Think residential agents are the only ones who need a customer relationship management (CRM) platform? Well, think again—commercial real estate agents need a CRM, too! The top commercial real estate CRMs offer practical, all-in-one solutions for sales, marketing, and managing properties, contracts, and sales leads. I’ve looked into many options to bring you the five best commercial real estate CRM platforms based on pricing, reviews, and software features that benefit commercial real estate businesses.
- Apptivo: Best for low-cost, customizable software
- Salesforce: Best for advanced sales features
- Buildout CRM: Best for AI-powered market research and insights
- AscendixRE CRM: Best for representing commercial investors
- LionDesk: Best for direct sales calling & multiple marketing channels
The Close’s Top Picks for Best Commercial Real Estate CRMs
*Based on annual billing, monthly billing is also available at slightly higher rates.
Apptivo: Best for Best for Low-cost & Customizable Software
Why I Chose Apptivo
Apptivo is the best commercial real estate CRM, offering incredible value for money and jam-packed with powerful features. The user-friendly tools make managing contracts, sales activities, and property tasks a breeze. Plus, you can personalize it to fit your unique workflow. Apptivo allows you to seamlessly integrate multiple apps and services to streamline your work and supercharge productivity. I’m impressed with the customizable layout and how easy it was to add or remove information fields based on users’ needs.
Additional Features
- Mobile CRM: Manage tasks, lead contacts, sales planning, and business opportunities on the go using the mobile CRM. You can also manage finances, invoices, work orders, time sheets, and expense reports.
- Email marketing: Send personalized bulk email messages to customers and boost client relationships with Apptivo Campaigns.
- Contracts management: Create contracts directly from different apps and functions in Apptivo to save time and integrate with third-party tools like Google Workspace, Office 365, and Slack.
- Procurement: Manage and update your item inventory count automatically when they’re sold, moved, or restocked.
Salesforce: Best for Advanced Sales Features
Why I Chose Salesforce
One of the best CRM for commercial real estate brokers is Salesforce for its Sales Cloud. It saves you money and makes your work more efficient by automatically handling sales tasks. I also love that you can personalize it to handle approval processes like deal discounts, travel, and expense reports. With Salesforce’s sales analytics, you can easily keep track of lead volume, conversion rates, and the health of your sales pipeline in real-time, which is incredibly helpful for your real estate business.
Additional Features
- Marketing cloud: Save time and money in delivering relevant content across email, web, and mobile by automating engagement in every marketing channel and receiving AI-driven marketing insights.
- Service cloud: Reach customers on every digital channel and provide consistent customer service experience via mobile messaging, web chat, or social networks.
- Tableau analytics: Use intelligent predictions, recommendations, and flows to visualize business opportunities and monitor your business in real time.
- Email integration with Gmail or Outlook: Automatically sync email with CRM data to get a complete view of customer interactions and boost productivity.
Buildout CRM: Best for AI-powered Market Research & Insights
Why I Chose Buildout CRM
Buildout CRM is another of the best CRM for commercial real estate brokers for its one-stop shop. It gives you all the tools for insights, marketing, and managing customer relationships. With its AI-powered capabilities, you can effortlessly analyze property data and connect with potential clients. I also enjoy the Buildout Insights feature, which provides access to owners’ contact information, sales comparisons, and national property data. Plus, predictive analytics can assist you in identifying properties that may be available for sale or refinancing in the upcoming year.
Additional Features
- Stacking plans: Determine which spaces and units will soon be available on the market to provide better solutions for your clients.
- Project management: Track important activities across your team and brokerage to close deals more efficiently.
- Property data: Access data on more than 8.5 million commercial properties to make more informed business decisions.
- Buildout Marketing: Promote your listings by creating property websites, proposals, and emails. The marketing solution includes document creation, a property inventory plugin, a leads dashboard, client reports, property listing syndication, interactive site plans, and branded email marketing.
AscendixRE CRM: Best for Representing Commercial Investors
Why I Chose AscendixRE CRM
AscendixRE CRM is a cloud-based commercial real estate CRM software that helps keep track of all your assets, buyers, sellers, and pricing info. Plus, it’s got a handy lease administration feature to manage all your lease info and even use interactive stacking plans. The contact management software is a real winner, making determining which tenants need follow-up easy. Integrate it with Mailchimp for targeted email campaigns and use the document generation software to create incredible marketing materials.
Additional Features
- Smart prospecting tools: Mine targeted lists of contacts for marketing campaigns and monitor and plan sales activities.
- Automated workflows: Automatically schedule follow-up meetings for prospects and “auto-assign” marketing tasks to various people associated with marketing a new listing.
- Data management: Track properties, listings, sales, and leases in one place.
- MarketSpace: Showcase your commercial listings on a property listings portal that integrates with AscendixRE CRM and lets you publish and update your listings from the CRM.
LionDesk: Best for Direct Sales Calling & Multiple Marketing Channels
Why I Chose LionDesk
LionDesk offers excellent phone features, such as click-to-call, which allows you to make outbound calls with just one click. Plus, there’s a power dialer with cool tools like call recording and automatic call tracking. You can even call up to three lines simultaneously. LionDesk has many marketing features, including prebuilt email and text campaigns, drip campaigns, direct mail, and Facebook lead generation.
Additional Features
- Transaction management: Monitor your properties, track your closings, and automate your tasks so you don’t miss any important business deals.
- Video email and video texting: CRM is integrated with video emails and texting, which you can use in drips and mass emails or texting.
- Commercial real estate contact management: Manage all types of lead sources, buyers, sellers, and hot or cold clients by adding an unlimited number of tags to each client.
- Custom landing pages: Create landing pages from prebuilt templates to capture real estate leads and deliver them directly to your LionDesk account for follow-up automation.
- Mobile app: This app allows real estate professionals to access the CRM portal and all its features on the go.
Methodology: How I Chose the Best Commercial Real Estate CRM
To evaluate and discover the best commercial real estate CRMs, I leaned on our team of licensed real estate pros, researchers, writers, and editors, who created a weighted rubric to evaluate each website. Our team has spent hours researching dozens of paid and free real estate CRMs, assessing each based on the most impactful elements for agents and brokers. Here are the criteria we based our evaluations on:
- Pricing (25%)
- When evaluating the cost of each CRM, we considered access to free account options, varying subscription plans, and whether or not monthly billing plans are available.
- General Features (25%)
- We reviewed features staples of most real estate CRMs, such as customizable pipelines, reporting and analytics, contact management, task assignments, and integrations.
- Additional Features (15%)
- Features like a mobile app, client collaboration tools, property maps, listing management, marketing tools, and deal tracking highly benefit commercial real estate businesses.
- Ease of Use (10%)
- Any application’s functions are only as beneficial as they are usable. To analyze these criteria, we used the knowledge required to set up the software, the skills needed to operate the platform, and the intuitiveness of the user interface.
- Customer Rating (10%)
- We used customer feedback for each CRM, with particular attention to reviews and the product’s popularity, to certify that it meets user satisfaction.
- Expert Score (10%)
- In addition to our firsthand experiences with the providers, we evaluated what other users say about each platform. These criteria consider how other experts rate each CRM and how customers feel based on their reviews to gauge features, ease of use, and overall value for money.
- Help & Support 5%
- Extensive support and service can prevent issues a user might encounter. We evaluated these in terms of customer service hours and the availability of support through various channels, such as phone, live chat, and email.
Your Take
When choosing the best real estate CRM, getting the best bang for your buck is vital. After looking into it, we found that Apptivo is the best commercial real estate CRM because it’s competitively priced and comes with tools specifically designed for commercial real estate. From managing contracts, projects, and procurement to handling email marketing, Apptivo makes it easy to handle tasks and sales. Its customizable CRM platform gives you a quick overview of how your business is doing. Plus, it has a mobile app for managing your commercial real estate business on the fly.
Which commercial real estate CRM do you use? Tell us how you like it!
Tell us about you so we know what to send.
Add comment