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Sage Announces Real Estate CRM Product
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Sage Software has announced the availability of ACT! by Sage Premium for Real Estate 2006, what company officials are calling “the first ACT! vertical industry product” built on the company’s contact and customer management product for selling professionals and corporate workgroups.
ACT! Premium for Real Estate is billed as giving residential real estate agents and brokers “industry-specific tools to help cultivate quality referrals, effectively market properties to prospective buyers and sell more homes.”
Real Estate features include customized layouts, activities, sales letters, reports and one-click access to local multiple listing service (MLS) systems, among others.
The product release continues expansion of the widely-used ACT! product family, which includes over 2.5 million registered users and more than 32,000 corporate account customers.
ACT! is popular for its data access methods primarily among small and mid-sized businesses. It includes online, offline and mobile device options as well as compatibility with leading accounting packages such as Peachtree by Sage and over 60 ACT! add-on products.
Joe Bergera, ACT! senior vice president and general manager for Sage Software said giving ACT! real estate specific capabilities was “a natural progression. Thousands of registered ACT! users indicate real estate as their profession.”
Bergera said the company’s research into their most-often customized functions resulted in a “best-of” features package.
The National Association of Realtors reports an addressable audience of more that 1.2 million real estate professionals for Sage to pitch. A 2005 REALTOR Technology Study indicated that 87 percent of NAR members surveyed indicated that selling is easier with advancements in technology.
Sage might very well be looking for another vertical industry to focus on, as its position as “the dominant purchaser of accounting software vendors” could be threatened following “its defeat in the battle to purchase Norwegian business Visma,” according to accounting industry observer Kevin Reed.
Private equity firm Hg Capital beat Sage to Visma by placing a bid of $675 million for the business, Reed reported late last month: “The soon-to-be-completed move has been hailed as the beginning of a plan by Hg Capital to compete with Sage on a regular basis, and could see the private equity firm pool together its software investments, including Sage rivals Iris and Exchequer in the UK, to build new products and create a new software house.”
Reed reports that Nic Humphries, the head of Hg’s technology practice, could not see its business going “head on” with Sage, although on occasions the two would compete for acquisitions. “It’s not part of Hg’s core strategy to compete, but we might on certain deals,” he told Reed.
David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.
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