Companies offering real estate leads have an accountability problem. They promise qualified leads and big opportunity but may not provide adequate tools or a platform to effectively deliver on that promise. Market Leader is different (or at least they claim to be). In this Market Leader review, we’ll do a deep dive and video walk-through to show you why they’re our #1 pick for real estate lead generation in 2022.
Market Leader delivers on its unique value proposition, providing agents with a guaranteed monthly volume of leads or your money back. With the rollout of their updated customer relationship manager (CRM) and new, beautifully designed websites, plus a marketing platform so advanced that it could be its own standalone product, Market Leader is making strides toward the goal of being THE operating solution for real estate agents. Learn why.
Why Should You Trust This Market Leader Review?
This deep-dive review of Market Leader isn’t like other reviews you’ll find online. For starters, we at The Close are seasoned real estate professionals with real experience finding, vetting, and using technology tools to successfully operate our business. We’ve got practical experience and know what works.
Also, we have used Market Leader extensively. We’ve put this review together using our firsthand experience with the actual tool, not second and thirdhand accounts of other reviewers.
You can trust The Close to provide an unbiased, firsthand account of Market Leader, its resources and usefulness, and to offer objective analysis as well as subjective impressions.
Market Leader: Pros, Cons & The Close Recommendation
We’re going to go deep into each of the features of Market Leader, plus do an extensive video walk-through of the entire platform, but if you’re just looking for our top-line observations + our recommendation, this section is for you.
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The Close Recommendation
Market Leader is arguably the most complete solution available for agents, teams, and brokers seeking a tool that will acquire, engage, nurture, and convert real estate leads. The platform isn’t without fault. For example, it’s likely not the best solution if your business is built on prospecting and other outbound marketing efforts, or for agents who heavily rely on data and analytics.
However, if you’re paying for inbound leads, you should seriously consider the Market Leader platform as a comprehensive platform for powering up your real estate business.
What Services Does Market Leader Offer?
Market Leader offers solutions for nearly every step of the real estate lead journey, with a primary focus on lead acquisition, nurturing, and conversion. These tools include:
- Paid lead generation: As mentioned above, Market Leader is The Close’s top pick for lead generation companies in 2022. Their unique lead guarantee makes them a clear pick for any agent who is watching their return on investment (ROI) for paid lead gen closely (hint: that should be all of us).
- Real estate websites: The public-facing, IDX-enabled real estate websites offered by Market Leader have gotten markedly better in the last year. They are attractive, customizable, and offer some really solid lead capture options. Since their websites are critical to the Market Leader nurture strategy, their upgrades are very important.
- Real estate CRM: Real estate leads are just missed opportunities without a system and a strategy to convert them into clients. The Market Leader customer relationship manager (CRM) provides just that with a number of intriguing features, including a complete MLS integration, a move that offers some very unique marketing power-ups (more on these later).
- Real estate marketing tools: Most CRMs will give you tools and templates for email marketing and not much else. The Market Leader CRM offers options to do email, paid social, and even print marketing, straight from their marketing suite within the CRM.
- Dedicated mobile app: The Market Leader mobile app is a bona fide professional tool. This standalone app is not just a mobile browser-accessed, watered-down version of the desktop experience. It’s a standalone app with its own integrations and features that will prove very valuable to agents on the go and who work from their phone a lot (meaning, all of us).
How Much Does Market Leader Cost?
Market Leader pricing is straightforward and easy to understand. For $139 per month, users get all-inclusive access to a website, CRM, and marketing center. A la carte pricing for individual tools is not available. A six- or 12-month contract is required.
For real estate leads, the cost is $25 or more per lead, depending on your market.
Market Leader Video Walk-through
Go Deeper: A Closer Look at Market Leader’s Tools & Features
Now that we know the basics of what Market Leader has to offer and how much it costs, let’s dive into each of their tools to get more detail about how they work and how they plug into the overall Market Leader strategy.
We’ll also provide you with our recommendation on how to get the most out of each piece of the Market Leader puzzle.
Real Estate Lead Generation
The Market Leader lead gen approach is simple: run ads on platforms where your prospects are already spending their time (e.g., Facebook, Google) and direct them to sites like HouseValues.com (for sellers) or your Market Leader IDX website (for buyers).
Sound familiar? You’ve heard this strategy before, but Market Leader does things a little differently.
Before selling you a contract with leads, they calculate, based on search volume, the number of leads they can consistently deliver on a monthly basis. Market Leader clients only pay for the lead volume they can support, as opposed to providers who use the same approach but have no estimate (or accountability) for the number of leads they actually deliver.
💡 How to Get the Most From This Tool: The Market Leader paid lead model is, in our opinion, the best and most effective tool available for getting a positive return on your ad spend. Get the most from this tool by carefully measuring your conversion rates, forecasting your closings relative to your lead volume, and scaling up the number of leads you buy as your success grows.
Real Estate Website
Real estate websites offered by Market Leader used to be a bit of an afterthought (at least in our opinion at The Close), but they’ve recently become a very important part of the success agents can find on the platform.
Their website designs have gotten a facelift, and they’ve got a really solid IDX-enabled search functionality that will give visitors to your site an experience akin to the one they’ll find on Zillow. They also offer excellent lead capture options that will convert more of your paid (and organic) leads than the average, brokerage-provided website.
💡 How to Get the Most From This Tool: The Market Leader websites are attractive, but their true value comes from their lead capture options. If you want to get the most out of this, make sure you turn on (and fine-tune) the “activity wall pop-up.”
This is a pop-up that will fire on the website after a prospect has viewed a certain number of pages, done a certain amount of searching, and so forth. The trigger for this pop-up is customizable, so you can make it as aggressive or relaxed as you like. Most websites only offer casual, optional pop-ups.
Market Leader’s lead capture approach will get more leads into your CRM, giving you more chances to convert site visitors to clients.
Real Estate CRM
The newly revamped CRM is the sun around which all the other parts of the Market Leader solar system revolve. Your website leads (paid or organic) will populate in Market Leader’s CRM, and it connects directly with your website to record any user activity (including properties viewed, searches saved, and so forth). You can access the Market Leader Marketing Center through their CRM.
💡 How to Get the Most From This Tool: Getting the most from the Market Leader CRM is easy—simply lean into its connection to your Market Leader website. The best part about this CRM is, hands-down, the organic integration between your leads’ website activity and their lead profiles. Using this feature will allow you to see what your leads are really searching for, and give you insight into how you can better provide value for them.
Without this connection (or the use of a Market Leader website), this CRM is still valuable, but relatively ordinary compared to its peers.
Real Estate Marketing
Market Leader’s Marketing Center focuses on three pillars: email marketing, print marketing, and automated campaigns that combine these two options.
Their email marketing includes a ton of templates for typical lead nurturing for buyers and sellers, plus tons of customizable templates for special holiday greetings, birthdays, home anniversaries, and more.
Partnered with Shutterfly, their print marketing options allow direct mail postcard and flyer marketing that can make your real estate farming and circle prospecting efforts a lot easier.
💡 How to Get the Most From This Tool: You’ll get the most from these marketing tools by optimizing the third pillar—automated campaigns. With Market Leader automation, you can choose from dozens of preconstructed email drip campaigns for prospects at virtually any stage of your sales funnel.
Plus, you can use their automated direct mail marketing, which is great for new listings, price reductions, open houses, and more. And as a bonus, Market Leader writes an original newsletter each month that you can repurpose as your own and blast to your email audience.
Additional Market Leader Resources
Market Leader offers a surprisingly robust set of tools for agents, teams, and brokers who want to level up their use of the platform, but also grow their business in general. These include collections of scripts, templates, long-form strategy guides, and more with titles like these:
- “Email Marketing & Automation”
- “Guide to Maximizing Your ROI on Old Leads”
- “Paid Online Lead Follow-Up Scripts”
Where Market Leader Could Improve
If you’ve made it this far in this review, you know by now that we’re feeling pretty good about Market Leader and what they have to offer, but the platform isn’t perfect. There are a few things we wish were better:
- Analytics: Market Leader doesn’t offer analytics on par with the rest of their platform. This seems like an odd omission, given how important it is to measure your marketing efforts. There are some tracking options available in the team and brokerage products, but not much for solo agents.
- Built-in dialer: Without a dialer built in to the CRM, agents are forced to log calls they have with their contacts manually. If you’re like most agents, you’re on the phone A LOT, so it’s inevitable that some of your calls won’t get logged. Not even the mobile app offers this functionality, which again, is a swing and a miss.
- Automated SMS texting: Though SMS texting is a limited option for Realtors through the Market Leader mobile app, scheduling text messages as a part of automated campaigns is not. This feels like an oversight. With scheduled SMS, agents could add an entirely new dimension to their drip and nurture campaigns.
Is Market Leader Right for You?
In our view, Market Leader is officially the front-runner when it comes to an all-in-one real estate operating system. To be clear, they aren’t there just yet (nobody is), but they are leading the pack. Between their lead gen, website, CRM, and marketing options, Market Leader is offering agents nearly everything they need to operate and grow their business. But is it right for you?
Market Leader is right for you if:
- You’ve got a growing business that already has or is ready to integrate paid lead generation into your strategy
- You are dedicated to using a CRM every day to improve the consistency of your contact management and nurturing
- You’ve got the budget to commit to at least 12 months of using their system
Market Leader isn’t right for you if:
- You’re just getting started in the real estate business and don’t have the budget or bandwidth to start paying for leads
- You won’t use the Market Leader website as your primary marketing hub
- You’re a part-time agent and don’t have time to use all of Market Leader’s offerings
Tell us about you so we know what to send.
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