Real estate agency software is an application that can digitize and automate the day-to-day activities of a real estate agency, brokerage firm, and property association, as well as those of loan officers and other mortgage professionals. This tool can manage contacts, inquiries, and listings, publishing assets for sale, lease, or rent on several platforms.

Estate agent software makes it easier for agents and property managers across Canada to list and conduct marketing campaigns to showcase their properties, be they freehold, leasehold, or rental. Whether published on the agency’s website or a Multiple Listing Service (MLS) platform, the properties must be shown at their best, with accurate pricing, ownership, extension, renovation, and selling history. Real estate applications can help create and maintain this content in-house and online in the same way that content management applications (CMAs) can, and dedicated Real Estate Content Management Software especially.

With an estate agency tool, users can often print flyers, catalogs, and business reports. They can also manage appointments, viewings, and documents from first contact to closing a deal. In this respect, an estate agent application shares some of the functionality of Contact Management Software.

Another critical aspect of real estate management is customer relations, something most types of software for estate agents are expected to manage. This involves maintaining contact with existing and prospective buyers and sellers, following up on their requests, inquiries, demands, and deals, and requesting their input and testimonials wherever possible. This is similar to what CRM Software was developed for, and Real Estate CRM Software in particular.

Attuned to current industry trends and search engine requirements, real estate sales software is used to extend the reach of a property listing thanks to lead tracking, email and SMS marketing campaigns, and the ability to showcase buyer testimonials and referrals on relevant listings. So, such a tool borrows some of the features of Lead Management Software.

Aside from general marketing tasks, real estate software can also assist with administrative and management tasks. This includes transaction workflow, compliance, tenancy tracking, vacancy tracking, e-signature collection, database management, reporting, and auditing. These are activities also managed with Commercial Property Management Software, Real Estate Property Management Software, Sales Tracking Software and Real Estate Transaction Management Software. However, specialized real estate software is relevant to the work of not just salespeople or property managers, but to full-lifecycle estate agents.

Ultimately, the point of using real estate software is to streamline business processes, sell properties quickly, and convert clients effortlessly. To that end, any such tool should be able to offer a few basic capabilities:

• Create, edit, and monitor property descriptions displayed on listing websites, agency portals, and MLS platforms
• Promote the properties online, to email subscribers, and other leads via SMS, push notifications, or other means
• Track leads as they progress through the pipeline and follow up on the ones who aren’t converted
• Manage property, seller, buyer, and agent information and documents in a safe and searchable database
• Maintain a calendar to keep track of viewings, open house events, show home launches, auctions, and agent schedules

What is Real Estate Agency Software?

Real estate agency software tools are applications that bring automation and efficiencies into the real estate agent’s marketing, administrative, and sales processes. Used by single-office agents, nationwide brokers, portfolio managers, and mortgage professionals alike, they enable users to view property, contact, communication, and transaction data at a single glance, using their resources as effectively as possible to close deals as quickly as possible.

With estate agent software, real estate agents, brokers, property managers, and lease officers can keep their teams focused on activities that drive customers to purchase, rent, or sign a lease agreement. Its mainstay is the ability to list and promote properties online, on agency websites, and Multiple Listing Service (MLS) platforms. As it digitizes property data, this type of tool can also help create real estate interactive digital brochures, flyers, presentations, and catalogs with built-in 3D tours, page-flipping effects, and social media integrations. With data populated automatically and image/video editing tools as standard, many of these real estate software tools can free up the agents’ time for sales-related activities.

The most modern types of software for estate agents also enable them to reach out to a wide audience on- and offline. From drafting attractive, SEO-friendly listings online for leads in their area and sending property updates to prospects via email to reaching out to app users via SMS text messages and push notifications, these tools are must-have lead management software. Some can filter leads, adjust their messaging to different types of contacts, and track prospects through a lifecycle estate agents wouldn’t otherwise be able to monitor.

Estate agent software can also be used for company-wide calendar management. Property valuations, viewings, show home launches, open house viewings, and auctions are just some activities agents can book, promote, host, take part in, and keep track of with real estate software. Property agents, managers, and brokers can also use it to keep on top of agent movements, assign tasks, draft workflows, estimate workload, and even onboard new team members.

Much like dedicated real estate CRM software, estate agent applications can manage every incoming and outgoing bit of communication between clients and agents. They often feature custom inquiry portals, request forms, messaging options, and response templates to help speed up interactions between both parties. This enables agents to optimize their schedules as they move between properties, simplifying their routes and taking last-minute cancellations and viewing requests into account.

Real estate sales software also occasionally features reporting, forecasting, budget tracking, accounting, and project management functionality to help team leaders grasp the performance, patterns, and trends for properties, portfolios, and agents. They also often feature shared team dashboards, workflow editors, and visuals like Gantt charts to ensure transparency and accountability across the organization.

Finally, most types of software for estate agents are delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud-based solutions. On-premises versions may be ideal for companies willing to take full control of the maintenance, running costs, and security of the software.

What are the benefits of real estate agency software?

The benefits of real estate agency software for Canadian organizations are felt by property sellers and buyers, as well as agents facilitating their transactions. A variety of other entities stand to gain from the use of estate agent software, including property managers, mortgage professionals, and investors. But when it comes to those who use these applications and know first-hand what the alternative is, here are some of the undeniable benefits of real estate agency tools that promote digitization, automation, and continuous access to real estate information:

• Smoother information management: Managing the agency’s conveyor belt of property information is no easy feat. But real estate agency software digitizes the capture, storage, verification, validation, distribution, and disposal of information. This can be sensitive information about properties like deeds, tenancy agreements, residency documents, DBS checks, court orders, and AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) restrictions.
• Streamlining communication: Real estate software can facilitate inbound and outbound communication between several stakeholders. This includes in-house queries and referrals, buyer-seller negotiations, viewing requests from prospects, form submissions from website visitors, and procedural advice from brokers to clients involved in lengthy buying and selling transactions. As it keeps a record of these communications, the tool helps boost transparency, accountability, trust, and reputations.
• Centralized lead management: In real estate, storing lead data from first contact and through the pipeline to closing a deal is a process that can take anywhere from hours to years. Between shift changes, days off, holidays, parental leave, sabbaticals, and layoffs, the data a company stores on its leads can exchange hands hundreds of times. But real estate software automates information storage and runs it in the background, tracking every prospective client’s progress through the pipeline by itself. With features like two-way texting, call recording, batch emailing, drip marketing, click and email open trackers, and automated appointment scheduling, this application can easily take over from several agents, unifying the data so it’s available to everyone in real-time.
• Better time and project management: Staying organized and running a tight ship is easier said than done in a world where no-shows, gazundering, and gazumping happen daily. Real estate agents can’t help having their time wasted by unscrupulous buyers. Furthermore, their best chance to make the most of their time is to streamline their administrative tasks, workflows, house showings, and in-person interactions with tools like web forms, chatbot schedulers, automated email reminders, dashboard analytics, templates, and virtual presentations.
• Greater capacity: Freeing up time for estate agents translates to higher productivity. All things equal, the agency can take in more business, do more deals, and reach higher profits. As long as the organization makes full use of the software for estate agents that can scale up or down in line with demand, there’s no limit to the number of listings it can safely take on.
• More versatility: Real estate agents are often one-trick ponies, with no qualifications in accounting, project management, or customer relationship management. With real estate software, they don’t need to go out of their comfort zone to manage a client or a sale across every step of the pipeline and beyond it. Real estate applications have integrations that relay every bit of information where it’s needed, helping to balance accounts, update task progress, and keep clients in the loop at all times.
• A better understanding of the market: Estate agent tools give brokers and agents valuable insight into the housing market. For instance, they can gauge the importance of some of the services they offer clients, such as after-hours chatbots, virtual reality tours, and mobile apps. Users can track usage patterns, identify new trends, and improve their tools for even greater uptake, according to Capterra’s article.

What are the features of real estate agency software?

The features of real estate agency software don’t vary much from one tool to the next, except where the developers have specific applications in mind. For instance, some tools can be used to onboard new estate agents, while others specialize in tracking tenancy status and vacancies. But whatever the type of property or the agent’s speciality, there are a few features of real estate agency software that every user should be able to count on:

• Property management features: Helps maintain the property and facilitate showings. Whether a residential or commercial property with freehold, shareholder, or leasehold ownership coming onto the market for sale, rental, or lease, real estate software can assist with its maintenance, security, and marketing. This type of software can schedule repairs, book inspections, carry out evaluations, and manage viewings.
• Listing management: Captures, stores, and shares property information, promoting it on several channels. This includes the agency’s website, third-party real estate portals, property portfolio websites, and Multiple Listing Service (MLS) platforms. Being able to add, edit, and remove these listings automatically and in real-time saves a great deal of time and effort for every one of these services, while reducing the risk of featuring expired listings.
• Contact management: Captures, stores, and shares stakeholder information safely. Many professionals are involved in listing, staging, photographing, marketing, selling, vetting, buying, and financing a property. These individuals and businesses entrust their contact information with the estate agency. Real estate software can help agencies store, use, share, and dispose of this information securely, maintaining their reputation and growing their business.
• Relationship management: Facilitates and maintains a record of all stakeholder communications. For organizations like real estate agencies, with an online presence but without a dedicated client liaison department, keeping track of queries, requests, agreements, conditions, warnings, permissions, and refusals from any one of the many people and businesses involved in the sale of a property is challenging. Estate agent tools can collect all this data, and report it to the relevant party, enable dialogue and negotiation, and automate follow-up. After all, reputable real estate agencies take the time and effort to maintain positive relations with buyers, financers, solicitors, council staff, and property administrators, showcasing their reviews and testimonials on their websites whenever possible.
• Lead management: Captures and uses lead data to maximize the chance of a conversion. Real estate software can identify, reach, reel in, and guide leads through the sales pipeline. They can track leads for as long as needed, enabling agents to adjust their messaging to convert or drop them as soon as possible. This often involves deploying technology like push notifications, two-way texts, email tracking, calendar syncing, on-site surveys, and proactive chatbots.
• Calendar management: Create, manage, and share calendars between agents, clients, or both. Real estate applications can share and sync schedules across agent teams, departments, and branches, enabling the agency to deploy the best available people for the job as efficiently as possible. They can also be used to share information with prospects, such as viewings, face-to-face appointments, open house days, auctions, inspections, and other events, enabling them to confirm attendance, book appointments, gauge their competition and keep up with the latest property updates.
• Information management: Captures, interprets, and stores documents safely. Real estate agents have access to a great deal of sensitive information about properties and clients, including residence, nationality, and citizenship, addresses, financial circumstances, family structure, criminal record, income, debts, credit scores, contact details, and the types of devices they use. Then there are also sensitive documents about the sale and financing of a property, such as, deeds, driving licences, passports, tenancy agreements, mortgage agreements in principle, valuation reports, solicitor notes, and AONB planning decisions. This information is best stored in a real estate software tool’s database that complies with both Canadian and international law.
• Time management: Manage teams, projects, and workflows. While real estate software doesn’t usually come with all the features of a project management application, it often boasts some of their simplest and easiest-to-use tools, like interactive Gantt charts, drag-and-drop workflow diagrams, and calendar-style task assigning capability.
• Video and 3D tour marketing: Capture, upload, and promote a video and virtual content. With eye-catching features like interactive floorplans, built-in URL links, and info points, estate agents would be hard-pressed to create photo-only listings that are as attractive or effective. With real estate software, agents can capture, store, and share this content, and ensure that it renders at the best possible resolution and image quality to keep viewers engaged.

Browsing Capterra’s software directory will reveal all these features and many others. There’s no shortage of real estate sales software to suit every industry vertical and niche. A quick scroll, filter, and glance are bound to reveal the ideal real estate software tool for any field, scale, and vision.

What should be considered when purchasing real estate agency software?

When looking for and comparing real estate agency software, it’s important to keep an open mind, but also stay focused on essential requirements. Here are a few of the most crucial, yet often overlooked, things to consider when purchasing real estate agency applications:

• Is it mobile-ready, mobile-friendly, or mobile-optimized? Real estate tools must cater to a wide audience. A mobile-ready listing website is one that users can access and view from several devices, as it fits on their screen and its content can resize dynamically. A mobile-friendly one is designed to display particularly well on smartphones, with text, links, images, and other content displayed for easy navigation, but also spaced out evenly. Finally, mobile optimized websites are purpose-built for mobile devices, with a compressed script, aggressive cache, and minimized images. It’s not unusual for real estate agencies to redesign their website every few years, and their listing software should be able to keep up with technological updates.
• Is it scalable? The real estate industry reflects changes in the property market, buying power, the cost of living, lifestyle changes, social movements, and other macroeconomic changes. A real estate tool should be able to keep up with rises in demand and housing market slowdowns. Users should check the number of account holders, listings, transactions, and queries the software can safely process.
• Is it multilingual? Real estate agency applications in Canada are often only available in English. This makes them less attractive to agents who are non-native speakers catering to an eclectic community. Foreign-born and multilingual estate agents should expect to be able to select their language of choice when accessing their business software.

What are the most relevant real estate agency software trends?

Some of the most prevalent and relevant real estate agency software trends of our time have to do with a shift in customer expectations. Aside from an increase in environmental awareness, changes in space standards, and higher demand for outdoor space and gardens, house buyers have new demands in terms of technology. Here are some of the key real estate agency software trends today:

• The cloud is the norm: Real estate agencies have experienced a shift toward flexible, shared, coworking spaces which redefined their business infrastructure. Serverless hosting is opening new doors to real estate agents and brokers, who are moving their entire business online. For many, this is the cost-effective, time-efficient, scalable, and real-time accessible option.
• Automation takes over the nation: Automation is spreading far and wide as businesses need it to keep their competitive edge. It’s no different in the UK, where much of the population is tech-savvy and quick to embrace PropTech. With such a receptive customer base, features like data processing, proactive chatbots, and scheduled email outreach campaigns reduce the estate agent’s workload considerably.
• Wising up to smartphones: Mobile optimization can make or break any business these days, and real estate agencies are no exception. Able to access listings on the go, reach their prospects instantly, and dash for a last-minute showing, agents have a greater chance of closing deals if they carry out their work via smartphone.

Sources:

The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in Capterra's directory that offer them. The following sources were used for this document:

1. Real Estate Agency Software - Capterra Canada (Date accessed: Fri, May 27, 2022)

2. What is PropTech? Discover the tech trends of the real estate industry (Date accessed: Mon, Mar 13, 2023)