Data entry and re-entry. They’re the bane of the real estate industry, and sources of errors, confusion, missed opportunities and upset customers. How can a brokerage’s agents and staff avoid wasting time re-entering lead data and listing information? Enter once, and send the data where it has to go, automagically. That’s the power of third party integration. Or as our elementary school teachers said, “Plays nice with others.” This article explores how brokerages can leverage real estate integrations easier than ever before.
Real estate integrations have, in the past, meant laborious efforts for programmers to create software, called application program interfaces (API), which allowed other developers to create code enabling access to the desired data for their own uses. Sounds complicated, right? It was, and time consuming and expensive to do. However, once connected, these two parties enjoyed the benefits of reusing data for the benefit of their customers and staff.
“We want to integrate with as many third party vendors our clients may use in their current business processes as we can. That way we can reduce redundant efforts, make staff focus on more meaningful uses of their time, make agents more efficient and clients happier.”
You undoubtedly benefit from such efforts – look no further than your own IDX data on your real estate brokerage website. Your agents enter the data into the MLS, and the MLS has technology that enables website vendors like TRIBUS to pull that data for our customers’ use. There are many, many real estate integration opportunities that could benefit brokerages these days. The good news is fancy programming APIs are not always necessary.
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At TRIBUS, we know what we are good at, and recognize we will never be great at every possible technology a brokerage would want. So we want to create real estate integrations with as many third party vendors our clients may use in their current business processes as we can. That way we can reduce redundant efforts, make staff focus on more meaningful uses of their time, make agents more efficient and clients happier. We integrate directly with several services, such as:
- SendGrid, which powers our blast and drip email delivery and provides email statistics
- Twilio, which powers our text notifications/acceptances of new leads to agents
- BrokerMint, who in the real estate accounting space shares our philosophy of connecting to others, focuses on commission processing and fee collections while passing other accounting duties off to heavyweights like QuickBooks. This gives TRIBUS CRM users an automated connection to QuickBooks via an API connection.
- Zapier is software that allows over 150 different software applications to talk to one another, without being a programmer or knowing how to write a line of code. Because TRIBUS’ CRM is connected to Zapier, brokerages can connect to applications such as Google Suite (Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Sheets), Office 365, Mailchimp, ZipForms Plus, Bomb Bomb, and many others.
Real Estate Integrations Example
So with all these integrations, how does that benefit you and your agents? Here are some examples:
- A new buyer registers on your TRIBUS website and a lead is created in the Real Estate Brokerage CRM. That could trigger:
- Bomb Bomb to send your new buyer video email to the client right away.
- Enter a calendar item in the agent’s Office 365 or Google calendar to call the new lead at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning
- Add the buyer to a MailChimp email list
- Setup a market data email alert from Altos Research
- Add the lead to ZipForms Plus, so when they’re ready to make an offer their information is already in the document management system
- Add the lead’s contact information to a Google Sheets spreadsheet so you have an easy record of all your leads that you can then sort, use for other mailing lists, and further analysis.
- An agent meets with a lead, and adds the lead’s work email to their Contact record in Google. That work email is automatically updated in TRIBUS CRM.
- An agent adds a bunch of leads to their Google Spreadsheet from another source. New leads are created in TRIBUS CRM automatically.
These are only a handful of the many applications TRIBUS can integrate with, and an even smaller fraction of the automated actions that can occur with integrations with TRIBUS CRM. Regardless of who your website vendor is, explore your integration options, and see how much time and energy you can save your agents and staff!
