Salesforce Case Study: Top Success Stories of Real Estate Leaders

Since 1999 Salesforce has quickly become the #1 CRM choice for over 150,000 companies of all sizes. Among Salesforce’s biggest customers are Toyota, U.S. Bank, T-Mobile, American Express, and Canon.

Moreover, 1,000+ certified Salesforce consulting partners are expanding the number of happy customers tremendously by providing various types of services to ensure complete CRM adoption.

Read Salesforce case study of CRM implementation success stories in the real estate industry.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform that entered the market in 1999. Since then, its ecosystem has grown to 30+ software products serving different business needs of over 10 industries. The best-sellers are Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Pardot, etc.

Salesforce functionality can be modified to meet the needs of any business, even the most sophisticated. Salesforce has already become the top CRM solution for Education, Financial Services, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Nonprofit, Real Estate, Hospitality, Travel, and Transportation.

Why Salesforce for Real Estate?

Based on PCMag’s data, over 87% of the top-earning real estate agents use CRM systems to manage their listings, deals, and customers.

Salesforce has proven to be a perfect platform for real estate firms of any size, but originally, it doesn’t offer out-of-the-box functionality for this industry and the system should be configured. However, there are already over 40 preconfigured solutions available on the AppExchange app marketplace created for different real estate sectors.

For example, if you need a CRM adjusted to commercial real estate needs, you can try AscendixRE CRM. It’s a Salesforce-based tool designed for CRE brokers that combines customized functionality specifically for CRE brokers with the full power of the Salesforce platform.

Selected Salesforce Success Stories of Real Estate Companies

Check our top 10 Salesforce case studies to see the platform in action and how it can work for different real estate verticals:

1. Salesforce for Commercial Real Estate: Story of Savills Ireland

Savills Ireland Salesforce Case Study

Location: Dublin, Ireland

Industry: Commercial Real Estate

Number of Employees: 250+

Salesforce Products & Services:

• AscendixRE
• Ascendix Search
• Salesforce migration
• Salesforce customization

Background

Savills is a global commercial, residential, and rural real estate service provider. The company offers a wide range of services from sale, acquisition, and investment advice to valuation, planning, and property management.

Savills Ireland has been at the forefront of the Irish Property market for more than 50 years.

Project Challenges

• Company data was sorted in silos or stored in Excel files, which made it difficult to share it across departments
• Low scalability of the existing platform
• No ability to tailor the system the way the company needed and let teams use it in different ways.

Solution

• AscendixRE CRM helped create a comparable database
• Ascendix Search (an app for an advanced Salesforce search) and AscendixRE enabled Advanced Search Options in Salesforce, as well as custom objects & fields like Lease Event, Lease Type, Market Localities, Rental Values.
• Ascendix Search enabled the search of real estate on a map by drawing, for example, a circle to find properties in a radius.
• Ascendix Search gave the flexibility to change fields that you search on, put necessary columns quickly, as well to be able to put them into PDF or Excel reports, and format those
• With Ascendix Search, Savills Ireland is now able to save searches and share parameters with other people, put custom pins on properties on a map, and make targeted standard email lists and Excel lists.

The Payoff

Searching for real estate units used to take several hours to go through and look through every Excel file. With Ascendix Search, it takes about 10 minutes.

2. Salesforce for Real Estate: Case Study of Azizi Developments

Azizi Developments Salesforce Success Story

Location: Dubai, OAE

Industry: Luxury Residential and Commercial Real Estate Development

Number of Employees: 1,400+

Salesforce Products & Services: 

• Marketing Cloud
• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Einstein Analytics
• Salesforce implementation
• Salesforce integration 

Background

Azizi Developments was founded in 2007, and since then, the company has sold and delivered over 11,000 residential properties to local and international investors.

It offers luxury developments across Dubai’s most sought-after residential destinations. The most notable are Meydan, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai Healthcare City, Al Furjan, Studio City, Sports City, and Downtown Jebel Ali.

Besides that, Azizi Developments is famous for its commitment to transparency and customer-centricity which has driven the company to implement Salesforce in 2019 to digitally transform its business.

Project Challenges

• Siloed and complex structure of the internal departments
• Disintegrated sales, marketing, after-sales, and broker management operations
• No visibility into the customer journey.

Solution

• Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation and integration with the Tableau CRM (also known as Einstein Analytics), company website, Property Finder, and social media channels to enable lead scoring and classification based on criteria like language spoken and lead’s preferences.
• Marketing Cloud rollout provided the way to personalized email and SMS campaigns, social media monitoring, and integration with sales functions.
• Service Cloud deployment helped organize advanced management of customer care and complaints, automation of payment collection, and follow-ups on maintenance and property management queries.
• Experience Cloud-based broker portal helped third-party brokers interact easier with Azizi Developments.

The Payoff

Salesforce implementation resulted in a 70% reduction in the sales cycle time. Instead of spending a week to close a deal – now it takes a day and a half. It improved lead scoring and quality and helped decrease the email bounce rate from 30% to 8%.

3. CRM for Commercial Real Estate: Cresa New York

Location: Washington, DC, USA

Industry: Commercial Real Estate

Number of Employees: 1, 000+

Salesforce Products & Services: 

• AscendixRE
• Ascendix Search
• Salesforce implementation
• Salesforce customization.

Background

Cresa was founded in 1993 and quickly became the largest commercial real estate firm in the world that specializes in representing tenants and occupiers of space.

It is a customer-centric commercial real estate company that applies its integrated expertise to make its business better. Cresa has been using AscendixRE and Ascendix Search for about 5 years.

Project Challenge

• No ability to own data due to corporate protocols when untouched data automatically got unassigned from an employee
• A large amount of data had to be migrated from Excel spreadsheets and CSV files to Salesforce with improved quality and accuracy
• The company looked for better ways to collect, organize, and utilize data to achieve the highest levels of success.

Solution

• AscendixRE helped create a custom consolidated database
• Ascendix team of Salesforce consultants enabled the successful import of about 8,000 records to a new system with 95% accuracy
• Ascendix Search improved general Salesforce search, data management, and retrieval.

The Payoff

In partnership with Ascendix, Cresa New York successfully imported every property in the market of over 100,000 square feet, over 2,500 lease comps, another 1,000 accounts & associated contacts to Salesforce with 95% accuracy.

Thanks to Ascendix Search, now 3 hours a week are saved on data searches within Salesforce.

4. Salesforce for Property Management: Story of Calson Properties

Calson Properties CRM Testimonial

Location: Palo Alto, California

Industry: Property Management

Salesforce Products & Services:

• AscendixRE
• Ascendix Search
• Salesforce implementation
• Salesforce customization.

Background

Calson Properties is a small, family-run property and asset management company that started out in 1948 in Palo Alto, CA, and since then, has been managing commercial and multi-family residential properties.

Now, Calson Properties’ team has dispersed in Colorado and California providing services to the Western United States. They have been using AscendixRE and Ascendix Search since 2019.

Project Challenges

• Need for automation of property management, email campaigns, and contact management
• Disintegrated systems, data sources, and communication
• Lack of centralized management of information on the properties and tenants, such as vendor contracts, certificates of insurance, as well as tenant data
• Overcomplicated contact management, custom field creation, property management/accounting, and mass emails.

Solution

• Implementation of AscendixRE streamlined task/work order management
• AscendixRE enabled quicker service delivery mechanism, sales tasks organization, automation of emails based on the trigger date, improved project status visibility.

The Payoff

AscendixRE had 80% of what Calson Properties wanted out of the box and Ascendix CRM consultants helped to design and build out the remaining 20% that helping reduce software implementation and maintenance expenses.

5. Salesforce for Construction: Case Study of BPD Europe

BPD Europe Salesforce Success Story

Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Industry: Construction

Number of Employees: 500+

Salesforce Products & Services:

• Marketing Cloud
• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Community Cloud
• Social Studio

Background

Since the foundation of Bouwfonds Property Development (BPD) in 1946, it has constructed more than 375.000 homes. Today, it is the largest area and property developer in The Netherlands, Germany, and France.

Its primary mission is to create sustainable, affordable, inclusive living environments in every region and for every resident. To increase efficiency and create a more personalized approach in dealing with customers, BPD launched a Salesforce implementation project back in 2010.

Project Challenges

• Unification of multiple communication channels, including social media, webchat, email, and telephone
• Connection of numerous lead sources to improve tracking and nurturing
• Optimization of lead generation, management, conversion.
• Improvement of visibility of the overall sales pipeline
• Boosting collaboration with real estate agents
• Creation of more personalized marketing and social engagement
• Centralization and automation of case management.

Solution

• Implementation of Sales, Service, Marketing, and Community Clouds helped create direct omnichannel engagement with customers
• Salesforce rollout allowed centralized management of construction project details, customer queries, and house purchases
• Sales Cloud-enabled lead management by deploying a series of workflows, generation of a rich data source for further analysis, capturing of the lead status and progress
• Service Cloud helped centralize case management and monitoring
• Marketing Cloud helped automate email updates, and social engagement and improve social listening
• Experience Cloud allowed building a partner community to simplify tracking of leads, tasks, and contacts.

The Payoff

Salesforce implementation and Clouds integration brought 50% improvement in lead conversion and reduced the time of customer case resolution to 36 hours on average.

6. Salesforce for Capital Markets: Story of Hanna Commercial Real Estate

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Industry: Commercial Real Estate, Capital Markets

Number of Employees: 26

Salesforce Products & Services:

• Salesforce implementation
• CRE technology consulting
• Salesforce managed services
• AscendixRE CRM for Capital Markets
• Ascendix Search.

Background

Hanna Commercial is the commercial division of Howard Hanna and was formed through the acquisition and merger of numerous existing independent commercial offices throughout the region.

They currently operate full-service offices in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Lehigh Valley, with support for additional commercial agents in other markets.

Project Challenges

• Individual offices were all using different systems
• Different data sources overcomplicate the data migration process
• Disintegrated market lines make it hard to share information.

Solution

• AscendixRE enabled CRM systems consolidation and unification of processes and workflows
• It simplified system workflows to encourage user adoption and utilization.

The Payoff

Compared to previous systems, AscendixRE demonstrated higher adoption rates and enabled a shared database across multiple offices in multiple markets.

7. Salesforce for Real Estate Investing: Case Study of Crowdhouse

Crowdhouse Salesforce Case Study

Location: Zuerich, Switzerland

Industry: Real Estate Investment

Number of Employees: 130+

Salesforce Products & Services:

• Salesforce implementation
• Salesforce integration
• Sales Cloud
• Pardot.

Background

Crowdhouse was founded in 2015 in Switzerland as a startup company to simplify the property investment process. The business has disrupted the real estate investing market and has brokered over 100 properties with 1.5 billion Swiss Francs in total value.

Crowdhouse has been using Salesforce almost since its inception in 2015 to revolutionize the Swiss crowd investing business.

Project Challenge

• Syncing Salesforce CRM with the proprietary CMS
• Need for a flexible system that will support business processes instead of victimizing them to the system
• Lack of property data visibility and accessibility.

Solution

• Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation helped streamline key processes to simplify closing of the deal
• Salesforce enabled standardization of anything that could be standardized in the customer journey
• Pardot integration helped send out the newsletters and organize data around a common view of leads and simplify the lead qualification process, giving predictability in sales.

The Payoff

Sales Cloud and Pardot implementation resulted in a 70% reduction in the cost of marketing leads.

8. Salesforce for Real Estate Investing: Visintainer Group

Visitainer Group Salesforce Success Story

Location: Fresno, California

Industry: Investment Real Estate

Salesforce Products & Services:

• AscendixRE
• Ascendix Search
• CRM migration
• Salesforce implementation
• Salesforce customization.

Background

Visintainer Group’s mission is to help sellers of investment properties market their properties with a sophisticated marketing approach.

The company specializes in selling commercial, multi-family, and agriculture properties located in Central California.

Visintainer Group maintains a detailed proprietary database of available properties, buyers, sellers, and opportunities and heavily invests in optimizing and improving their data.

Project Challenges

• Synchronization of processes across multiple divisions within the company
• Replacement of the custom-build CRM system with an agile platform that could be adjusted to their growing business needs.

Solution

• AscendixRE provided the way to unify activities of company departments within one system and enabled better visualization and access to the property data
• Ascendix Search helped to improve data management and search in Salesforce.

The Payoff

AscendixRE and Ascendix Search allowed them to turn data from a static form to a dynamic one within Salesforce, simplifying data mapping, search, and tracking.

9. Salesforce for Land Real Estate: Base Camp Country Real Estate

Location: Fishers, Indiana

Industry: Land Brokerage, Rural Real Estate

Salesforce Services & Products:

• AscendixRE Land
• Ascendix Search
• Salesforce implementation
• Salesforce customization.

Background

Base Camp Country Real Estate was established in September 2018 in partnership with Halderman Real Estate.

It is hunting land, ranch, and farm listing agency that assists both sellers and buyers throughout the real estate process and is backed by land market experience.

They have a solid foundation built from over 20 years of experience with their sister company Base Camp Leasing, where both landowners and people who enjoy the outdoors have taken advantage of their services.

Project Challenges

• Connect human resources in several different geographical locations
• Have an adaptive solution that would fit our niche of recreational land sales with lead tracking, workflow, and reporting all in one place.

Solution

• AscendixRE Land offered the adaptability of the program to the company business model,
• It became a one-stop-shop for my agents to upload a listing, store documents, and look at their Key Performance Indicators,
• AscendixRE Land CRM streamlined the processes of entering buyer/seller leads, developing listing details, housing legal agreements, marketing materials, marketing campaigns, to even handling commission splits, communication, and reporting.
• The solution also provided an ability to create visual graphs, export into excel, create PDF or time-driven e-mail reporting is outstanding.
• AscendixRE Land enabled integration with the Box app.

The Payoff

AscendixRE Land CRM helped Base Camp Country Real Estate support aggressive growth strategy, coordinate smooth work of agents from multiple locations, and drive efficiencies in their operations.

10. Salesforce for Leasing Real Estate: ERA Belgium

ERA Real Estate Salesforce Case Study

Location: Sint-Niklaas, Belgium

Industry: Leasing Real Estate

Number of Employees: 200+

Salesforce Products & Services:

• Sales Cloud
• Salesforce integration
• Audience Studio
• Customer 360 Platform
• Email Studio
• Tableau CRM.

Background

ERA (Electronic Realty Association) started its operations in 1995 and pioneered the promotion of property listings via the internet in Belgium. Now, the company supports thousands of commercial and residential real estate listings online.

ERA welcomed Salesforce in 2015 to connect the properties and buyers and to manage huge volumes of property data.

Project Challenges

• Need for highly customizable listing portals powered by large volumes of data,
• Lack of tight, highly -configurable data controls to manage it and automation of time-consuming manual processes and standardization of operations,
• Streamlining residential viewings for brokers and buyers,
• Targeting buyers with more tailored messaging.

Solution

• Sales Cloud provided integration of data with listing portals and enabled the building of workflows to automate and standardize time-consuming manual processes.
• Tableau CRM helped score listings in Sales Cloud and flag slow-selling properties to adjust the listing to show it to a wider audience of buyers.
• Salesforce integration with Tableau CRM enabled an automatic match of listings with a pool of 43,000 candidate buyers to create audiences based on their preferences.
• Sales Cloud made possible a comparative market analysis to see tendencies via dashboards that collect rich data on how long properties are on the market, how much they sell for, and each broker’s individual rate of commission.
• Audience Studio helped to make anonymized data accessible to partners such as insurance companies, financial institutions, and utility companies.
• Marketing Cloud enabled the creation of more targeted media campaigns and capturing of website entries and searches.
• Email Studio provided an ability to build tailored B2C email campaigns.

The Payoff

Salesforce helped ERA create a consistent repository of data, thanks to which the company is constantly recognized by the Universities of Leuven and Antwerpas as the trusted source in Belgium with enough consistent data that can help with academic research.

Bottom Line

Salesforce is a comprehensive tool with an exhausting list of benefits and despite its seeming complexity that can overwhelm at first, can become the best friend for your brokerage if you involve expert guidance.

Each real estate firm can take advantage of the platform in its unique way due to its scalability and flexibility. And even if you don’t want to spend time tuning the standard functionality of Salesforce, you can leverage its advantages with pre-configured solutions specifically for real estate agents.

And in case you are ready to welcome Salesforce CRM into your realty and simplify the process of its implementation, then our Salesforce consulting services will be the best fit for you.

Our consultants will make complicated processes easy for you.

We, at Ascendix, are ready to take any Salesforce-related challenges and successfully overcome them.

Our broad range of Salesforce services, 15  years of Real Tech experience together with product development expertise, and the number of happy clients speak for themselves. And all you need is to contact us and share your project challenges and we will be glad to share our best practices in dealing with them.

Ready to start with us? Get your custom quote on Salesforce implementation cost and timeline.