Hmmm.  I am guessing that the silence on this issue means that there aren’t a lot of real estate users (yet).

We are a 5 person commercial real estate team and are using Solve360 with little customization.  The biggest change might be that we call it Fred instead of Solve360 because Fred is easier to say when referencing our shared CRM.

The five of us are often in disparate and remote locations - so for us, Fred has been a lifesaver.  We created tags for contact types (principal, broker, other, personal, vendor, etc) and there are tags for property types (used less frequently since many of our principals do not specialize (retail, industrial, office, etc)and then we created tags for each of us users.

Examples of use:  If we have an office property for sale, we SHOW all Tags/Office and call those contacts.

We use an ongoing monthly marketing campaign that we tagged T12.  If someone wants to unsubscribe from our marketing blasts, we remove the tag but they are otherwise 100% intact in the system (for purposes of more personal contact)

Need to contact all the brokers in a certain area?  SHOW tag/Broker and Search For (any field) Contains (area code) or you can use a zip etc.

Scheduling:  we were early adopters and while the calendar is becoming more robust, it just wasn’t “there” early on.  We use Firefox and freeze the first few tabs.  So Fred is ALWAYS the first tab and the second tab is AlWAYS Google calendar.  For us this was easier to toggle than the calendar in Fred and since we were already using it as a team there were no adoption issues for us.  Plus we have many recurring events which were no issue for Google.

Correspondene/Reporting and version control: We have some substantial leasing/sale assignments (listings), each of which requires a bi-weekly report to the client.  Our team was going INSANE with issues having to do with version control of these docs.  We now embed a Google spreadsheet in the Project (one for each property).  Since we can all see the reports along with each edit we can tell which prospects etc the other team members are contacting.  The report is always current and then we export and print (along with some attractive formatting that Google docs can’t handle) a hard copy that we had to the client.

Fred is becoming very dear to us.  Hope this post helps you.

Thanks for all the information Kathleen

I have a bit to say about this, but I’ll get back to you soon on this!

Kathleen,
We are a small real estate team and looking at implementing Solve360.

Would you be willing to spend some time on the phone or maybe send some screen shots of how you have implemented this for your office/team? We’re struggling a bit, even though it seems easy, it gets complicated very fast…

-David

Kathleen Howard - Jun 26, 2009 02:01pm

Hmmm.  I am guessing that the silence on this issue means that there aren’t a lot of real estate users (yet).

We are a 5 person commercial real estate team and are using Solve360 with little customization.  The biggest change might be that we call it Fred instead of Solve360 because Fred is easier to say when referencing our shared CRM.

The five of us are often in disparate and remote locations - so for us, Fred has been a lifesaver.  We created tags for contact types (principal, broker, other, personal, vendor, etc) and there are tags for property types (used less frequently since many of our principals do not specialize (retail, industrial, office, etc)and then we created tags for each of us users.

Examples of use:  If we have an office property for sale, we SHOW all Tags/Office and call those contacts.

We use an ongoing monthly marketing campaign that we tagged T12.  If someone wants to unsubscribe from our marketing blasts, we remove the tag but they are otherwise 100% intact in the system (for purposes of more personal contact)

Need to contact all the brokers in a certain area?  SHOW tag/Broker and Search For (any field) Contains (area code) or you can use a zip etc.

Scheduling:  we were early adopters and while the calendar is becoming more robust, it just wasn’t “there” early on.  We use Firefox and freeze the first few tabs.  So Fred is ALWAYS the first tab and the second tab is AlWAYS Google calendar.  For us this was easier to toggle than the calendar in Fred and since we were already using it as a team there were no adoption issues for us.  Plus we have many recurring events which were no issue for Google.

Correspondene/Reporting and version control: We have some substantial leasing/sale assignments (listings), each of which requires a bi-weekly report to the client.  Our team was going INSANE with issues having to do with version control of these docs.  We now embed a Google spreadsheet in the Project (one for each property).  Since we can all see the reports along with each edit we can tell which prospects etc the other team members are contacting.  The report is always current and then we export and print (along with some attractive formatting that Google docs can’t handle) a hard copy that we had to the client.

Fred is becoming very dear to us.  Hope this post helps you.

@Kathleen
I would like to see that too if possible, we are trying to implement Solve as well and would like to see the screen shots of other real estate users.