General cost of a CRM: The cost of a real estate CRM can vary wildly. Generally, a CRM is quoted on the number of users from different departments that will use the platform + the base product cost. A global enterprise CRM can cost somewhere around INR 8K per user per month whereas an affordable CRM can cost around INR 1K per user per month. There are other aspects like implementation cost, API charges, integrations, email or SMS costs, automation built or requested, maintenance cost, etc. that bloat up the overall check. A few leads management software also charge per lead acquired through their software.
Frills attached to the CRM making it expensive: If your industry doesn’t have an evolved CRM in the market yet, then you may have to move towards a generic CRM. And that’s when you will find too many features as a part of the basic package that are not relevant to your industry, and you still end up paying. Example: You are new in the real estate business and just started with your first project. The CRM available in the market gives you a plethora of functions and integrations simply not applicable to you.
Integrations definitely expand the scope – A simple connection process that can help your CRM connect with external applications and produce a unified architecture. But do look out for the platforms that are charging you because they have a plethora of APIs available – something that may fit in your future scheme of things but not within your current budget.
A smaller to medium-sized real estate firm can look for a simpler but fairly evolved CRM with basic functionalities that serve as an end-to-end platform from handling marketing to post-sales activities.
For a CRM to be truly economical in the real estate market, we need vertical-specific products built by domain experts, by people who understand the entire customer journey of the home buying process and also understand the software comprehensiveness.
