Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), also known as Sales Force Automation (SFA), is an computer industry term used to describe processes used by businesses to track their prospects and customers in an organized fashion with the goal of converting prospects/contacts to paying customers. Customer Relationship Management can be used to describe systems, software and associated actions.
Real Estate Assistant (REA), created by Tim Creagh, is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software created specifically for commercial real estate agents. Unlike any other CRM software, REA integrates commercial property information and links it to contact records for owners, sellers, agents, vendors, and tenants.
A commercial real estate agent can quickly produce marketing pieces, sale or lease comp reports and find buyers, tenants or properties that match specific criteria. Information can be shared as you see fit; sensitive information can be kept private. REA will get results faster and with less effort than anything else you can find for commercial real estate professionals.
You can >> try REA free for 30 days to explore its functionality. REA software is excellent for Investment Property Brokerages, Commercial Leasing and Land Sales organizations involved with the sale of commercial office and industrial buildings, hotels and restaurants, mobile home parks, apartments and land.
A Short History of CRM
Tim Creagh Gets Started with Member Management Software
In the 1970’s Tim Creagh owned and managed several tennis clubs in San Diego, California. In 1980 he purchased a small computer and began writing a database to help manage his members using the CP/M operating system and a database program created by MicroPro called DataStar. He was able to integrate his database program with another MicroPro program called WordStar to do mass mailings to his members.
Tim Finesses his Software Specifically for Commercial Real Estate Agents
In 1982 Tim met up with his good friend Bill Berkley a long time restaurant entrepreneur who was starting a commercial real estate company. Mr. Berkley was intrigued with the system Mr. Creagh had developed and convinced him to join the real estate company and develop a program for them. From 1982 to 1984 Mr. Creagh updated the program adding features that the commercial agents in the company needed. During this time Mr. Creagh converted the program to run on MS DOS and created a networked version of the system. During this same time Michael McCafferty began developing a generic contact tracking system called Telemagic. Unlike REA, Telemagic did not track properties but focused solely on contacts. As circumstances would have it, Mr. McCafferty’s office was only blocks away from Mr. Creagh although the two never met or even knew about each other’s programs until years later.
In 1984 Mr. Creagh began selling his system to local developers and commercial real estate brokers in the San Diego area. In 1985 he sold the system to Grubb & Ellis Commercial and to Coldwell Banker Commercial (now known as CB Richard Ellis).
Customer Relationship Management is Born
In 1986 Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney founded a small company named Conductor Software. They designed a product which would take over the contact management market named ACT!. The program took the vertical idea of REA and the generic idea of Telemagic and created a sales persons database that became the industry standard for contact management, which has become to be known as CRM or Customer Relationship management. Some companies use the term Sales Force Automation (SFA).
The next Contact Manager to enter the race was created by Elan Susser and Jon Ferrara named Goldmine. The focus for this product was generic CRM for fortune 500 companies. This program also did well and became a viable force for companies all around the world.
During this time Mr. Creagh maintained his focus for REA solely on commercial real estate agents. He began selling REA to commercial real estate companies all over the United States. He did work for a few years on a generic program named Biz*Base and a Windows based CRM named ACE which won a number of awards for best contact manager over programs such as Telemagic, ACT! and Goldmine but his passion was still REA.
Microsoft's Customer Relationship Products
In late 1990s, Microsoft began shipping Outlook. It was intended to be a personal information manager built upon an e-mail database. Today Microsoft has two products in the customer relationship ship area, business contact manager and Microsoft CRM. Neither is designed for the commercial real estate broker. REA has thrived because it has always focused on the market niche of commercial real estate brokers. It combines customer relationship management with a robust property database making it easy for any broker to connect contacts with properties.
