FAMLS Announces CRM-Enabled MLXchange Deals

First American MLS Solutions, a division of First American Residential Group and a member of The First American Corporation family of companies, has announced that six organizations have chosen First American's CRM-enabled MLXchange product as their new multiple listing service system.

Four of the six new accounts have also chosen to implement MLX Professional, First American's customer relationship management and Agent Web Site product. With these recent additions, more than half of MLXchange's 220,000 users now have access to the enhanced customer relationship management (CRM) tools that MLX Professional provides.

Real estate pros are getting much more savvy about the importance of CRM in their business. Pivotal Corporation, a vendor of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products and a division of CDC Software, announced recently that Boca Developers, one of South Florida's largest and most successful builders of luxury condominiums, has implemented Pivotal CRM from CDC Software.

By the way, if you want a great novel about South Florida real estate types and you've read all of Carl Hiaasen's books -- if you haven't read all Carl Hiaasen's novels that moves to the top of your To Do On The Train list, by the way -- get John D. MacDonald's Condominium.

Selling luxury, multi-family waterfront properties in South Florida, Boca Developers saw its annual sales jump from $400 million in 2004 to $600 million in 2005 and promptly realized hey, our methods of manually capturing and reporting critical sales data are inconsistent and inefficient and, like so completely lame.

Like many builders, Boca Developers works with numerous sales offices, and of course everybody and their brother needs their own cotton-pickin' method of capturing and reporting data. The company also works with sales brokers, who aren't direct company employees and who lack incentive to follow a specific sales methodology or data collection scheme. Repeat after me, campers: "If there ain't no incentive…"

Serving more than 16,000 real estate professionals in the Palm Beach area, the Regional Multiple Listing Service (RMLS) used MLXchange alongside its previous MLS for more than a year before making MLXchange its primary system.

"By directly integrating prospecting and client communication tools with property information, MLX Professional eliminates a major source of redundant data entry, saving Realtors significant time and money," said Bryan Foreman, president of First American MLS Solutions.

MLXchange 3.0 is scheduled for release in early 2007 and will include dozens of new enhancements, including several premium features specifically for MLX Professional customers.

And also in October, Chicago-based Sonoma Partners, a vendor of IT services for mid-size and enterprise companies, 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."

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

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