Greg,
With the little that I've learned about your business, I would say that you need a CRM database with data tables such as:
- Contacts
- Property Owners (Linked to Properties)
- Properties (Linked to owners)
- Possibly a table to track photos
- Different letters
- A history log to track conversations, letters, tasks, etc. (Linked to property owners and properties).
- Other tables might include calendar events, monetary transaction, etc.
Merge procedures to generate letters, emails, etc.
Possibly some web scraping tools.
Method for your researchers to put in the property and owner data.
Hope this helps. Its a bit hard to find good out of the box solutions for different businesses. I'll try to look into solutions more after work tonight.