The CRM is the spine of Direct REI. Every contact, conversation, and deal lives here. It has five sub-tabs along the top: Deals, Inventory, Buyers, Sellers, and Other.
Buyers / Sellers / Other
These three tabs are your contact buckets, split by which side of a deal they're on:
- Buyers — people who acquire (builders, flippers, investors, landlords).
- Sellers — people who offload (property owners, wholesalers). The Sellers tab also tracks linked Properties.
- Other — service providers (title companies, attorneys, lenders, government).
Find Leads and CSV import drop contacts into the right bucket automatically based on the type you chose.
Contact status
Every contact carries a status that advances as outreach happens: Not started → Contacted → Replied → Qualified → Active Buyer, plus Not Interested for dead leads. The system bumps it automatically (a reply flips them to Replied, and so does the Dialer's "Interested" button — which then runs your Interested-call automation, set up by default to create a deal), but you can set it by hand anytime.
Tags
Tags are free-form labels you control. Add one to a whole batch at import or in Find Leads ("Austin-Q1"), then filter by it later to work that slice. Use tags for market, list source, or campaign wave.
Filters, search & sort
Each tab has a search box plus Status, Campaign, and Sort filters, with a More filters toggle for the rest (tags, attention, buy-box fields). There's also a Needs attention filter that isolates red-flagged contacts. Bulk-select with the row checkboxes to act on many at once (send, tag, skip-trace, delete).
Import & export
Import CSV takes .csv, .tsv, or .txt — upload, map your columns to Direct REI fields, and save. Export dumps the current list to CSV or Excel.
Not sure how to lay the file out? Download a ready-made template for each tab in CSV import template — the best format to upload (Getting Started). The columns in those files map themselves.
Custom fields (paid)
On a paid plan you can add your own contact fields under Settings → Custom fields — useful for tracking anything specific to your business (lot size, ARV, motivation, etc.). They show up in the contact detail and as filter/column options.
The deal pipeline (Deals tab)
The Deals tab is a Kanban board. Each column is a stage; drag a deal card between columns to move it forward. The default stages are:
- Interested Seller (where new deals land)
- Negotiating
- Under Contract
- At Title
- Closed
- Dead
Stages are fully customizable — rename them, recolor them, add your own, or reorder, using the stage editor on the Deals tab. Each deal links back to its contact and the campaign that produced it, so you can always trace a closing to the outreach that started it.
Inventory — the properties you're selling
Deals track what you're working. Inventory tracks what you actually hold: the properties you own or have under contract to sell. It's a separate tab because the questions are different — a deal asks "will this close?", inventory asks "what do I have on the shelf, and what am I selling it for?"
Four states, each with its own colour and a clickable KPI at the top of the tab:
- Under Contract — you've tied it up and intend to sell it.
- Owned — it's yours.
- Listed / For Sale — actively marketed.
- Sold — closed out; kept for history.
Three ways in:
- Add to inventory on the Inventory tab — search a property or deal you already have, or create a new one. Pick the state and a list price in the same dialog.
- To inventory on a deal — moves that deal's property across, with a sensible state pre-picked from the deal's stage.
- The Inventory Status dropdown on any property record.
Change the state inline from the list as things progress. Deal cards show a coloured inventory chip when their property is in inventory, so you can see at a glance which pipeline cards are things you already hold.
Two prices, and they mean different things
A property carries an Asking Price and a List Price, and mixing them up will scramble your margins:
- Asking Price — what the seller wants from you. It's on the acquisition side of the form.
- List Price — what you're selling it for. It's in the Inventory section, and it's what you set when you add something to inventory.
Both are available as columns, and your list price is what a Websites listing shows buyers (falling back to the asking price only if you haven't set one). It can also be added to the dialer's focus card.
What's next
Ready to fill it up? Read Finding the right leads with AI research. To put your inventory online for buyers, read Websites: launch a property site that feeds your CRM.