Apto Commercial Real Estate Blog

Rod Santomassimo at The Massimo Group, the premier commercial real estate coaching and consulting organization, recently hosted The Great CRE CRM Debate, and we were honored to be one of the four companies who participated.

It's no surprise that hundreds of commercial real estate professionals joined to hear about commercial real estate CRMs. A CRM is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s become a must-have for brokers. In fact, this year's DNA of #CRE survey data revealed a pretty dramatic stat:

Less than half of brokers who make under $100K a year use a CRM, and 71% percent of brokers who make more than $100K use a CRM.

Even if you use a CRM, it may not be made for commercial real estate. And if it’s a CRM for commercial real estate, it could be doing more for you than just storing data.

Here at Apto, we’re all about giving commercial real estate brokers simple tools to put your information to work. Our CRM organizes your data the way you think and applies it the way you work. Here’s one of the ways we help you close more deals faster.

We call it Buyers Needs (or Tenants Needs, if that’s your thing), and it helps you prospect and find likely buyers quickly and easily.

Ready to create a presentation-ready property website in seconds?

No entering the address and relevant details over and over again, no messing with formatting, no wondering if you missed something. Just a beautiful website created straight from your CRM, autopopulated with the details there, and complete with lead capture form for prospects to register interest.

Send the URL directly to your top contacts or post it on listing sites. Either way, every inquiry you receive is captured and centralized within Apto for easy follow-up.

Watch the video to see how it works

Too many times have I heard the story about the one "tech savvy" broker or the transaction coordinator who gets tasked with exporting contacts from the CRM and importing them into Mailchimp to send a new email campaign.

If you're that person, then you know the steps involved. And moreover, you know just how inefficient that process is.

There's no reason to do it that way. You don't need two different tools to store your contacts and then email them.

We recently enhanced our existing Mailchimp integration so you can effortlessly send marketing emails straight from your CRM, where you already keep everything organized. (And of course, we have similar integrations with other email providers as well.)

Sounds nice, right? Here’s a little more about why we did it and how it works.

For many brokers, creating marketing materials for a property is a frustrating ordeal.

Even if you have the technology in place to create websites and brochures, you’re often entering details over and over, wondering if you missed something, or fiddling with the formatting. Then once the site is out there, you’re left sifting through unqualified leads.

And what about those off-market deals that you know you can sell, but don’t necessarily have the budget for materials that can help showcase the property?

You don’t have time or resources for all that. You need a professional website that’s easy to create, that’s built from the system you already have in place, with a centralized hub to organize and follow up with the leads that you reach out to or that come in on their own.

Well, we’ve got good news. We just launched Apto Property Sites, our latest product feature designed to help you work your deals more efficiently.

When it comes to building software for commercial real estate brokers, you have to consider what you’re up against.

Commercial real estate is notoriously lagging when it comes to technology adoption. Excel, email, and maybe an old contact management system are still king. And they're king because they work (albeit in a 1998 kind of way). This makes the challenge of building something brokers want to use all the more difficult. If you’ve been successful in making money with these older systems, why change?

Don’t get me wrong—some brokers have changed. There are those who have adopted a more modern CRM as their primary technology platform. The problem, though, is that many CRMs are still limited to basic data organization and management. Those are important benefits, but they’re not actual activities that drive sales.

In other words, you don’t “organize and manage” your way to new deals; you win deals. And you win them through action, not management.

If you’re finding success as a commercial real estate broker, then chances are you’re winning and executing business based on a fairly repeatable process that demonstrates your unique value. That process is likely a series of things to do in order to create and keep momentum and assign responsibility to yourself or your team.

Apto’s latest feature set is designed to help you do everything related to a deal much more efficiently. It lets brokers track, manage, and execute deals from start to finish with a simple interface and intuitive workflow that drives everything forward.

How, you might ask? Well, we have three feature spotlights to show you our favorite tools and how they’ll help you close more deals faster.

Have you taken a look at Apto Deals yet? Our latest feature is meant to give you perfect clarity and workflow for every deal.

With a million details and moving pieces to manage, it’s shockingly easy to have something fall through the cracks. Many of the brokers we talk to have just such a story, and frankly, they get emotional about it (and who could blame them?).

Closing a deal and cashing a commission check is such a good feeling, right? After months—sometimes years—of hard work, all your efforts finally pay off.

If closing a deal is good news, the even better news is that you can easily keep up the momentum and use your recent success to drum up new business. Just think, you have relevant market intel that you can use with other owners in the market. Maybe they’re in a similar position to the deal you just closed.

Leavitt Digital, or LDCRE, is a commercial real estate listing distribution platform, syndicating listings to 900+ news websites around the world. Those websites cover 27 countries, all 50 U.S. states, and 7,100 global cities.

And it now integrates directly with Apto, meaning your listings get way more exposure with no effort on your end.