Salesforce for Real Estate

Learn why your real estate clients are or aren't converting after the tours

In residential leasing sales, converting prospects into signed agreements frequently depends on the tour experience and other variables including unit particulars and lifestyle compatibility.

The platform concentrates on monitoring key touchpoints, particularly tour experiences, enabling teams to comprehend what influences prospect choices. By gathering more detailed prospect information and feedback at the tour level, the tool assists agents and leadership in recognizing patterns behind successful and unsuccessful conversions.

Making feedback collection more specific and transparent through strategic field selection and visual hierarchy enables teams to examine trends, understand prospect actions, refine strategies, and ultimately raise conversion rates.

Intended project impact

For the company: The demo increased sales opportunities by demonstrating the startup's Salesforce capabilities and real estate expertise to prospective clients.

For clients: Individual platforms would be customized per client requirements. The demo serves as a foundational template. I didn't stay long enough to collaborate with new clients, but would have conducted discovery sessions to determine their optimal features and information prioritization.

These intricate elements of conversion often disappear in conventional CRM procedures. Disorganized information makes it challenging for teams to recognize conversion drivers and enhance leasing approaches.

A deeper look into current journeys in digitally managing real estate leads

Research began with secondary investigation through articles, social platforms, forums, and studies examining typical workflows and requirements for digital real estate prospect administration. I then consulted a subject matter specialist with over ten years of Salesforce experience in real estate organizations.

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Most common pain points

• Difficulty maintaining contact and developing client relationships
• Managing substantial documentation that's easily misplaced
• Inability to assess prospect interest level
• Prospects ghosting and rejecting
• Critical information not consolidated, especially across multiple properties with numerous units
• Misalignment when selling to groups — the touring individual may not be the ultimate decision-maker
• Client disappointment from comparing actual properties with online representations
• Unexpected maintenance complications

Business needs

Real estate organizations frequently encounter:

• Excessive marketing expenditure for inadequate conversions
• Fragmented pipeline perspectives
• Alignment difficulties with organizational culture
• Ensuring agents disclose critical property details, including safety concerns

"We've stopped calling them 'leads' ... You have to look at them like they're not a lead — they're a relationship. Let's call these people, people."

— Emily Smith, Wemert Group Realty

🎯 Their main goal: keep as many units occupied as possible!

⚠️ Possible biases and constraints to consider: this undertaking occurred within an organization with minimal design maturity and constrained resources. I lacked opportunities to interview numerous individuals beyond internal staff and one subject matter specialist. Fortunately, the specialist — a certified Salesforce Administrator — possessed UX comprehension and understood usability problems, though her experience was primarily in commercial rather than residential segments. Additionally, this represented my first B2B and real estate initiative, potentially missing details seasoned professionals would recognize.

So what do users and businesses look for in real estate sales management tools? What are their goals?

A summary of typical user and business needs discovered through secondary and primary research:

📑 Unified workflows

• Navigating numerous tabs or screens to access prospect data, tours, and agreement specifics is frustrating
• Customization would be valuable if workflows require adjustment
• Absence of centralization causes important information, such as maintenance details, to be overlooked
• UI design creates usability challenges, including difficult-to-locate or misleading buttons

🗂 Information architecture

• Information organized through multiple perspectives (by property, agent, unit, etc) rather than a single view would be advantageous
• Integration with other platforms would simplify processes
• Standard activities shouldn't demand excessive clicks
• Reduces dependency on spreadsheets and external tools

⚒️ The right features

• Automating birthday and communication replies
• Displaying property manager identity for specific tours and their availability
• Simple report production with easy-to-interpret dashboards
• Options to maintain previous system versions
• Visibility into prospect movement timing, including anticipated dates

🤔 Other considerations

• Commercial and residential administration demands differing capabilities — platform flexibility or inclusivity across modes would assist
• Understanding conversion drivers: tour circumstances, tour conductors, prospect reactions
• Whatever minimizes agent administrative work, freeing time for sales and maintaining occupancy!

Opportunity management

Salesforce's standard opportunity management display was customized to monitor lease expiration and critical specifics including rental rates per square footage.

🔔 Not pictured: notifications when leases expire or approach expiration.

Setting prospective KPIs

I collaborated with Salesforce administrators determining which metrics prospective real estate customers should prioritize.

📈 To measure the success of this product, our clients should mainly look at:

👩‍💻 To measure how well their teams have adopted Salesforce internally: