Popular and long-established business CRM software company Salesforce acquired its San Francisco neighbor Slack for $27.7 billion.
Slack’s stock price jumped 25 percent Thanksgiving week as rumors of the acquisition floated around Wall Street and the Bay Area, according to TechCrunch. Salesforce’s stock dipped, however. Slack became a public company in 2019.
The real estate industry has long relied on Salesforce to help it manage relationships with buyers and sellers. Slack’s inter-team, chat-based communication app hasn’t gained as much traction in the industry; however, it has all the fundamentals to be a powerful business asset for any brokerage.
As TechCrunch noted, Salesforce will likely begin to push its new product into the industries where it already has a presence, such as real estate.
Real estate agents who use Salesforce should expect to see emails and outreach from their CRM on how Slack can help them augment business.
Agents, teams, and transaction coordinators can all benefit from the granular, rapid-fire discussions the software facilitates, which users can easily build around individual listings or new construction developments — without burdening your email inbox.
Document sharing, in-app phone calls, outside-office contacts, and third-party app integrations are already common to Slack, and thus could help Salesforce reach deeper into its real estate clients’ operations.
It appears that Salesforce’s aims are higher than finding a way to help its clients communicate better. The New York Times reported that CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff might be eying direct competition with Microsoft, the company he came close to selling to in 2015.
Microsoft Teams is Slack’s largest competitor for workplace communication.
Salesforce was founded in 1991 and is considered a pioneer of the subscription sales model in real estate.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
