leader’s approach ensures you’ll have new contacts in your database on a regular basis, new people to run through your nurturing campaigns, and new opportunities to turn your contacts into transactions.
Is Market Leader Right for You?
The crossover between paid lead generation and CRM makes a lot of sense for established agents who still have a real need for leads. With Market Leader, you get an excellent CRM platform as well as one of our top-rated lead generation options. Yes, you need a healthy budget to make this work, but if you’ve got the scratch for it, Market Leader is a fantastic option.
Try Market Leader
IXACT Contact rivals Propertybase and Sierra Interactive as a similar all-in-one real estate agent solution—but for a fraction of the price. The company’s robust CRM includes options for an IDX website and social media content, bringing it ever closer to closing the circle on that lead-gen-to-closing-table journey.
The company offers more-than-generous free trials, extra features, and integrated solutions that are intuitive to use and easy to scale. While IXACT Contact is a really wonderful option for new agents, we recommend it to any agent who wants a powerful real estate CRM at a great value.
Related Article
IXACT Contact Wants to Solve All Your Problems. Can It?
IXACT Contact Pros & Cons
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Why We Chose IXACT Contact
IXACT Contact Pricing
Not only does IXACT Contact offer a free five-week free trial with complimentary concierge onboarding, it also offers six months free to any agent who’s within their first year of being licensed. This is a singular offer in the CRM game—nobody else has anything like it.
The base price is $38 per month when billed annually, making it an exceptional value. The rest of IXACT Contact’s features are offered a la carte, so you don’t pay for services you don’t need. For example, the social stream add-on is $20 per month, a basic IDX website is $19 per month, and additional text, email, and voicemail credits can be added as well.
Our Favorite Feature
Obviously, we geeked out over the free six months, but we also really like the Social Stream feature, which adds another level of service that others in the space just aren’t providing. In the Social Stream dashboard, you can select articles and videos to share with your network and choose how often you want content auto-posted to your accounts. IXACT Contact doesn’t offer original content, but there are plenty of relevant articles from reputable sources, such as Huffington Post, Forbes, HGTV, and Better Homes and Gardens, that will engage your contacts.
Is IXACT Contact Right for You?
IXACT Contact is easy to try, especially with its more-than-generous free trials. If you are looking for a real estate CRM with an IDX website component, some social media options—or gosh darn it, something free—you really should give IXACT Contact a go.
Try IXACT Contact
Best CRM for Teams & Brokerages: Propertybase
The Propertybase Salesforce Edition CRM is robust and full-featured, designed for real estate teams and brokerages that need more than just a place to store contacts. Propertybase, powered by Lone Wolf Technologies, also has a single-agent and small teams option called Propertybase Go that is optimized for smaller operations.
Related Article
Propertybase GO Review: The Next Generation of Real Estate CRM?
Propertybase offers all the features that high-powered teams and brokerages are looking for, including advanced analytics; lead routing; integrated brokerage, team and agent websites; and much more. It’s a solid, easy-to-use real estate CRM combined with a potent website development arm and effective lead-generation platform.
Propertybase Pros & Cons
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Related Article
Propertybase Review: The (Old) New Kids on The Block Get Serious
Why We Chose Propertybase
Propertybase Pricing
Starting at $875 per month for 10 users, Propertybase Salesforce Edition is ideal for larger teams and brokerages. The additional IDX-integrated website is an additional $299 per user, per month.
If you’re interested in Propertybase but don’t have the team or budget to support Propertybase Salesforce Edition, make sure to check out our review of Propertybase GO. It’s a great option for individual agents as well as smaller teams, with prices starting at $425 per month for its award-winning CRM and a fully integrated IDX website.
Our Favorite Feature
Most real estate CRMs offer some sort of lead score evaluation to allow real estate agents to quickly glance at a profile and determine what sort of attention that lead needs today. But no other CRM that we’re aware of allows you to adjust the criteria for that lead score, and certainly not with the granularity and detail that Propertybase offers. With Propertybase, agents can make adjustments to lead scoring criteria based on factors such as a lead’s response to your outreach campaigns or time since last contact.
Is Propertybase Right for You?
Propertybase offers a fantastic real estate CRM with tons of customization options, from the dashboard and user interface all the way down to how your lead scores are evaluated. But the value doesn’t stop at providing a great CRM—Propertybase also offers website and lead generation services that make them as close to an end-to-end platform for large teams and brokerages as we’ve seen.
Try Propertybase
Best CRM for Marketing: Real Geeks
Like some of our other top real estate CRM picks, Real Geeks offers a full prospect-to-closing ecosystem, including a website and lead generation tools. We continue to be impressed with Real Geeks as an all-in-one solution for agents and especially like how well the CRM is optimized to organize leads captured by one’s website.
The company also offers integrated Facebook marketing, which means that your CRM is constantly primed for new leads coming from Facebook ads. If you’re looking for a real estate CRM that is part of a system designed to gain and convert leads from social, Real Geeks is a great bet.
Related Article
Real Geeks Review: An In-depth Look at Features & Pricing
Real Geeks Pros & Cons
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Why We Chose Real Geeks
Real Geeks Pricing
You get the whole Real Geeks ecosystem, including the CRM, IDX website, AI assistant, integrations, marketing ad placement, and landing pages, for $299 per month. Simple and straightforward.
Our Favorite Real Geeks Feature
Aside from appreciating how effectively the different products work together to bring in and convert leads, we really like its AI assistant. Like LionDesk’s Gabby, this bot takes some pressure off busy agents who know that responding to a lead right away is going to help drive conversions. While not perfect, Real Geeks’ AI assistant does a good job of engaging with both buyer and seller scripts.
Is Real Geeks Right for You?
Real Geeks is a great choice for any agent looking for an all-in-one solution. The website and CRM work seamlessly together and allow you to manage leads. The CRM has bulk texting and emailing capabilities, plus drips and custom integrations that make it a really strong contender in this field of great real estate CRMs. If you’re looking for marketing capabilities that are built into your CRM, Real Geeks is a great product.
Try Real Geeks
Frequently Asked Questions About Real Estate CRMs
We want to answer some of your most common questions about the best real estate CRMs, from “what the heck is a CRM?” to “how do I get my large team to use our new, very expensive tools?” Feel free to ask anything we haven’t covered here in the comment section below.
What is a real estate CRM?
The best real estate CRMs operate as both contact repositories and tools for converting those leads. As you build your business, you’ll need a place to keep all of your leads and their contact information, but you’ll also need to strategize your lead nurturing and track all of your communication with those leads. A good CRM is how and where you manage all of this information.
What does a real estate CRM do?
Every real estate CRM on our best-of list helps you to stay organized with your lead generation and nurturing. A good CRM will increase productivity and efficiency, streamline transactions, and increase your effectiveness in building relationships. Ultimately, a CRM is a crucial tool in closing deals and building your business.
Why should I pay for a real estate CRM?
Sure, you might be able to get by for a little while with a spreadsheet of contact info. But I bet even the savviest Excel wizards will quickly find that a spreadsheet is simply not sustainable. You really need software that is robust enough to keep track of not only your actual contacts and their information, but also every communication with your leads (how, when, and why), and your strategy for engaging with them.
The most advanced CRMs will also let you manage your marketing (ads on social media or Google), automate your communications, and even call and record messages, all in the CRM system.
What are common features of a real estate CRM?
First and foremost, every real estate CRM should allow you to collect and manage contact information. In addition to the basics (email, phone number, and address) you may be able to include information like birthdays, transaction anniversaries, social media handles, or even a favorite sports team.
Some offer additional features, letting you manage your marketing, social media content, phone calls, and automated communication drips all from your CRM dashboard. Sophisticated CRMs, with pipeline management, lead distribution, and performance analysis, are well suited for large teams and brokerages.
We should also mention that a CRM should be easy to use. If it’s overly complicated and cumbersome, you and your team will never use it to its full advantage.
What should I consider when choosing a CRM?
First and foremost, what are your needs? Consider these questions:
Do I need a CRM with a website included?
The short answer here is no, but it’s a nice perk to have. A real estate CRM that is directly, organically connected to your website allows you to tap into efficiencies like automatically recording your lead’s website activity on their profile or emailing personalized drip campaigns based on the properties they view.
The long and the short of it is, if you’re also looking for a website, getting a CRM and website combo is absolutely the way to go. If you already have a site you like, it might be worth looking into a CRM that integrates with it.
Are there any worthwhile free real estate CRMs?
Yes, there are some platforms you should check out. First off, if you’re new to real estate, circle back up to the section in this guide about IXACT Contact. They offer six months free to anyone who’s had their license for less than a year. Also, check out our buyer’s guide for the best free real estate CRMs.
What’s the biggest mistake when starting with a new CRM?
The answer to this question depends on your experience level. If you’ve used a CRM before, you’re probably looking at all these contenders through the lens of your old CRM. But that means you can easily miss out on the opportunities a new tool provides. Do your best to start fresh, and walk through the training as if you’re brand-new to the space.
If this is your first time using a CRM, make sure to avoid moving too fast, too soon. You were most likely sold on the product because of the advanced features it offers, but before you run, you’ve got to learn how to walk. Understand the basics before jumping into the most sophisticated workflows and automations and creating custom market updates and website integrations. Build effective lead profiles, start communicating through the platform, and use it to categorize and prioritize your leads. Once you’ve got the basics down, then you can start to level up.
How do I make sure my team or brokerage is actually using their CRM?
If you’re going to invest in a technology platform designed for teams or entire brokerages, you want to make sure everyone is using it. After all, these tools aren’t cheap! Here are three ways to ensure your team buys in.
- Introduce the platform slowly: Even the most technologically comfortable agents aren’t going to jump headfirst into a new CRM; they’ve got clients to service and other parts of their business to maintain. Your agents can’t just put their entire world on pause for a week to learn a new platform, so offer them a transition period to get onboard.
- Train, train, train: Assume that your team members don’t know anything until they show you they do. Most agents don’t come into the real estate industry with a technology background, so just because they are successful on one platform doesn’t mean that they’ll naturally succeed on all platforms. Give them all the resources they need to learn the ins and outs of your new tool.
- Offer incentives: If everyone on your team is on the same CRM, your productivity is going to go up, your lead conversion will rise, and you’re going to close more deals. That means more money in your pocket, so pass some of that along to your agents. Consider incentivizing them with a reduced split on a commission after successfully adopting the platform or some other form of monetary benefit to give them a personal reason to buy in.
What if you need a commercial real estate CRM?
Commercial real estate is really a different beast compared to residential and needs its own set of tools. If you’re looking for a CRM that is specifically designed to help commercial real estate agents and brokers, consider BuildOut. BuildOut offers some pretty sophisticated analytics that predict sellers and uncover true property owners. The solution is comprehensive and includes a website, proposal building, emails, and marketing.
Is The Close paid to pick these CRMs?
The Close has a strict editorial independence policy when it comes to advertising—one that we make public and available for all of our readers at the top of every article.
The providers in this article were chosen based on their ability to offer the best answer to the needs of real estate professionals. None of the providers on this list, regardless of whether or not we have an affiliate partnership with them, have the opportunity to influence, steer, or affect the content in this article.
We’ve spent time on each of these platforms, used their features, talked to users, and measured these tools against what our experience tells us matters to agents, teams, and brokers everywhere. Our team works hard every day to make sure we are first asking what is best for our readers, including you.
Bringing It All Together
With so many different business models, philosophies, and real estate agent types out there, it is easy to see why there are so many different real estate CRMs. Which of these seven is right for you? Is there a real estate CRM that we need to add to our guide?
Drop a comment below and tell us about your favorite CRM. Is it on this list? How has it changed the way that you do business?
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