A History & Partial Listing of Contact Management Tools in Real Estate – Part 1 of 3

This article is an ongoing work-in-progress on my site – click here!

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 this transplant from computer operations to Real Estate guy…

During Howard & Friends tenuous tenure, another Real Estate Specific (RES) program came out called, interestingly enough, RES – Real Estate Specialist. I loved that program, but it never made it to Windows. As reticent as agents are now to invest the time into learning Contact Management or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, can you imagine how small the market was back in the late ’80’s?!

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.

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. Version 6i was the last offline version to be produced by Top Producer, and is now no longer available, and support will end in May of 2007. Agent Office remains an ‘offline’ solution, meaning it is software you load on your computer, as opposed to being available online with any Internet connection, as is Top Producer 7i. 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 7i. 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 7i 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 is more likely to stay in business than ANY other Real Estate specific CRM solution on the market today.

Be very aware that once you get into ANY CRM program, if you leave it to go to another one, things like your contact’s record of e-mails, to-do’s, appointments, phone calls, etc., will not be exportable, or importable into another program. The way these records are kept is unique to each and every program, so they will not transfer from one to another. The same can even be said of Outlook. Another thing that does not export from these tools is the letter library, without significant intervention. If you use merge fields in ANY program, 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 Microsoft Office suite, but compared to the relatively 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, 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 Agent Office, 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. 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, 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.

Next time – Part 2 – What else is out there? A significant, yet still partial list of other leading CRM solutions that lend them themselves to use by real Estate agents.