Integrating CRM with your estate agent website to elevate the digital experience

Despite an influx in the last 10 years, online estate agents still handle just 7% of UK home sales. But as these digital-first and digital-only agencies continue to grow and firm up their offering, it’s vital that “traditional” estate agencies follow their lead in terms of prioritising a seamless digital experience to stay competitive.

The digital experience starts with and centres around your website. But in a world and a marketplace where efficiency and responsiveness are key, your digital strategy should look beyond just your website to thinking about how you can connect up your digital ecosystem to elevate this experience even further.

In this post, we’ll look at:

• The benefits of integrating your CRM with your estate agency website
• Things to consider and best practices for setting up a CRM integration

Integrating your estate agency website with CRM

Two things sit at the centre of an estate agency’s operations – customers (buyers, vendors, tenants, landlords) and properties. For any large estate agency with established digital processes, these will usually be managed together in their CRM platform – via a property-focused solution like Reapit or Alto. For complete efficiency in both your back-office operations and seamlessness in the experience you offer to customers, it makes sense to link up your CRM with your website.

The benefits of integrating with CRM

Managing website property listings

Integrating your website and CRM means you can pull through property data automatically – saving you time on duplicating data entry (i.e. adding to your internal system and listing on the website). It will also enable you to display live property statuses (for sale, under offer, etc), without having to manually update them, improving the experience for users browsing your website for potential properties. With the right setup, you can also integrate multiple CRM instances with your website – for example, if you’re running separate systems for buying and letting, or for residential and commercial – streamlining everything and reducing duplication of data.

Better customer data management

Data goes the other way too – setting up a CRM integration also enables you to pass data automatically from the website to the CRM system. This could be enquiries about properties, bookings for views or valuations, or instructions. Having this data pass seamlessly from teh source (your website) into your CRM gives you more visibility and control over customer data throughout the sales process. This will both improve the customer experience, ensuring they get more personalised communication and service, and also enhance your approach to sales and marketing with access to better data and segmentation.

Increased efficiency

Being able to seamlessly and automatically manage the flow of customer and property data between your website and CRM helps you save time, avoiding duplication of data entry and fewer manual tasks. This helps you focus more on adding value and maintaining a high level of service throughout the property buying and selling process. 

A single source of truth

With data being managed from one place (your CRM), and digital frontend experiences feeding to and from it, you can ensure the accuracy and relevancy of the data within it. As we’ve already mentioned, you don’t have to keep two systems (your website backend, and your CRM) manually updated, so there is only one version of the data, reducing the risk of errors or missed fields.

Reapit CRM and website integration for Karl Tatler

We worked with estate agent Karl Tatler to create an elevated digital experience to match the premium standard of their service. To maximise efficiency, we built a custom API which would pass data between Reapit CRM and their headless website. This meant they were able to seamlessly list new properties via Property Hive, as well as update property statuses automatically. All enquiry data around valuations, viewings and instructions also gets passed into Reapit, and the source of each enquiry is tracked to give them full visibility of where exactly on the site an enquiry came from.

The Reapit integration was a significant piece of work and a vital piece of the puzzle in the website project. During the discovery process, we spent time investigating possible solutions. After exploring options already available on the Reapit marketplace, we identified we’d need to build a custom solution in order to get it to work in the way the customer needed it to. Following this, we had to assess how property data was added to Reapit and how this would need to be packaged by our API in order to be uploaded to the website via Property Hive.

The Karl Tatler website picked up the Silver Award in The Negotiator’s Website of the Year category in 2023.

The value of having an expert partner for CRM integration

More often than not there are off-the-shelf solutions for integrating your CRM with your website – but it does depend on the CRM and the CMS/website platform you’re using. That being said, out-of-the-box solutions won’t always get you where you want or need to be – and it’s important to explore all of your options before you commit to something which might not be right for you in the long run.

An expert partner like Adaptable can help you consider all of the options for integration and advise on what’s best for your purposes. It’s important to remember that what might work for you now might not work for you in the mid to long term – building scalability into your solution is vital if you want your digital processes to adapt to your growth plans.

Harnessing headless to improve integrations

One way to achieve scalability and flexibility in your digital ecosystem is to utilise headless. Headless is a way of setting up your website so that the frontend (what the user sees) is separate from the backend (where you add, edit and manage content). Setting up in this way gives you much more flexibility in terms of the frontend framework you use and your wider tech stack – you’re not tied into one particular CMS or frontend, opening up more options for integration and making it easier to scale elements of your ecosystem separately from each other. Again, an expert partner like Adaptable will be able to advise on whether headless is suitable for you and how you might benefit from it.

Key takeaways

• Integrating your CRM system with your website is vital to maximising efficiency in your digital processes as an estate agency
• Having data flowing automatically between your CRM and website means less manual data entry, less duplication of tasks and less risk of error
• You’ll also benefit from better control and visibility over the data from enquiries coming through your website – valuations, viewings and general enquiries
• Consulting with an expert partner will help you get the right solution for you and your needs – for now and in the future

Are you an estate agency looking to elevate your digital experience with a new website and improve efficiency by integrating with your CRM? Get in touch and we’ll chat about how we could help.