HubSpot for Real Estate Sponsors

The fastest growing real estate syndication groups have one thing in common- robust systems for attracting and onboarding capital quickly. 

The cornerstone of this success hinges on investor relationships, and while many real estate syndicators utilize HubSpot as their CRM of choice - some limit their success through not having the best set-up. This can result in the loss of time, investors and capital for deals.

This guide is designed to navigate you through the process of establishing deal pipelines in HubSpot, specifically tailored to GPs and sponsors of real estate syndications. 

It should take you less 30 minutes to set this up, and will help you raise more capital for years to come. If you get stuck or need any help, our team at GP Flow is here for you - reach out to support@gpflow.com.

Hubspot Basics

HubSpot organizes customer data around three primary entities: Contacts, Companies, and Deals.

Contacts

• Contacts represent individual people, such as potential investors in your real estate projects
• They are the backbone of your CRM data and include details like name, email, phone number, and more
• You can customize the data you track about contacts in the HubSpot settings

Most real estate syndicators add custom fields to customize HubSpot for their business - this also supports compliance with regulations around KYC and investor understanding. Below are the basic fields we most commonly see (and available here).

Companies

• Companies are organizations to which your investors belong to
• This could represent different investment groups, JV partners or investment funds
• Each company record can have multiple associated contacts.

Deals

• Deals represent investment opportunities with a contact or company
• For real estate syndicators, each deal represents a potential investment opportunity from an investor
• Each deal moves through various stages until it reaches closure

Setting up Deal Pipelines in HubSpot for Real Estate Syndicators

Deal pipelines in HubSpot act as visual representations of your investment process, broken down into stages, for a specific deal.

For real estate syndicators, these pipelines should be set-up to reflect the lifecycle of securing a specific investment, from initial contact with an investor through securing the investment.

Once you have a pipeline that works for you, you can copy the stages for each subsequent deal.

Using deal pipelines allows you to track investor conversations, identify bottlenecks, forecast capital commitments, and make better decisions. For instance, if you see a lot of deals stagnating at a certain stage, it might indicate that investors need more information or assurance at that point in the process.

Typically Deal Stages

We’ve worked with 100s of real estate syndicators and while you can customize these stages to match your syndicate's unique process - the most common set-up we see is below (and available here). 

Importantly these are ‘Deal Card’ statuses (not ‘Contact’ statuses) - as an investor's interest in a specific syndication might be `Closed Lost` but they still have interest in a future deal. 

You set these up in HubSpot pipeline settings like this, and should use the deal probabilities that accurate for your business.

Once we have the pipeline set-up, we need to figure out how we can efficiently get investors into the deal pipeline and communicate with them at scale.

Automating Lead Entry into the Deal Pipeline

HubSpot’s automation capabilities allow you to streamline the process of moving an investor lead into a deal pipeline. 

For new investor leads

For leads that are just entering your CRM for the first time, here are the steps to get into deal pipelines efficiently.

1. Set Up a Form: You can use HubSpot forms on your website to capture lead information. When a potential investor fills out a form, their details are automatically created as a contact in HubSpot.
2. Create a Workflow: Next, you need to create an automation workflow to add leads to the deal pipeline.

In HubSpot, workflows are used to automate tasks and actions. In this case, you would set up a workflow to automatically create a deal when a form is submitted.

1. Go to Automation > Workflows and click on 'Create workflow'.
2. Select 'Contact-based' as the type of workflow.
3. For the enrollment trigger, select 'Form Submission' and choose the specific form on your website that potential investors complete.
4. Click 'Add action' and select 'Create a deal'. You can specify the initial deal stage (such as 'Initial Contact'), pipeline, and any other relevant deal properties.
5. Review and activate the workflow.

Once this workflow is live, any time a potential investor submits the designated form on your website, a new deal will be automatically created and added to the specified deal pipeline.

This automation saves you the manual effort of transferring contact information into a deal and ensures a quicker, more efficient process of managing leads as they come in.

For existing investors

For existing leads in your HubSpot CRM, you would need to manually create a deal and associate it with the lead, then move the deal into the appropriate stage in your deal pipeline. 

Thankfully, HubSpot allows you to create deals for multiple contacts at once but you will need to have workflows included in your subscription – since this requires automation.

You will need to create a contact-based workflow. Make sure to set up an enrollment criteria that is watertight as HubSpot will follow your exact instructions and you don't want a deal card created for every single contact in your CRM.

Once you've got this workflow set up, you can then enroll a group of investors following these steps.

Deal Card Management

Once in the pipeline, each prospective lead is assigned a ‘Deal card’ linked to their contact record. This deal card makes its initial appearance in the 'Leads' stage.

Each deal card, tied to a specific contact record, will track a distinct investment into the specific deal.

In scenarios where an investor makes multiple contributions, each individual investment will have its own corresponding ‘Deal card’. You can customize this deal cards to show the custom fields we set-up earlier.

As investors progress through the pipeline, their respective cards journey through various stages until an investment is secured. For real estate funds, if an investor decides to reinvest, a fresh deal card is created for that particular contact.

Integrating with your Investor Management Platform

While CRM platforms like HubSpot play a vital role in managing your investor pipeline, it's important to note that they are just one piece of the puzzle. Real estate syndicators also need to invest in a dedicated investor relations management platform.

These platforms handle more specialized tasks that go beyond the capabilities of a typical CRM system. For example, they can handle document signatures, manage funding contributions, preferred return calculations, investors distributions and tax forms (like K-1s).

GP Flow is the Investor Relations management platform of choice for real estate syndicators, with a deep two way integration with HubSpot out of the box. 

Schedule your free 30 minute demo to see how it works here.