Ask an agent what their CRM costs and you will get a monthly number. Ask what they have paid for it and you will usually get a pause. The two questions have very different answers, and the gap between them is the entire business model of real estate software.
This is not a complaint about subscriptions. Recurring pricing is a reasonable way to sell software that needs continuous hosting and support. It is a complaint about how the cost gets presented: as a small monthly figure, at signup, on a per-seat basis, before you have added the seats. Almost nobody does the five-year arithmetic before they buy, and the five-year arithmetic is the one that matters, because five years is roughly how long a working agent keeps a CRM.
Do the math on your own numbers
Skip the vendor comparison for a second. The formula is short enough to do in your head, and it is more useful than any review site because it uses your seat count instead of a stock photo of a happy team.
Monthly price, times seats, times 60 months, plus setup, plus every add-on you were told was optional.
The last term is the one that catches people. Real estate CRM pricing is rarely one line. The base subscription buys the contact database and the pipeline. What sits outside it varies by vendor, but the usual suspects are consistent enough to plan for:
- Onboarding or setup fees, charged once, sometimes waived if you sign annually.
- Per-seat pricing that steps up, so adding your third agent costs more than adding your second.
- Minimum seat counts on team tiers, which means a three-person team can end up paying for five.
- Texting, dialer, and email-send credits, metered separately from the subscription.
- IDX or MLS integration, often a separate line or a separate vendor entirely.
- Annual price increases, which are normal, contractual, and almost never modelled by the buyer.
Take a solo agent on a plan quoted at a hundred dollars a month. Five years is six thousand dollars before a single add-on, before any price increase, and before the day they hire an assistant and the seat count doubles. A four-person team on a per-seat plan at the same rate is looking at twenty-four thousand over the same window. Those are not exotic numbers. They are the ordinary outcome of an ordinary plan.
| Team size | Quoted monthly | Year one | Five years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo agent | $100 | $1,200 | $6,000 |
| Two agents | $180 | $2,160 | $10,800 |
| Small team of four | $400 | $4,800 | $24,000 |
| Brokerage of ten | $900 | $10,800 | $54,000 |
The costs that never appear on the invoice
Subscription pricing has three second-order effects on how a real estate business runs. None of them show up in a pricing comparison, and all three are more expensive than the line item.
You pay for seats you are not using
Per-seat pricing punishes exactly the thing a growing team needs to do, which is add people. It also punishes seasonality. Agents come and go, transaction coordinators work part of the year, and a licence that bills monthly bills through every quiet month. Teams respond by sharing logins, which breaks the audit trail and the lead routing at the same time, or by leaving seats provisioned for people who left.
Your database is leverage against you
The switching cost of a CRM is not the price of the new one. It is the export, the field mapping, the tags that do not survive the move, the automations that need rebuilding, and the two weeks where nobody trusts the pipeline. Every vendor knows this. It is why renewal conversations rarely include a discount, and why the honest question to ask before you sign is not what does it cost but what does leaving cost.
Feature gates shape how you work
When the reporting you need sits one tier up, you either upgrade or you build a workaround in a spreadsheet. Most people build the workaround, and then the spreadsheet becomes the real CRM while the actual CRM becomes the place leads go to be forgotten. That is the failure mode we see most often in databases we are asked to migrate: not a bad tool, a tool the team was only half using because the half they needed was gated.
What the alternative actually looks like
There is a version of this where you buy the software once. It is not exotic. It is how most business software was sold before the industry discovered recurring revenue, and it still works for a tool that runs on your own domain and holds your own data.
The trade is real and worth stating plainly. A one-time purchase means you own the thing, the cost stops, seats stop mattering, and the switching leverage disappears because nothing renews. It also means the vendor is not funding an infinite roadmap out of your monthly payment, so the honest comparison is against what you actually use rather than against a feature matrix.
Which is the right way to evaluate a CRM anyway. Most agents use a small, stable set of things: a lead inbox that does not lose anything, a pipeline that reflects reality, a place client documents live, task reminders that fire, and invoicing. That list has not changed in a decade. It does not need a subscription to stay current.
The OAS CRM is built on exactly that list, sold once, with no per-seat pricing and nothing renewing.
See the CRMA short checklist before you sign anything
- Multiply the quoted monthly by your realistic seat count in two years, not today.
- Multiply by sixty. That is the number to compare, not the monthly one.
- Add setup fees, and ask directly whether texting and email sends are metered.
- Ask what the export looks like. Specifically: which fields, which format, and do notes and tags come with it.
- Ask whether the contract has a scheduled price increase, and what notice you get.
- List the five things you will genuinely use every week. Check each one is in the tier you priced, not the tier above it.
If the answers are good and the five-year number is fine, sign it. Plenty of teams are well served by a subscription CRM and should stay put. The point is only that you should know the real figure before you agree to it, and the industry is not structured to volunteer it.