Using a real estate CRM is critical to your success as an agent. It sits at the center of your lead generation, lead follow up, lead tracking, and client communication efforts. It’s how you organize your business and move people through your funnel from prospect to client. Without using an effective CRM software, you will end up spending much more time than you should be on organizing and communicating with your leads. And worse yet, things will start to fall through the cracks.

Your Real Estate CRM Needs Regular Maintenance

Just because your real estate CRM is going to save you a lot of work in the long run, doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t require some work as well. Once you get it all set up and put all your contacts in there, your work isn’t done. After a while, you might notice that you are getting more and more bounce backs on your email campaigns and people aren’t responding or engaging with your messaging anymore.

The reason this happens is that your contact lists will slowly go bad over time, if you don’t take the steps to maintain your real estate CRM. People get new email addresses, they’re not longer in your area, or just stop engaging with your all together.

Why Is a Poorly Maintained CRM a Problem?

There are several reasons why an out of date real estate CRM can create problems for your business. First off, sending emails consistently to outdated addresses can get you flagged as sending out spam. If you’re flagged, then fewer of your emails are going to find their way to your prospects and leads.

Second off, having out of date contact information is a waste of your time and resources. You spend a lot of time crafting emails, drip campaigns, text message campaigns, and other marketing efforts. If a significant number of those messages are going to out of date addresses or to people who no longer need or want to see them, then all that work is for nothing.

It’s important to keep your real estate CRM up to date, so that you are connecting with the right people—people who you should be nurturing and who may actually work with you at some point in the future.

How to Clean Up Your Real Estate CRM

There are several steps you can take to regularly clean up your database and make sure it has the right contact information.

Remove duplicate contacts

The first step is to download all of your contacts and remove any duplicates. Be sure the information you are keeping is the most up to date information you have.

Look for unresponsive contacts

Next, look at who is not opening your emails, not responding to any of your messaging, or otherwise seems completely unengaged with you. Generate a list of those unengaged people and start calling them. When they answer, ask about their real estate needs, see if they are still in your area, and then ask what the best email address to reach them at is.

Create an inactive list

Instead of deleting unengaged or less engaged contacts, consider moving them to an inactive list that delivers a minimum number of touchpoints a year. If your real estate CRM has strict spam rules, then consider putting your inactive list in a different email platform with less strict rules.

Take a close look at bounce backs

If your emails are bouncing back, then look at the contact information. Check for misspelled words or if the email is no longer valid. Remove all bounce backs that you can’t fix.

Continuously add new contacts

Block out time on your calendar to input new names into your real estate CRM and update other information. When you do this each week, you make it a habit; just part of your routine. And like any activity that you do regularly, you naturally become faster and better at it — saving you time.

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