My Zoho Story #1 - Zoho CRM for Real Estate businesses - Interview with a soloprenuer

Imagine being the one-man-show for your real-estate business. That would mean juggling several tasks such as gathering requirements from buyers, showing houses, following up for purchase, keeping track of sales, and much more. The number of activities associated with one buyer or seller by itself might be overwhelming. How then do you manage to keep advancing as an individual agent in the residential real estate business? Customer Relationship Management tools do your multi-tasking for you so you can focus on key aspects of your business. Zoho CRM and its numerous marketplace applications is dynamic enough to mould  your real estate business, and keep sales flowing. One of our Zoho User Group members who is a power user from Atlanta shared  with us and we thought it'd help you use CRM better.

- Why don't you tell us a little bit about your business? 

Well, I'm an independent contractor for real estate giant Keller Williams and I primarily generate leads and close deals as an individual producer. 

- How long have you been using Zoho? 

I started using Zoho CRM about nine months ago. 

- Which Zoho CRM features do you use most frequently? 

I implement a lot of workflows and blueprints as I find them the most helpful. I've found that automating most of my processes helps shave off quite a bit of time in my daily task load.

- Which processes in Zoho CRM have you automated? 

I've automated mass emailing and data entry for call notes . 

- As a soloprenuer in the real estate industry, are there any integrations or marketplace extensions, you'd want to recommend? 

I use IDX broker as my IDX feed on my web site, Vidyard in my email client when responding to customers and ManyChat as my ChatBot on my web site.. 

- Have you evaluated any of the other Zoho services? 

I love  SalesIQ which can be used to show the website visitor's name instead of the ID - and in real time, while they are visiting my web site. This is particularly helpful just after launching a mass email campaign. 

- What business process have you implemented Zoho CRM in? 

This is how it works - there is a MLS provider in most cities  in the US. A real estate agent pays an MLS to see what houses are for sale and also to place their own listing for sale on the MLS. By having an IDX gateway linked from the MLS to an agent's web site, the general public may also view all listing for sale - from the agent's web site. Almost all IDX gateways provide a way to collect leads from visitors of the web site. When the IDX gateway emails the leads into our Zoho CRM, we parse them into the CRM and set the prospect up on a drip campaign in addition to setting a task for follow-up.  

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