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CRM and lead consolidation tool ‘play nice’ together

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Real estate agents get leads from ever more places online. Keeping track of those leads is not always easy. Real estate tech firm Tribus has come up with one way to tackle this problem: The firm has integrated its customer relationship management system with FiveStreet, a tool that consolidates leads from Zillow, Trulia, realtor.com and others.

Chicago-based Tribus has more than 7,500 brokerage and agent clients in 33 states and Canada, the company said.

Agents who use its CRM and sign up for a FiveStreet account can now have FiveStreet decipher and pull prospective clients’ contact information from their lead emails and have it flow automatically into the Tribus CRM where it can be tagged, routed to specific agents or teams, and become a part of the agent’s workflow and email drip campaigns.

“Our policy has long been to connect our platform to any other vendor or service that has the same goal in mind of providing agents with streamlined software. We don’t believe Realtors should be hampered by having their leads and data scattered in different places,” said Eric Stegemann, Tribus’ director of strategy, in a statement.

“Agents are always on the go and receiving leads from multiple different directions, and it’s about time they don’t have to worry if those leads are coming in correctly,” the company added.

News Corp. subsidiary Move Inc. acquired FiveStreet last year. The company describes FiveStreet as a “virtual command center for your leads.” FiveStreet says it works with any email-based lead source. The tool is also integrated with Contactually, BombBomb, MailChimp, Market Snapshot and Move’s Top Producer CRM.

In a statement, Jack Miller, CEO of real estate consulting firm T3 Experts, applauded FiveStreet’s willingness to integrate with third-party CRMs.

“As a technology specialist it has not escaped my notice that some lead generation vendors and portals have made working with lead response technologies difficult, and I would ask them the question: Whose interests are you serving by not playing nicely with others?” he said.

“Every study on lead conversion emphasizes that response time is critical, and this is why FiveStreet and similar lead response technologies are creating a better consumer experience, and by extension, a better industry,” he added.

In August, Tribus acquired real estate website vendor Displet with the aim of building the first virtual office website (VOW) or Internet data exchange (IDX) listing sites that allow communication among agents, their clients and their clients’ collaborators on a home purchase by sharing notes attached to specific properties.

Displet’s websites offer responsive design, API integration and WordPress capabilities, Tribus said.

In May, Tribus and National Association of Realtors subsidiary Realtors Property Resource (RPR) partnered to offer Tribus’ brokerage clients a free website widget that displays automated valuation estimates for homes and ZIP codes.

Last year, Tribus began integrating Planwise, a consumer-focused financial planning tool that helps homebuyers evaluate the affordability of listings they find online, into websites that Tribus builds for brokers and agents.