We’ve always had three record types in Rex: Properties, Listings and Contacts – and for the most part, this has worked well.You enter your property data into your property records. You win an appraisal and it becomes a Listing record, enabling the typical actions you’ll need to take - like reporting to the vendor or marketing management. All the while, your contact data goes into your contact records where it belongs. Everything remains beautifully organised: a place for everything and everything in its place.Unfortunately, real estate’s not quite that simple. Aggregating information is great – and to do so, you need some boundaries. But boundaries are well, boundaries; your data is locked away in information siloes.Having separate contact and property data isn’t so flash when you’re trying to filter for a list of properties specific contacts own. You might like to find a list of contacts that own a three-bedroom house? Or all the ones you’ve previously sold property for? Or send a mail merge to all the owners on a particular street? These kinds of situations require both property and contact data to work in tandem. Sure, you could always access your related contacts from a property record, or vice versa – but this was a limited, one-at-a-time affair that wasn’t really befitting Rex’s true powers. After a lot of scratching of heads, we’ve come up with a pretty elegant solution to this problem. You can now break these boundaries with a simple Go to Related function.
Go to Related
It’s quite simple really. Once you’ve filtered down a property, listing or contact list, you now have the option to bring up another list and go to related records. These might be owners or tenants of a property list. Or maybe they’re properties owned or leased to a particular group of people? You can manipulate and filter your data in a million new ways to drill down to exactly what you need – based on contact and property data together.
You can also access the Go to Related functionality directly from an individual record screen. While you’ve always had your related records displayed down the right hand side, you now have the option to generate lists of records with specific relationships. You can find a comprehensive list of all the relationships we can filter for in each module.To illustrate just how often this new feature is going to come in handy, here are a few examples of possible searches:
- Generating a comprehensive list of all past buyers
- Generating a list of the years’ buyers and vendors for a Christmas card
- Generating a list of properties an investor owns
- Generating a list of tenants that live in the properties an investor owns
- Generating a list of all the owners on a particular street
- Generating a list of related contacts of contacts (you might like to find all the employees of a company, or all the members of a family, for example)
Mass actions: Mail merge, tagging and exports
The cool thing about lists is that they’re the gateway to mass actions – making changes or running functions on more than one record at a time. These can be things like tagging, mail merges or exports – except for 1,000 records at a time. Just as an example, let’s say you’ve created a list of all the owners in a particular area where the market is hot. Now you can:
- Tag them as desired for further follow up
- Export the entire list for cold calling
- Send a mail merge email, SMS or letter
Being able to filter your contacts relative to their property – or vice-versa - is an enormous time-saver. Couple this with mass actions, and you’re going to be quicker than a rat in a coffee tin. For a complete list of all the mass actions available for each record type, check out this help article: Making changes to more than one record at a time. As you can imagine, saved filters, system lists, Go to Related, and mass actions work together to enable you to create highly efficient workflows that take hours of grunt work off your shoulders.
