// The situation

i have a real estate investing business along with a business/commercial dscr brokering company ( one feeds deals to another , do I need a crm to keep track of these deals and how to grow and scale to at least 3-5 isa's and track then properly?

The verdict · Jul 21, 2026

Yes.

You need a simple CRM — but not yet the one a sales rep will pitch you.

What's really going on

You run two businesses that hand deals to each other. That handoff is where deals die — one side assumes the other called back. Right now it lives in your head, which works solo. It will not survive three ISAs calling the same lead twice or none at all. The real problem isn't tracking deals — it's making ownership and next-step visible to more than one person.

What to do instead

  1. Pipedrive (~$14-15/user/mo, check current pricing) — one visible pipeline per business, with a stage for "handed to DSCR side" so nothing falls between them. Clean per-rep ownership when ISAs come on.
  2. HubSpot Free CRM (free) — if you want to trial shared ownership with zero spend before committing; unlimited users on free tier covers you and 3-5 ISAs.
  3. Today, in 30 minutes: open one spreadsheet, list every live deal in both businesses in one column, and write the single next action and date beside each. That list becomes the pipeline you import.

What you're being oversold

Follow Up Boss will get pushed at you because it's the real-estate default — it's built for retail agent teams chasing Zillow leads, not investor + DSCR broker handoffs. Skip it. Also skip anything with "sequences" or "cadences" (Apollo, Salesloft) — you have relationships, not cold lists. Doing nothing costs you the deals where an ISA thought you were following up and you thought they were — one missed DSCR close pays for years of software.

When to revisit this

When your second ISA starts, or when you catch two people calling the same lead.

The part worth getting right

The one call is whether these are two pipelines or one. If a lead can enter as an investor deal and exit as a DSCR loan (or the reverse), you want one CRM with two pipelines and a clean handoff stage — Pipedrive handles that. If the two businesses truly share nothing but you, you want two separate accounts and no handoff at all — different setup, different training for ISAs, different reporting. Pick wrong and in six months you're migrating everything or your ISAs are working blind on half the deals.

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