New Real Estate Hubspot CRM Best Practices (2024)

New Real Estate Hubspot CRM Best Practices

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Hi All,

New to hubspot - looking for some best practices/guidance specific to the commercial real estate industry, namely multifamily investment (not brokerage).

We're in the set-up/onboarding stage and wanted to see if anyone would be willing to share best practices on how to set up your platform for real estate aquisitions.

The main thing I'm looking for guidance on is essentially around how to best set up our platform. For context, I have property information (ie, about the physical asset) and two contacts for each property (Owner / Property Manager). These are all "investments / targets" we are going to pursue acquiring. I'd like to store the information as effectively as possible so that the contacts are tethered to the physical property and I can enroll them in sequences together to be contacted at different intervals / stages. Going through on-boarding it seems like we're trying to force the data into hubspot out of the box, and it seems like a more tailored to real estate set up may pay off more down the road.

Key questions:

1. I'm thinking about re-classifying the property (physical asset) as the "deal" in Hubspot, currently we have them as "Companies". This way it would show up as an opportunity with a stage and contacts attached to it.
2. Are you able to tailor sequences to bounce between different contacts. Ie, if I wanted to reach out to owner X times first, then at a certain stage in sequence reach out to the Property Manager, is this possible? Or is it not possible/better to keep each contact in a deal on it's own sequence - ie, run outreach for the asset through the Owner. Then initiate outreach through Property Manager separately.
3. Is there a fast way to optimize data importing. We are testing on a sample size of 50, but I have a goal to work up to importing 5k properties (physical assets) with contacts for each. Mapping them to the correct deal has been time consuming even at this lower number, so I'm concerned it will be a huge time suck if I'm doing this at scale. I'm sure I'm missing a way to do this more effectively and systematically.

Commentary/guidance or video resources are all welcome. Thanks in advance!

trevordjones

‎Mar 15, 20246:52 AM

Lucila-Andimol

‎Mar 15, 20247:11 AM

mangelet

‎Mar 15, 20247:45 AM

New Real Estate Hubspot CRM Best Practices

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New Real Estate Hubspot CRM Best Practices

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Hey @PGeary, how are you? I am reading what you raised as problems and also what @Lucila-Andimol answered you, which is very good.

1/ Definitely, using companies for properties is a bad idea, okay?

2/ The idea of using businesses or deals for this is better.

3/ But the best model is that you use a custom object, a property object, precisely for the physical assets.

That would greatly simplify your data model, the way you see it in HubSpot and, at the same time, the way you are going to import it by linking the properties with the contacts.

If it were your possibility to create custom objects, you would have a more robust, better and clearer data model, right? For that, you would need enterprise (and today it's probably very easy to upgrade just 1 seat is a low investment ~130).

If you are going to stay with Pro, switching to deals is a better idea than staying with companies.

And then, for the part of sequences or contact automations, as Lucila also told you, it is a better idea to use workflows. If you want to automate this in two steps, contact one contact first, then another and so on. For that, you need the marketing hub, not just the sales one, right?

Martin Angeletti HubSpot Veteran (12+ years) ❌ Worried about messing up your HubSpot? I've got your back. ✅ Join the thousands of people who have discovered how to avoid problems with simple tricks and have started to dominate HubSpot (and not be dominated). ⛅️ Don't get left behind. → Click the subscribe button and scroll down to find the opt-in box. Subscribe

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New Real Estate Hubspot CRM Best Practices

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Hey@PGeary

I agree with you that classic onboarding is not going to meet your needs.
When we work with clients like you in the Real State industry the configuration of the data model is a bit different and to make it more robust it usually involves using custom objects like Properties or Property Manager/Brokers.
Of course you can then differentiate in your database investors from buyers and customize your marketing and sales actions for that.

About the secuences (as you describe them) I think it 'd be better work with Workflows and for the import it could also be solved with syncs form the API depending on where you are getting the information of the properties from.
If you need coaching on how to achieve a HubSpot portal that best suits your business let me know.

María Lucila Abal | COO Andimol HubSpot Expert, Community Champion & Certified Trainer (12+ years) Have questions? Get answers: Get Premium Support

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New Real Estate Hubspot CRM Best Practices

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@PGeary, I agree with@Lucila-Andimolthat workflows may be a better choice for your flows that need to switch between recipients, as long as your Property Managers and Owners are opted into Marketing Email, since emails sent through workflows are marketing (bulk) emails and not Sales (1:1) emails. Understand also that emails sent through workflows will be tracked as marketing activites and not sales activities, if that matters to your process.

- Trevor
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New Real Estate Hubspot CRM Best Practices

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@PGeary,

My initial reaction is that you should probably be working with an experienced HubSpot Architect who works for a Solutions partner. There is a lot to unpack in this post, and I'm a little concerned about doing it justice in a brief post.

1.) Since you are using Professional, I am inclined to agree that using the Deal Object is probably the best approach for properties in this model. If you want to track purchase and sale transactions using the deal object as well, these can be tracked in separate pipelines.

2.) Your best bet here is to have two sequences: One that reaches out to the owner, and a second that reaches out to a property manager. With an Enterprise subscription, you can enroll contacts in sequences automatically using workflows, and this would allow you to "bounce" between the two sequences automatically. Unfortunatley, this option is not available on your current subscription.

3.) The key with any multi-object import is to have a unique identifier for each object so HubSpot creates the associations correcltly. In your case, your owner and property manager will have email addresses that should be unique to them. You'll need something similar for properties, such as for example, a unique property number. This could be as simple as having a column in your property spreadsheet be sequential numbers. 0001, 0002, 0003, etc. With that done, you just need your property spreadsheet to list the email addresses of the relevant owner and manager in their own distinct columns of the spreadsheet. This article tells you more about how to do that.

- Trevor
If my post solves your problem, please accept it as a solution.