How Crowdhouse is transforming Swiss real estate with Salesforce

Robert Plantak, CEO of Crowdhouse, is back in the office, sitting in front of the kind of blackboard usually seen in physics lectures. It’s covered in squiggles and diagrams that represent some small part of the future of Swiss property investment.

In 2015, Plantak and Ardian Gjeloshi founded Crowdhouse, a Swiss startup that’s revolutionised property investment on two fronts. It’s first innovation was an online crowdinvesting platform that gave small investors the chance to invest directly in Swiss multi-tenant properties.

Three years later, Crowdhouse took the entire buying and selling of multi-tenant properties online for a new group of prospects: wealthy individuals and big institutional investors.

‘People admire us for democratising property investment with crowdinvesting,’ Plantak says. ‘But what we’ve done on the brokerage side is even bigger. People in real estate are still walking around with printouts and PDFs. They may offer online listings but their websites aren’t transactional. We’re making buying or selling a property something you can do in a few clicks.’

Crowdhouse now transacts about half a billion Swiss francs annually — a healthy slice of Switzerland’s highly fragmented 30 billion-a-year real estate market. According to Plantak, Crowdhouse is a real contender for market leadership in the next two to three years. The goal is to become the property platform in Switzerland — a digital ecosystem where buyers, sellers and mortgage providers can invest in real estate quickly, efficiently and transparently.

And, as Plantak is first to acknowledge, Salesforce has been an important part of the Crowdhouse story — past, present and future.

Getting supply and demand right is Crowdhouse’s ‘secret sauce’, according to Plantak. What’s fascinating is how closely the team has tied Salesforce CRM to their proprietary CMS.

‘We actually create profiles around our properties and users to help us figure out which property is best suited for whom, as well as to predict which properties we should buy. This matching process of ours constantly brings us up against the limits of Salesforce.’

Sabine Gralla, Crowdhouse’s director of business process management, chips in: ‘We’re using — or perhaps I should say “misusing” — Salesforce as our ERP as well. We handle the entire real estate chain — from initial purchase to sales — on Salesforce. Everything happens there. Of course we come up against certain limits because it wasn’t created as an ERP. But we’ve certainly made it work for us.’

It isn’t just Crowdhouse’s salespeople who are using Sales Cloud. Salesforce is the backbone of the entire organisation and its supply chain. ‘That’s why,’ Gralla adds, ‘it’s so important to have all our most important data in Salesforce where it’s visible and accessible.’

An important figure in getting the best out of Sales Cloud has been Jeanette Mittendrein, Salesforce product owner and business analyst at Crowdhouse. When she joined Crowdhouse, the crowdinvesting processes were already up and running on Salesforce. Mittendrein’s challenge was to work with Gralla and Plantak to implement processes for the new online brokerage business.

‘Having someone on board who really knows Salesforce has made all the difference,’ says Plantak. Gralla goes further: ‘In many companies, process is the victim of the system. The system dictates how you operate, process wise. Here we do things differently.

‘We understand our business needs and then translate them into Salesforce. The beauty of Salesforce is that it gives us the flexibility to do that — especially if you have someone like Jeanette to make it happen.’

Getting processes and systems right has been critical for the brokerage business. When crowdinvestors invest, say, 100,000 Swiss francs, they’re happy to do everything on the platform. But when an investor buys an entire multi-tenant property for several million, it’s different. Their questions are much more detailed. Crowdhouse needed a very streamlined process to guide the customer through, so they didn’t get lost in the complexity of the deal.

‘Salesforce allows us to do that,’ says Plantak.

Like any startup, the early days of Crowdhouse’s brokerage business were unpredictable. The team would organise viewings for anyone who asked, spending a huge amount of time with every possible prospect. It was also incredibly difficult for new salespeople to learn the ropes because every deal was unique.

Plantak and his team knew they needed to dramatically streamline this process for the business to survive. This ‘growing up’ was part of why he brought in smart people like Gralla.

‘The first thing we did was to standardise anything that could be standardised, such as terms and conditions, and contracts. Then we said, okay, we need to provide all the information prospects need online so they can decide if they want to invest in a property just by being on the website and, perhaps, talking over the phone. The physical viewing is now just something that happens when the deal is almost done to confirm that the property is actually there,’ says Plantak.

Every single step of this process happens within Salesforce — with the exception of the due diligence Crowdhouse conducts on sellers and buyers. Handovers are now more seamless because everyone has the information they need. The customer journeys are now clearly mapped out so everyone knows what they’re aiming for and can even follow specific milestones.

For starters, they’re implementing Pardot to send out their newsletter and organise their data around a common view of leads. A big part of that has been the lead qualification process they’ve set up which, though still in its infancy, is already giving them a glimpse of the same kind of predictability they’ve enjoyed in sales.

The most important thing is the way they’re already reaping all the benefits of centralising the management of customer data and processes. Now that most of their data lives in one place, organised around a cohesive view of the customer, it even changes the way they manage their operations.

‘We can’t do without Salesforce. We have all these overviews — all the company’s KPIs, reports, and processes are there.’