Various Solutions:

Updated: 5/8/2008 - They're coming out of the woodwork! It all started back in the mid '80's with Howard & Friends. I know many of you loved it, but waiting for "Blinky to gather my contacts" was a tad too silly for yours truly, a transplant from computer operations to Real Estate guy... It has since been reincarnated as Star Contact, and then Agent's First Choice, but I frankly have not had the time to reevaluate it. I've spent my time looking at the ones I hear most about.

Then along came Top Producer in 1989 and Online Agent in 1992, later to be renamed Agent Office in 2002. Agent Office has also been 'branded' by various franchises over the years as 'RE/MAX Agent 2000', 'Agent Office for RE/MAX', 'Century 21 Power Pack', and Realty Executives' 'Executive Agent'. They were exactly the same program, except that the franchise logo was displayed in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Those two were pretty much the only games in town for years, in the context of market share, and boast the lion's share to this day. Top Producer was always far heavier into marketing than was Agent Office, hence the leading market share for Top Producer. See Agent Office vs. Top Producer.

The two continued to expand and improve over the years, but the first big change came about in 2003. Top Producer went online with Version 7i, and as of 2008, now it's 8i. Version 6i was the last offline/desktop version to be produced by Top Producer, and is now no longer available, and support has ended. Agent Office remains an 'offline' solution or 'desktop application', meaning it is software you load on your computer, as opposed to Web based, being available only while online, with any Internet connection, as is Top Producer. While there are third party solutions available, such as eServer, that enable Agent Office to be 'served' or accessed, 'online', it does not have some of the same functionality as does Top Producer. That said, if you are already using Agent Office, there is much to be said for not having to go through a whole new learning curve, and migrating only a part of your database to a new system.

As Top Producer and Agent Office own the lion's share of the market, it's been interesting to see my client's migration from one to the other, and the reasoning being given as to why. I have a steady stream of agents purchasing Agent Office from me, who are Top Producer 6i users. The three most common justifications being given:

"I don't want my database online. If the company goes out of business, I could lose my database"

"I don't want my database at risk of being compromised."

"I have enough monthly bills. I don't want another one"

Responding to the first; you have the capability of exporting the vast majority of the fields, and the export is done very quickly and easily. Importing that data into another CRM tool can be somewhat tricky if you have no clue what you're doing with databases. I have articles to help on my Agent Office Tips & Top Producer Tips pages.

A far as "If the company goes out of business...", Top Producer and Agent Office are more likely to stay in business than ANY other Real Estate specific CRM solutions on the market today, due to the size of their user base, and the money behind them.

Be very aware that once you get into ANY CRM program, if you leave it to go to another one, information typically referred to as 'history' which is comprised of your contact's record of e-mails, to-do's, appointments, phone calls, etc., will most likely not be exportable. There are some applications that will export that data, but even they can, you will not be able to import it into another application, other than a spreadsheet. The way these records are kept is unique to each and every program, which is why they will not transfer from one to another. The same can even be said of Outlook. Another thing which may or may not export from these tools is the letter library, without significant intervention. Because you use merge fields in all of these programs, including MS Word, they are different for each program. So no matter which one you use, they will not be usable in another program without editing all the merge fields. The only way to have ANY universality with e-mails or letters is to stay with Microsoft products. But then you lose all the benefits of the other programs, and they are MANY. There are more and more companies out there promoting the use of Outlook, in conjunction with Microsoft Office suite, but compared to the rapid expansion of the Real Estate specific CRM tools, you will be missing a great deal. More and more of them are interfacing with products like Zip Forms, Settlement Room, SureClose, Relay, ArchTel, and many template Web sites. Those relationships do not exist with MS products, with rare exceptions. Active Agent for Outlook is one of them, as it interfaces with Settlement Room.

To the second; Consider that the company with whom you have your database generates their entire income from their product. To allow the data to be compromised would be financial suicide. Could it happen? Never say never, but I don't see it being very likely at all.

Lastly; What can be said? It's more costly right? Or is it? If you take the initial cost of an 'offline' software as the only cost, you're not looking at the whole picture. After the initial cost comes the cost of the upgrades, IF you choose to buy them. Note that with most desktop applications, you can skip as many upgrades as you want, then buy the current upgrade, and it will include all the ones you skipped, for the same price. Then there is also the cost of tech-support on an annual basis. The online solutions usually include upgrades and tech-support in the monthly cost. Long term, yes online solutions will be more costly than offline, without a doubt, but you do need to take the whole picture into consideration to best evaluate them both. When the cost becomes the biggest issue with the monthly solutions, is when you are a team, and growing, and you need more and more "licenses". Then the cost can get to be significant. That said, if you are doing that well, the additional cost simply becomes a factor of doing business on that scale.

Then there are the people that are coming to me that have Agent Office, and buy Top Producer. Their needs are such that they need to be online. There are an ever increasing number of agents that have assistants, or buyer agents, who are not in the same physical location, and need remote/Internet access to their Contact Management tool. As previously stated, Agent Office can be 'served' online, but it's analogous to using a Real Estate specific add-on; it improves the capabilities, but falls short of a tool designed specifically for that use.

There is yet another product which is a hybrid of both desktop and online. It's called Mark-It-Advantage Xi. Where Top Producer, being online, allows you to share your database with your team members in 'real-time' (everyone being able to see all changes made by anyone immediately), Advantage Xi does not. Advantage Xi is licensed "per computer", as opposed to "per user". Any time, as you are using it, on your desktop, it is automatically going out to the 'Master Database' which the Mark-It Advantage people  host on their servers, synching to it at periodic intervals. So you can set each computer to synch once a day, twice a day, or whatever you choose. That way, if you don't need everyone to see the exact same data, at the exact same time, then this may suit you, as it is much less expensive on a monthly basis. It is very full featured, and has been around since 1991 in the DOS days. If your needs are simply to share your database between your own computers at the home and the office, you can skip the online database, and simply synch to a flash drive/USB memory stick, and carry that back and forth with you as your database. It allows synching to Outlook, to include categories and notes; and will do mail merges with MS Word and Publisher. Personally, I prefer Xi's e-mail to Outlook. While it looks and 'feels' very much like Outlook, it is more flexible and powerful.

What else is out there? In the RES (Real Estate Specific) arena, there are 2 programs that are based in FileMaker, which is a highly respected database platform.  Agent Business Builder is one of them, that started in 1995, and has a fairly significant user base as a result. Then there is REST, a relative newcomer with what I think to be some very good potential. Based in Filemaker, these two have some flexibility with respect to report generation, using a readily available group of programmers as a third party to generate them for you. Another interesting thing about them is that they are MAC compatible. Yet another with REST, is that with an additional license, it can be accessed remotely over the Internet, on it's own port, increasing speed, and without a monthly fee. Like all the other's, it has it's own idiosyncrasies, making it more suitable for some agents than others.  Most notably, they are not yet capable of 'receiving' email directly into them, yet.  The workaround being to copy and paste the emails into the notes field.

Someone vying to compete with Top Producer Is 360Agent. It has the potential to be Top Producer on steroids.  But as they are also new kids on the block, we'll just have to wait and see. As of the writing of this update, 360 has stopped taking new subscribers, so that doesn't bode well.

Speaking of new kids on the block, that's the state of the industry.

One called Realty Juggler, started  out strictly for use on Palms, but is now yet another online solution.

"All Client's" niche is for those who are very seriously into intricate referral tracking, although Mark-It-Advantage Xi is as good or better at that.

THEN we get into the ‘Add-ons'.  Creating add-on software to enhance the capabilities of Outlook has been getting popular for the last several years. ‘Active Agent for Outlook' is the one that most resembles good ol' Outlook, and it makes doing mail merges, and using activity plans, among other things, easier. Obviously it integrates with Microsoft products, which appeals to many. It's still not as easy as RES software to do the daily tasks that agents have to do on a daily basis, but there are a good many agents that are tired of dealing with ‘proprietary' software, most of which, but not all, lack the ‘power' of MS products. The single biggest drawback to all Outlook add-ons is that they are all limited to some of the core functionalities of Outlook.

There are two other most popular Outlook add-ons.

Last of the three is one called RealeSeller. Which one will suit you best? They all have their upsides and downsides.

We can't finish the list without letting ACT!, which I personally used for a year myself, get into the 'act'. There have been several add-ons created for it, but unfortunately I've yet to hear literally a single kind word spoken of them. Then ACT! itself came out with ‘ACT! for Real Estate'. I haven't personally looked at it yet, but the general consensus from the dozen or so people I've spoken with that used it, is that it is a lackluster effort, falling short in true functionality. In case you're considering hiring someone to customize ACT! to fit your needs, you may want to know this. I've had far and away more people purchase RES software from me that had just given up doing just that, than any other CRM tool in my experience. They had spent many hours, and a lot of money having it customized, and eventually gave up, because they got tired of dealing with it. Before you ACT! users, and I know there are a number of 'category ones' out there, start crucifying me, I didn't say ALL, simply more, than any other program.  Some other comments from ACT! users that have defected after years of using it...

GoldMine! There are definitely some die-hard GoldMine users that have downloaded the add-on for that, and swear it's the best thing since sliced bread. We are talking POWER now though. GoldMine is industrial strength, and not for the average Real Estate agent, who is being dragged kicking and screaming into using a Contact Management tool to begin with. OUT OF THE RUNNING NOW! As of March 2008, Goldmine is now a minimum 5 license program. Everyone I speak with is now jumping ship.

Another one I took a hard look at is Maximizer.  This is a powerful tool along the lines of GoldMine and ACT!, but in some respects has even more.  It interfaces directly with Outlook and MS Word as do GoldMine and ACT!, which will pique many people's interest. It is very flexible in and of itself.  A Real Estate add-on is available, but, as with many add-ons, for the most part all it does is label many of the user defined fields with Real Estate terms, add some letter templates and checklists, and add seven "Action Plans".  The program itself I definitely like.  The add-on does make it more Real Estate specific, but as with the ACT! add-on, it's inadequate.

Believe it or not, there are many more out there! I spend much of my time asking people specific questions to determine their needs, and then recommending the solution that best suits their needs. Let me please make one thing clear.  There is NO one program/application that is THE BEST!  Which one is the best depends upon you. I have my opinions about which ones are the best, generally speaking, for most agents, but I don't believe any one of them is clearly 'the best'.  It all depends upon your level of comfort with technology, your current needs, and your future needs.  When listening to opinions from others, be aware that many people 'love the one they're with', or if they don't love it, sometimes they'll still tell you it's the best  one, because they don't want to admit to making a mistake in their choice.  My question is, 'How can they say the one they use is "the best" if  they have not used more than one program, in depth, for a good length of time?"  No one has USED all of the major ones out there.  Some people have used several of them, but those individuals are far and few between.  Remember that when someone is telling you that one is better, ask them how long they have USED the other one. Reviewing it, studying it, or doing a trial period is far from having used both.

I just had someone buy Agent Office, and he hated doing it. He had been using a product that he absolutely loved. (I won’t mention the name here, because I don’t like to knock companies in public. It can be devastating to a company, and by the time you read this, they could have turned their act around. That is not to say I will not share my honest opinions about all products with you one-on-one.) He had been through many of the Contact Management tools I mentioned here, and loved this one. He bought Agent Office because he considered it to be the next best one for him after this one that he loved. Why the move? As great as it was, he was spending 4 – 5 hours a week with tech-support, resolving problems. He simply couldn’t afford to continue investing that kind of time with a newer product that was still experiencing growing pains.

Where is it going? It’s anyone’s guess. There are one heckuva lot of Real Estate agents out there, and more and more are beginning to realize that SOME kind of Contact Management tool has become a necessity. There are a lot ice cream flavors available, and while some are certainly more popular than others, the less popular ones still have a market.  Will the smaller markets be able to support so many different kinds of Contact Management tools? Time will tell.

In the interim, how do you choose?

Don’t make assumptions, when it comes to evaluating CRM’s

Finding the right CRM (Customer Relationship Management – often called “Contact Management”) solution, is getting more and more difficult all the time. There are literally dozens of choices. It takes hours to evaluate each one, to get only a cursory sense of how closely it matches your needs.

The biggest mistake I see people make on a regular basis, which ends up costing them more time in the long run, is to evaluate too many, too quickly. Because looking at one after another is so time consuming, people tend to discount each one too quickly if they don’t see what they need right away. Some solutions are more intuitive (easier to understand and learn) than others. While that is an attribute, it is not necessarily the only factor to take into consideration. In some cases, some solutions are less intuitive, but contain more of the other attributes you require. Intuitive or not, it’s very easy to ‘assume’ it does not do what you need, simply because you don’t see it. Rather than eliminating one as a possible solution, and moving on to the next one, make a list of the things you want it to do, that you don’t see, and send it to the provider, or me. That way you don’t pass one by, that could actually be your best choice.

Once you find one that feels right, and has many of the attributes you need, spend more time with it, and give it a chance. And remember, if you have a great many needs, it’s very unlikely you will find one solution which will do everything. One thing I hear from many people is that they have to have CMA capability, and the ability to interface with the MLS. Most CRM solutions do not have those capabilities, so most agents use their MLS’ CMA feature, or a third party service such as Lightning CMA;  Toolkit CMA; or Expert CMA.

One way to pick a tool is to evaluate what kind of 'user' you will be.  I've worked with thousands of agents over the years, in the context of CRM.  Agents fall into two categories in the following respect:

1)  You are capable of, meaning you have a deep enough understanding of, how software works and interacts.  You pick up software very easily and enjoy 'playing' with it.  You have the imagination to be creative with it.  You will enjoy investing the time into tailoring the program to be just the way you want it.

2)  You should really have something that may not be quite as flexible, but that lesser flexibility makes it easier to learn because it comes already tailored to the needs of the vast majority of users. You do not want to invest the time into 'making' it do what you want it to do. You just want it to do it.

My experience tells me that the vast majority of agents fall into the latter category.

While none of these applications can be so easily pigeonholed into one type, and it is certainly not my intent to say any of them are totally inflexible, the above solutions tend to be more for category number 2 people. 

On another note - On a fairly regular basis, I hear people comment that this person’s or that program’s form letters or fliers are bad/not for their market/hokey, you-fill-in-the-blank.  

The value in ‘canned’ content is not necessarily in that you can take them as they are, and start using them. While it is true that there are some things, some times, that can be good they way they are, or pretty close, it is rare. The value is in the fact that the content, the concept, is already there for you, and pretty much done. What is left for you to do is to tweak it to your personality, and/or your market. The value is in not having to start from scratch. Starting form scratch takes a great deal of time. That’s where the value is; the time savings.

It’s literally impossible to create a body of letters, fliers, post cards, or activity plans, that are perfect, for everyone in every market. Different people have different ways of communicating, with different personalities. And the difference in markets is vast in some ways from one to another, with regards to terminology and procedure.

The point here is that once again, there is too much of a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water when searching for a CRM solution. People hear; “Oh the form letters in that program are terrible”, and they discount the software on that basis alone. That’s a mistake. The form letters in all CRM solutions need to be tweaked. Granted, some more than others, but it’s necessary in all of them, for the reasons stated. 

I liken CRM software to the purchase of a home, in that when purchasing a home, you are actually purchasing a parcel of land, and the improvements on it, the house. The lot can not be changed. It is where it is. It can’t be changed to any significant degree. The home however, can be added to, or raised for that matter, and built anew. CRM software also has two parts; the program itself, and the content. The program, for all intents and purposes, cannot be changed, whereas the content, can be added to, deleted, or modified.

When looking for a CRM solution, one of your decisions is which is more important for your needs. Is it the content, or is it a complete system to track prospects, track your history with those prospects, schedule to-do’s and reminders, create reports, manage your listings and closings, create mailing lists from the way you have categorized your contacts, and manage drip email campaigns. In my opinion, there is not one single CRM solution out there, that has the best of both, so keep this in mind when conducting your search.

One consideration is how much pain you’re willing to go through. If you go with one of the market leaders, you’re less likely to have to switch down the road.  Then again, there are some solutions out there now that are very interesting, and if they last, could turn out to be a terrific solution; but will they last? If not, that’s where the pain comes in. The pain of learning one, having it go down the tubes, and then having to switch to another and endure a new learning curve. That process can be worth it, but if you’re going to take that risk, I would advise that you take it with a product that easily exports a great many fields. That way at least, you won’t lose a lot of your data in the transition.

Another consideration. All of these Contact Management tools have many things in common, one of them being the goal of eliminating the need to enter information more than once, by using ‘merge fields’. By that I mean creating a contact record, and then being able to simply click on ‘Write’, ‘Letter’, and that person’s name and address, is automatically put into the letter. With the advent of ‘Online Transaction Management Platforms’ (OTMP’s – see my last post), CRM’s and OTMP’s are currently mostly two separate programs. This makes duplication of data entry necessary. It may be that some of the players that will grow the most, will be the ones that merge the two best.

If you need help figuring out which one is best for you, I know a little something about the subject. Contact me for a free unbiased, consultation.

Steve Rupp, Realtor, Broker-Associate, ABR, ASR, CNHS, CRS, e-PRO, GRI, RFS, SRES

Some kind words from someone that bought one product from me, did not like it, returned it, and didn't know I could also sell her Top Producer: