# Zoho CRM for real estate: free for three, $14 for four, and one number to demand in writing > Zoho CRM for brokerages: the free edition covers three users, Standard at $14 adds calling and multiple pipelines, and monthly billing suits a changing roster. _Source: https://professionalstoolkit.com/articles/zoho-crm-for-real-estate — The Professional's Toolkit · updated 2026-10-06_ --- A brokerage is a hard shape for a CRM. Most of the people who need access are not employees, the document trail per transaction is heavy, and the roster changes through the year. Zoho CRM fits two of those three well, and the third is the question nobody asks until it bites. There is no real-estate edition on the pricing page. What you buy is the general product, so this is a fit analysis rather than a summary of a vertical page. **OUR TAKE:** The free edition for three users and the $14 Standard tier make this one of the few CRMs a small brokerage can run without a budget conversation, and monthly billing at every edition suits a business whose headcount moves. The open question is document capacity, because the vendor publishes no storage ceiling for paid editions, and real estate is the industry most likely to find it. **$14** — Standard per user per month on annual billing: calling, multiple pipelines, email campaigns and lead capture, which is most of what a small brokerage uses. - **3 free** — Users on the free edition, with no card and no expiry. Enough for a broker, an assistant and a coordinator. - **5,000/day** — API calls on the free edition, enough to feed portal and website leads into the CRM before paying anything. - **not published** — Document storage ceilings at paid editions. For a business that attaches disclosures and closing packets, that is the number to request. ## What fits well Three users free, forever, with no card[1]. For an independent broker with an assistant and a coordinator, that is a working CRM at no cost, including workflow automation and the mobile apps. Standard at $14 per user per month adds what a working brokerage actually uses: email integration and mass email for campaigns, built-in calling so call logs land on the record, multiple pipelines so listings and buyers do not share a funnel, calendar integration for showings, and lead capture forms for the website. Monthly billing at every edition, with the vendor stating there are no contracts or commitments. In an industry where agent rosters change mid-year, that is worth more than a small discount. Compare it with the alternative at the expensive end of this category, where every edition above the entry card is annual-only. And 5,000 API calls a day on the free edition, which is enough to feed leads from portals and your website into the CRM without paying for the privilege. > 💡 **undefined:** Split your people into seats and portal users before asking for a quote. Staff who update records need seats; agents, vendors and coordinators who need visibility may be served by the portals that arrive with Professional at $23 per user per month. Counting heads and multiplying always produces the largest possible number. ## What to check before you commit Document capacity. This is the one. A brokerage attaches listing agreements, disclosures, inspection reports, photographs and closing packets to records, and that volume grows every transaction. The vendor publishes limits for its free edition, 10 custom email templates, up to 10 data exports and 5,000 API calls a day, and we could not find a published storage ceiling for any paid edition on any readable page. So ask for it in writing before you commit, along with records, custom fields and API calls at your edition. For most businesses that request is prudence. For this one it is the single number that decides whether the system survives year three. ## The seat question Decide who works in the system and who only reads from it. Licensed staff who update records daily need seats. Agents who want to see their own pipeline, and vendors or coordinators who need visibility into a transaction, may be better served by portals, which arrive with the Professional edition at $23 per user per month and extend the CRM to contacts, vendors or partners[1]. That distinction is the main lever on the size of a brokerage's bill, and it is invisible if you count heads and multiply. > 💡 **undefined:** Build lead to appointment first and use it for two weeks before adding the transaction pipeline. Capterra's review summaries describe this product as complicated to manage while praising the customisation that causes it, which is a trade you win by building slowly. ## Which edition, and why Free, for a one or two person operation with a simple pipeline. It is not a trial and there is no expiry. Standard at $14 for a small brokerage that runs email campaigns, logs calls and needs more than one pipeline. This is where most independent offices should start. Professional at $23 if you want portals for clients and vendors, process management so every transaction follows the same steps, or unlimited reports. The step is $9 per user per month, which is small against the value of a standardised transaction process. Enterprise at $40 if you run multiple offices and need multi-team management with a reporting hierarchy, so each manager sees only their own team's pipeline, or if you need field-level encryption for sensitive client data. ## Three workflows worth building first Lead to appointment. Portal and website leads arrive through forms, route to the right agent, and generate a follow-up reminder. The free edition covers this. Listing to close. The transaction with its stages, its documents and its deadlines. This is where multiple pipelines earn the Standard tier, and where process management earns Professional if your team does not follow the steps reliably. Past client to repeat business. The least implemented and the most valuable, because a past client is the cheapest future transaction in this business. It needs almost no configuration, only the discipline to keep records current. Build the first, use it for two weeks, then add the second. Capterra's summaries of this product describe it as complicated to manage while praising the customisation that causes it, and that trade is won by building slowly. > ⚠ **undefined:** Ask for your edition's storage ceiling in writing before committing. Listing agreements, disclosures, inspection reports and closing packets accumulate per transaction, and we could not find a published storage limit for any paid edition on any readable vendor page. ## The coordinator's view, which is the one that decides adoption In most brokerages the person who determines whether a CRM survives is not the broker. It is whoever keeps the transaction moving. That person needs three things from any system: every document attached to the right record, a deadline that surfaces before it passes, and a way to see which transactions are stuck without opening each one. Workflow automation and follow-up reminders cover the second on the free edition. Multiple pipelines at $14 cover the third, because a stuck listing and a stuck buyer are different problems. The first is where the unpublished storage ceiling matters again. So when you evaluate, give the free edition to that person for two weeks rather than to the agents. If the coordinator will not use it, the agents certainly will not, and you will have learned that for nothing. ## What this product will not do for you It is not an MLS and it does not list properties. Nothing on the pricing page suggests otherwise, and any CRM implementation in this industry is a configuration exercise on top of whatever listing system you already use. We also did not read any Zoho page describing real-estate integrations, so we make no claims about what connects to what. The API allowance is real and generous; what you build on it is your project or your developer's. > ⚠ **undefined:** There is no real-estate edition and we read no Zoho page describing real-estate integrations, so this is a general CRM configured for your process. It is not an MLS and it does not list properties. ## How it compares for a brokerage specifically The three CRMs we have read in full land very differently for this industry, and the reason is seat economics rather than features. | | Zoho CRM | HubSpot Sales Hub | Salesforce | |---|---|---|---| | Free plan | 3 users | 2 users | none at signup | | Entry paid, annual | $14 | $7 | $25 | | Mid tier, annual | $23 | $90 | $195 | | Access for non-employees | portals from Professional | not read by us | partner portal from $10 per login per month | | Billing | monthly at every edition | monthly at every tier | annual above the entry edition | All per user or per seat per month. Salesforce's per-login partner pricing is the only mechanism in this table built explicitly for people outside the company, which is the shape of an agent network, and it is worth knowing it exists even if the seat price above it is out of range. For an office of four to ten, Zoho's combination of three free users, a $14 paid tier and monthly billing is the easiest entry in the category. For a multi-office operation with a large contractor network, the comparison gets more interesting and the per-login model deserves a look. ## The roster problem, priced Agents join and leave through the year. Seats do not. On Zoho every edition is sold month to month, with the vendor stating there are no contracts or commitments, so a seat added in March can be removed in June. On the expensive end of this category, every edition above the entry card is annual, which means a seat bought for someone who leaves in month four is paid for through month twelve. Two habits make this concrete. Review seat count quarterly rather than annually, because the whole advantage of monthly billing disappears if nobody checks. And keep the annual commitment for the core staff while leaving seasonal or probationary people monthly, which the vendor's own terms allow since there is no contract to break. That is a small operational discipline with a real payback, and it is only available because of one sentence on the pricing page. ## A practical plan for a four-agent office Run the free edition with three users and your real contact database, duplicates included. Measure your duplicate rate. That number is your cleanup estimate. Add the fourth person and move to Standard at $14 per user per month, billed monthly at $20 while you are still deciding. Build lead to appointment, then listing to close. Before the annual commitment, ask for your edition's storage, record and API limits in writing. Then take the 30% annual reduction at Standard, or the 34% at Professional if portals and process management have proved themselves. Review once a year. Delete the automations nobody uses. The product rewards configuration, which means it also rewards pruning. ## What to measure in the first month Three numbers, and none of them requires a purchase. Your duplicate rate on import. Real-estate contact databases are unusually messy, because the same person arrives as a portal lead, a walk-in and a referral within a year. The rate tells you how much deduplication work stands between you and a system anybody trusts. Documents per closed transaction, multiplied by your annual transaction count. That is your storage trajectory, and since the vendor publishes no ceiling for paid editions, your own number is the only basis for asking the right question. Actual logins per week per person. Count how many people opened the system more than twice in a week. That number, not your headcount, is how many seats you need, and in a brokerage the gap between the two is usually large. All three are free to collect on the free edition, and together they turn the edition decision into arithmetic instead of a sales conversation. ## Two things to put in the quote Storage at your edition, stated as a number. Everything above explains why; this is the line that turns the explanation into a commitment. And the access model for anyone who is not staff. Portals arrive with Professional, and how they apply to independent agents depends on how your people are contracted, which is a question with a legal side as well as a licensing one. Ask it once, in writing, rather than discovering the answer when you add the twentieth person. ## FAQ **Is Zoho CRM good for real estate?** It fits the commercial shape of a brokerage well: three free users, $14 per user per month for calling, multiple pipelines and lead capture, and monthly billing at every edition for a roster that changes. The gap is document capacity, since the vendor publishes no storage ceiling for paid editions, which matters more in this industry than in most. **Does Zoho have a real-estate CRM edition?** No edition on the pricing page is specific to real estate. A brokerage buys the general product and configures it, which means the implementation is a configuration project rather than an out-of-the-box vertical. **How much does Zoho CRM cost for a brokerage?** Free for up to three users, then Standard at $14 per user per month on annual billing or $20 monthly, Professional at $23 or $35, Enterprise at $40 or $50. Local taxes such as VAT or GST are charged in addition. **Can agents use Zoho CRM without a full seat?** Portals arrive with the Professional edition and extend the CRM to contacts, vendors or partners, which is the mechanism for giving people outside the core team visibility. How that maps to your agents depends on how they are contracted, so get the access model confirmed in the quote. **Which Zoho CRM edition should a small brokerage buy?** Standard at $14 per user per month covers email campaigns, call logging, multiple pipelines, calendar integration and lead capture forms, which is most of what an independent office uses. Move to Professional at $23 if you want portals for clients and vendors, or process management so every transaction follows the same steps. **What should I ask Zoho before buying for a real-estate team?** Four numbers in writing: storage at your edition, records, custom fields and API calls per day. Storage is the one that decides whether a document-heavy business stays on the edition it bought, and it is not published for any paid edition. ## The honest risk Support is the largest complaint theme in every pool we could read for this vendor, averaging 1.9 stars in the company-level corpus[4]. A brokerage without a technical person is exposed to that in a way a software company is not. The mitigation is the same as everywhere else in this product: one person inside the business who owns the system. In a four-agent office that is usually the broker or the transaction coordinator, and it should be a named decision rather than whoever happens to be curious. ## Sources [1] Zoho vendor pricing page, read from the United States — https://www.zoho.com/crm/zohocrm-pricing.html (2026-10) [2] Zoho vendor editions page, read from the United States — https://www.zoho.com/crm/value-centric-crm.html (2026-10) [3] Capterra, user sentiment only — https://www.capterra.com/compare/144340-155928/Nutshell-vs-Zoho-CRM (2026-10) [4] Trustpilot, company level, user sentiment only — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/zoho.com (2026-10)