CRM Elements For Real Estate Released By Sonoma Partners

Chicago-based Sonoma Partners, a vendor of IT services for mid-size and enterprise companies, has announced CRM Elements for Real Estate, a sales and customer relationship management tool for condominium developers, home-builders and real estate marketing companies.

The customizable software is designed to "help capture greater sales revenue, close deals more quickly, keep customer databases up to date and perform thorough analyses by providing real-time reporting," according to company officials.

According to Mike Snyder, principal of Sonoma Partners, the software probably offers the greatest benefits to developers and agents managing sales for multiple property sites with 50 or more units per property by offering what he calls "a more sophisticated means of capturing and updating large amounts of data."

The product "helps users manage pricing and inventory in real time with configurable sales alerts that notify you when unit sales cross predefined thresholds," explained Snyder.

"As a result, a user knows instantly when it's time to adjust prices, saving the builder from leaving money on the table," said Snyder.

By the way, Snyder does a pretty mean blog himself. Drop by to read about things like Microsoft (News - Alert) CRM download updates, CRM 3.0 and the end of Internet Explorer crashes as we know them.

In addition to real-time reporting, CRM Elements for Real Estate can be customized to send scheduled e-mail results of sales statistics on a weekly, daily or hourly basis to help users spot consumer trends.

"Nearly 90 percent of the prospective clients I speak with rely on either Excel or Outlook programs to keep track of sales leads and monitor the sales process," said Snyder. "These programs help organize data, but they don't necessarily help you analyze it. CRM Elements for Real Estate is designed to not only keep information organized, but also to help an executive analyze his or her marketing tactics."

The software is built on top of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, accessible from Microsoft Outlook and the Internet. "Customers can get up and running quickly without a lot of end user training," said Snyder.

Sonoma Partners has customized its Microsoft CRM Elements for Real Estate software for a number of national real estate firms including Chicago-based Equity Residential, Dallas-based Fairfield Residential and New York-based Athena Group.

Also, Florida real estate firm EWM Realtors has selected SharperAgent to provide a marketing system. "We were in search of technology to make it easier for our sales associates to prospect, build value-added relationships, and grow customers for life," said EWM president, Ron Shuffield.

SharperAgent, a vendor of CRM and e-marketing suites for the real estate and mortgage industries, created Max's Marketing Magic specifically for EWM Realtors to build and retain client relationships.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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