Real Estate, Investment Sales - Introduction

[Duncanre-estate]

My investment sales team is using Salesforce.com currently.  I am looking to connnect to any other users in this community who are currently using Salesforce.com in the investment sales industry.  My team sells large apartment properties, and I am looking for new ideas / best practices as we use Salesforce.  Any contact would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you.

[duncanmurray]

SNAP! My name is Duncan and we are in the same business, I am also trying to customize Salesforce for our Business needs at the moment.

How long have you been using Salesforce?

Duncan

[a.schaefer]

hi guys,

we're also working in real estate (among other), actually implemented a few solutions for various customers with bigger developments. let me know if you have any specific question that i might be able to help you with.
my current pet peeve with SFDC is that inability to allow for a unique product catalogue without the need of specifying a product quantity when adding some building space to an opportunity.

- Andreas Schaefer
leancrm.com

[Duncanre-estate]

Sorry, I responded to your message but I did not enter it in the message body. We have been using Salesforce for about 4 months. Everything is driven off of a close date, ie. forecasting, reporting, commissions, etc. are all driven off of a close date. Many times we do work in our business for clients that may not be necessary to add a close date. The deal may not be listed at all, but we still want to track it without a close date. I just wanted to see how other companies (in investment sales) have designed Salesforce to work for them. We are trying to track every Deal (Opportunity) we come across in Salesforce. We are NOT using leads really at all. We really only deal with Accounts. I am in the process of adding a new record type for hot buyers that we want to track. It is a work in progress at the moment.

[Harris44]

Duncan,

Interested in hearing about the progress you have made with salesforce.com to manage leads.  I work as an acquisitions officer in the apartment industry and hunt for both on market and off market opportunities.  There should be a lot of overlap.

Harris