Looking for a new CRM, but we have some specific needs that I’m struggling with.

I am an assistant to a Realtor, who is fairly established in his business – ie. he's a little larger than a small business. There are 4 assistants, plus the Realtor.

We currently use TopProducer as our CRM but it's very slow and outdated, and I just think there's a lot better out there, potentially. However, here's the problem: the way we need our contacts/files managed is apparently very un-standard!

Because he's a residential Realtor, we're usually working with couples who are selling their property. In TopProducer, it creates a 'contact card' that attaches both people's names to it, and we can attach however many addresses to it as well (as many of our clients have multiple properties). We have about 2,500 of these contact cards.

In most CRM's I've seen, we would need to either set up two contacts and join them together in an account, or we would need to set up one contact and have a custom field for the spouse's name.

In that first scenario, I am concerned because then interactions on one file are potentially split up between two contact records, and we are needing to update contact info (like when people sell their home and buy a new one) in 2-3 places instead of one. Additionally, for the CRM's that bill by the number of contacts we have, we will go from having 2,500 to closer to 4000 contacts.

In the second scenario, things become inconvenient at best when we can't easily search by both spouse's name, and many CRM's limit the amount of contact info attached to one contact, which becomes a problem when we're trying to have emails from both spouse's from both their personal and work emails automatically link to their contact card (ie if they each have 2 emails, we're already over the limit of 3 email addresses that are usually allowed)

Is our only option to pay a partner company to one of the big CRM's like $10,000+ to customize it for us?

We're currently working with a marketing consultant on ActiveCampaign for the marketing/automations side of things which is fine, but us assistants have poked around in it to look at using it as our contact management and it's gonna kill us if we have to use it, as contacts are identified by their emails, and many of our older clients share an email, but there isn't a great way of representing both spouses on one contact, just as one example of the issues we've already identified.

Hopefully our situation make sense! Appreciate any help!