Sugar CRM for Real Estate?

[econtre]

Has anyone ever used Sugar for Real Estate Development/Commercial Real Estate?

[justinmeyer]

I've played with Sugar a little bit and it might be useful for that work.
What would you want it for? Leasing? Maintenance? New Prop Development?

As an aside, I work in CRE best practices, so I would be interested in hearing your thought processes as you evaluate the software.

-Justin

[econtre]

I'm evaluating whether or not this would be useful for our leasing activities for our sister company. We've used Sugar for sales for our consulting company to great success - curious to find out if the features are flexible enough to apply to commercial and residential real estate (both sales of condo space and leasing of apartments and commercial/retail tenant space). We already have project management software for the development side of the business; not sure what property management is using at this time.

How do you think the real estate sales cycle would match up with the way Sugar CRM works? Do you think it would work if we edit some of the field names?

[justinmeyer]

I am very new to Sugar so I am not sure if what I am saying is fully accurate, but as I have played with it, here is what I see from Sugar that might work well.

On the buy/sell side, obviously a contracts tab is important. I would use projects to handle the pre-sale tasks (ie title insurance, due diligence, phase 1/2 surveys, etc) . The projects tab might work well for condo conversions as well.

On the lease side, a contacts-esque tab would work well, I think. You could also use cases to log maintenance requests. With a few custom fields that are used or not based on the area, I think you could set it up for both commercial and residential leasing in one system.

My disclaimer, I have not seen any contracts tabs since I am using SugarOS.

[arellano]

Yes,

I use it for my CRE firm, Metro 1 Properties, Inc. We have applied it on some of our micro sites like officeinmiami.com for lead capture regarding landlord representation. We also use it to track accounts, team management, sales team performance, lead assignment, and marketing ROI. We have about 25 agents running it now on my sales team and i can honestly sale it keeps things organized and our customer follow up has noticeably improved.

In addition our firms agents have become more accountable and closing ratios have improved. If you cant measure it you can not manage it. I would highly recommend it for CRE adoption because what we do is all customer relationship management.