10 things to check when choosing a real estate CRM
The Planyum Team · October 9, 2026
Most real estate CRMs are general-purpose sales software with an "estate" label added on top. For a firm working in luxury residential, commercial leasing, or international investment advisory, the evaluation criteria look different. Here are 10 questions worth asking before you decide.
1. Does it actually understand your commission structure?
Tools that only calculate a flat "percentage per sale" usually fall short; ask whether it supports multi-tier (waterfall) commission splits across consultants, team leads, agencies, and developers.
2. Is there a department approval chain?
If a contract change can go through without legal, accounting, and management sign-off, the system reflects the software's default flow, not your organization's.
3. Is it genuinely multi-currency and multi-language?
If you work with international buyers, having proposals and contracts locked into a single language or currency is a real constraint.
4. Are commercial leasing rules supported?
Index-based rent escalations, revenue-based rent, and late-payment interest are calculations most residential-focused CRMs simply don't handle.
5. Is data isolation enforced at the database level?
Is access control just application logic, or is it enforced by the database itself? The latter is considerably more robust.
6. Does task tracking actually replace WhatsApp and Excel?
If an assigned task goes untouched, does it escalate automatically, or does accountability just evaporate?
7. Can reporting benchmark by project, not just company-wide?
Comparing a consultant's performance against their own project's average is a fairer measure than a blanket company average.
8. How long does setup really take?
A multi-week integration project delays the day your team actually starts using the software.
9. Is two-factor authentication and an audit trail available?
Especially for high-value transactions, you should have a clear answer to who changed what, and when.
10. Does it grow with you?
As you move from managing one company to managing multiple companies or projects, the software should absorb that complexity, not buckle under it.
Most of these were questions we asked ourselves while designing Planyum.