The Cost of Not Having a Real Estate CRM: Work It Out With Your Own Numbers

No made-up numbers

Most articles on this topic give you an industry average and a return on investment. We can't, because we haven't measured your agency, and nobody who quotes an average has either. What we can give you is the arithmetic, so you can do it with numbers you believe.

Part 1: Inquiries that go cold

Fill these in from your own last month:

• A: inquiries received (from every source: site, portals, texts, calls)
• B: of those, how many never got a proper reply, or got one too late to matter
• C: what one let property is worth to you (your fee, or for a landlord, the rent you lose while a unit sits empty)
• D: out of every ten good inquiries, roughly how many would have become a lease

The rough monthly cost is B × (D ÷ 10) × C.

The interesting part is usually B. If you can't fill it in, that is the finding: you don't know how many inquiries go unanswered, which is exactly what a tracking system is for.

Part 2: Time spent on admin

For one week, tally the minutes spent on:

• Copying applicant details from messages into a sheet
• Searching for a message or a document
• Asking colleagues who is dealing with someone
• Arranging showings by text
• Updating owners on what's happening

Multiply the week's total by four, then by what an hour of that person's time is worth. That's the monthly cost of the admin.

Part 3: Compare with the tool

Add Part 1 and Part 2. Put the monthly price of the tool you're considering next to it, plus any setup fee spread over a year and the hours it will take to set up.

If Part 1 plus Part 2 is smaller than the tool, don't buy the tool. That's a real answer for a lot of one-person businesses with a handful of inquiries a week.

Our spend calculator adds up what you pay for your current tools, if you'd like to do this properly.

Costs that are harder to count

• The owner who calls for an update because they don't know what's happening
• The applicant who got two replies from two people, or none
• The colleague who leaves and takes their message history with them

These don't go in the formula. They're still real.

Do you need a CRM at all?

A sales CRM tracks contacts, deals and follow-ups across buyers, sellers and past clients. If most of your work is rentals, what you're tracking is narrower: an applicant, a property, their documents, a showing and a decision. Here's how to tell whether a spreadsheet will still do.

Where Loftfolio fits

Loftfolio isn't a CRM. It's a rentals website with an applicant pipeline built in: every inquiry from your site becomes an application with status, priority, tags, notes, budget and a message thread. Document requests and self-booked viewings are on every plan. It costs $39, $99 or $249 a month for the account, with no contract and no setup fee, and it's live the same afternoon.

Put that price into Part 3 above. If the numbers don't work, don't buy it.

→ See the plans and do the sum