From First Contact to Signed Lease: 5 Workflows Salesforce Can Handle

Most real estate teams currently experience inefficiencies that delay leasing, produce uneven tenant experiences, and restrict portfolio visibility. These usually arise due to manual activities, siloed tools, and minimal automation throughout the leasing cycle.

Salesforce provides a scalable platform to automate and streamline essential real estate processes—from capturing leads to tracking lease approvals and maintaining tenant engagement. If set up to address the demands of real estate teams, it can simplify administrative tasks, decrease turnaround times, and enhance cross-departmental visibility into data.

Below, we detail five critical workflows that can be automated with Salesforce to enhance leasing performance and operational effectiveness.

1. Result in Lease Pipeline Automation

Most real estate teams handle incoming leads with spreadsheets, email, or CRM software not optimized for leasing processes. This translates into missed follow-ups, delayed responses, and lower lease conversion rates.

What Salesforce Makes Possible

• Captures leads from various sources like websites, listing sites, walk-ins, or brokers

• Automatically qualifies leads based on properties like type of property, budget, or time frame

• Assigns leads to leasing representatives by availability, property, or priority

• Follows the progress of the leads through predetermined steps (e.g., inquiry, visit to the site, proposal, negotiation, lease executed)

• Alerts proposal emails and reminders

• Works seamlessly with e-sign tools (e.g., DocuSign or Adobe Sign) for quick closure

  
  

Advantages

• Enhances lead response time

• Provides greater visibility into leasing activity

• Enhances centralized offer and conversion tracking

This process is the basis of a scalable real estate CRM and assists teams in transitioning from reactive to proactive lead management.

2. Site Visit Scheduling and Proposal Development

Scheduling viewings and issuing proposals can occupy much of an agent's time. Manual scheduling tends to produce delays or variable experiences for prospects.

What Salesforce Makes Possible

• Enables prospects to schedule viewings utilizing embedded calendar features

• Sends automated confirmations and reminders

• Allows agents to create branded proposals from unit data, rent, and status

• Monitors client interactions and proposal views

• Sends user behavior-based follow-up tasks or emails

  
  

Advantages

• Saves agent and client time

• Enhances consistency and professionalism in proposal presentation

• Reduces errors in scheduling and missed appointments

  
  

For teams handling multiple units in different locations, this automation enhances coordination and response time.

3. Lease Approval and Tenant Onboarding

Approvals for leases typically involve several stakeholders such as legal, finance, and compliance teams. In the absence of organized workflows, approvals become slow or necessitate multiple follow-ups.

What Salesforce Empowers

• Routes lease approvals based on lease value, geographic region, or lease type with Flow Builder

• Logs stakeholder feedback and revisions needed in a single place

• Sends finalized lease agreements for electronic signature

• After signing, automatically triggers tenant onboarding:

•  Creates tenant record

•  Sends welcome email and documents

•  Notifies operations and property management staff

  
  

Advantages

• Streamlines lease finalization delays

• Increases transparency and responsibility in the approval process

• Enhances new tenant onboarding experience

• This process ensures compliance and maintains leasing timelines intact

  
  

With Salesforce, this automation is made easy.

4. Inventory and Unit Availability Management

Most leasing teams handle inventory via spreadsheets or manual registers. This usually results in data migration errors, double-booking, or lost opportunities because of stale data.

What Salesforce Enables

• Tracks each unit (e.g., apartment, suite, floor) as a custom object with attributes such as status, size, rent, features, and parent property

• Automatically updates unit status based on events like lease signing, move-in, or scheduling maintenance

• Presents real-time inventory through dashboards or visual calendars

• Notifies when occupancy falls below specified thresholds

  
  

Benefits

• Maintains current availability for leasing teams

• Avoids overbooking or miscommunication

• Aids reporting and forecasting on unit turnover and occupancy

This works particularly well for portfolios with multiple active listings or high unit turnover.

5. Tenant Engagement and Support

Once tenants are in place, most real estate firms handle support requests manually by email or phone. This makes it impossible to measure response times, monitor the resolution of issues, or proactively reach out to tenants for renewals and feedback.

What Salesforce Makes Possible

• Offers a self-service tenant portal through Experience Cloud

• Enables tenants to request support, view a lease, or change contact details

• Routes service tickets to the right teams with SLA tracking

• Utilizes chatbots or live chat for simple support interactions

• Sends automated renewal reminders, satisfaction surveys, or event invites through Marketing Cloud or Pardot

  
  

Benefits

• Improves the tenant experience with guaranteed service and prompt communication

• Decreases workload on property managers operationally

• Increases retention with sustained engagement

  
  

This workflow enables real estate teams to shift from simple tenant support to formalized tenant relationship management.

Bonus: Integrating AI with Predictive Insights

After establishing the core workflows, Salesforce Einstein AI can assist in integrating predictive insights. For instance:

• Lead scoring to determine top chances for conversion

• Churn prediction from tenant behavior and service history

• Recommended actions for leasing agents by pipeline stage

• Dynamic pricing recommendations based on availability and demand trends

  
  

These findings can aid in optimizing decision-making and enhancing forecasting across properties.

How AlliedGeeks Deploys Real Estate Automation with Salesforce

At AlliedGeeks, we offer dedicated Salesforce implementations for real estate, property management, and construction management businesses. Our Real Estate Quickstarts are pre-configured solutions to enable teams to go live with automation in 3 to 4 weeks.

Each Quickstart features:

• Pre-built workflows for lead, lease, and tenant lifecycle management

• Real estate-specific data models for proposals, brokers, leases, and units

• Configurable reporting templates and dashboards

• Integration with ERP, accounting, and e-signature tools

• Admin onboarding and user training

  
  

We collaborate directly with real estate teams to ensure the solution fits their operational procedures and compliance requirements.

Conclusion

Real estate firms are under growing pressure to provide quicker service, increase leasing efficiency, and build better tenant relationships. Manual processes are unsustainable for teams that handle high volumes of deals or multiple properties.

• With automated workflows in Salesforce, real estate teams can:

• Shorten the leasing cycle

• Enhance pipeline and inventory visibility

• Decrease administrative overhead

• Offer timely and consistent tenant support

• Make more informed operational decisions

  
  

Whether you are new to Salesforce or want to optimize your existing configuration, automating these five workflows is a sensible step forward. 

Ready to Get Started?

If you're interested in Salesforce for your real estate practice, we'd be delighted to set up a brief call with one of our solution architects.

We can take you through what these workflows actually look like in operation and provide you with examples of how other real estate organizations are leveraging Salesforce to automate their operations.

Schedule a free discovery call