My Venture into a Salesforce Real Estate CRM

I recently began working with The Kite Team of Keller Williams Infinity based in Chicago. They had customer relationship management problems across the board. I was tasked with finding a CRM that would continue to grow with the company and would be able to integrate with any software we wanted to leverage. During my research, I came across a real estate CRM that was built on the Salesforce platform. That CRM was Propertybase. Propertybase was purposefully created for the real estate transaction in mind, and since its foundation was Salesforce, our team was confident we could do anything we wanted to do. 

With no background in Salesforce, my venture into building out a Real Estate CRM began in October 2017. Yes, I had no previous experience with the Salesforce platform before I started this project. I, of course, was not starting from the ground up but instead building on top of what the Propertybase team had already developed and taught me during an eight-week onboarding class. With my background in web design and coding, I was able to pick up the necessary Salesforce admin skills after a few online courses.

I started with the transaction management side; making sure the customer's transaction was being followed from pre-listing to past client and beyond. Once we knew every detail was being tracked the goal was to automate as much of the task assignment as possible. Then deliver curated content to the customer based on different stages of the transaction. It started with creating action plans that assigned tasks from pre-listing to accepted offer. Then generating emails for each step of the sale to send to our clients. After that, I used Salesforce's process builder to send these emails out to the client automatically based on the stage of the transaction. As well as automatically assigning custom action plans to listings. Pretty basic, right? Well, this was just the beginning of the automation. 

The heavy lifting comes when our transaction heads to the closing. Our team knew the importance of a solid closing plan and wanted to make sure we never missed a step. The way I accomplished this was by creating automated task assignments based on field values in Salesforce. 

When specific dates are entered, and fields are changed, particular tasks are created. Now the transaction coordinator only receives tasks when necessary. With our previous CRM, this was a massive battle; action plans would give you tasks you may or may not have needed. While with Propertybase I was able to leverage process builder to automate everything based on specific criteria I choose. Creating these processes allowed us to truly streamline our task assignments while not missing anything on our closing.

We have been using this system since May 2018, and I am happy to say it has been running smoothly and efficiently. Propertybase has increased our transaction coordinator's time to focus on creating a more personal relationship with the client because they know they will never miss a step with this system. It has also increased the number of times we contact our client because we now send them more meaningful information with email automation.

I am excited to say I will be continuing to build bigger and better things with Propertybase and Salesforce. Keep an eye out for future updates as this project is ongoing and will continue to be developed.