Should the renovation side live in the same system as the leads?

Question

Ask me about scope creep and you'll get an hour, but the version that's bugging me this month is software scope creep. I run acquisitions and rehabs. Sellers, agents, wholesalers come in one side. Once a house is under contract it becomes a job with a scope, a budget, four subs and a draw schedule.

The consultant I've been talking to wants to build it all in one place. Lead becomes an opportunity, opportunity becomes a project, same records, same tags, one place to look. His argument is that the handoff between acquisitions and construction is where houses get lost, and two systems guarantee that handoff is a text message.

The other quote I have says keep them separate. CRM does people and follow-up, a project tool does tasks and budgets, connect them with one integration that pushes the address across. His argument is that CRMs are bad at the things construction needs, and every time someone forces it, you end up with custom fields nobody fills in and a budget you still track in a spreadsheet anyway.

I've bent a CRM into a job tracker before and it was fine until it wasn't. Genuinely split. What do you run?

priya_n21 · Answer

No renovation experience here at all, so ignore me if this is naive, but the phrase that jumped out was that the handoff becomes a text message. That sounds like the actual problem you're paying to fix, and it doesn't obviously require one system, just a rule about who does what when a contract signs.

devon_pierce · Answer

Building a list, not buying yet, so I'm only at the lead half. But I've watched two people force construction into a CRM and both of them ended up with a spreadsheet for the budget anyway. The budget is the tell. If the money doesn't live in the tool, the tool isn't really running the project.

brandonlee36 · Answer

Separate, with one link. My portfolio is small and boring compared to yours but every unified system I've tried collapsed under the weight of fields that only apply to half the records. Nobody fills in a field that's blank most of the time. @bramble the budget point is exactly it.

karen_whitfield · Answer

I'd ask a different question. How many people touch a house between contract and finish? If it's you and one project manager, one system, because the cost of two logins is real and the coordination cost is small. If it's six people, two systems, because your PM should never see a seller lead.

aaron_fitz10 · Answer

@orchard that's the cleanest framing in the thread and it's basically a headcount question.

diane_kowalski · Answer

Land side, so my projects are entitlement timelines rather than rehabs, and I keep them apart. What I will say is that the integration everyone waves at as a solved problem is the thing that broke for me twice, both times because a vendor changed something on their end. If you go two systems, know who fixes that and what you pay them when it happens. That's a maintenance question the setup quote usually doesn't cover.

Should the renovation side live in the same system as the leads?

6 replies