That’s why we decided to update our picks for the best real estate software of 2022. We organized the tools by category and linked to our deep-dive review articles—making it easier for you to find that one tool that you soon won’t be able to live without.

Lead Generation Software

1. BoldLeads

Pricing: Starting at $649 per month

In-depth review: BoldLeads Review: How Does It Work & Is It Worth It?

If you’ve been busy selling houses, you may have missed the exciting new technology that BoldLeads offers today’s agents. Instead of just sending you a list of leads, they offer A/B-tested seller lead generation landing pages, an integrated customer relationship manager (CRM), and automated email and text messaging to connect with leads when they expect it—instantly.

You can even leave stealth voicemails, create follow-up funnels, and integrate with your favorite CRMs like Contactually, Top Producer, Wise Agent, and more.

Even better, BoldLeads will convert leads for you using their Concierge. They also offer free onboarding and on-demand training classes.

Visit BoldLeads

2. Zillow Premier Agent

Pricing: Varies by ZIP code

In-depth review: Is Zillow Premier Agent Worth the Cost?

Over the past few years, Zillow Premier Agent has grown up. Instead of just blasting out cold leads like they used to, Premier Agent now offers agents many ways to become the primary point of contact for a lead and nurture and close them.

Using their app, you can see which homes your leads are looking at and saving to make sure you reach out with the right message at the right time. They also offer a streamlined CRM with task reminders, notes, and mobile notifications. The customer experience report lets you know exactly what your leads think of you without having to ask.

Visit Zillow

Real Estate CRM & IDX Website Software

3. LionDesk

Pricing: $21 – $83 per month

In-depth review: LionDesk Review: The New King of the Real Estate CRM Jungle?

If you want a full featured CRM that you can upgrade as your business grows, LionDesk is a great option. Starting at just $21 a month, with LionDesk you can send video emails, bulk texts, drip campaigns, and more. As your business grows, you can add more features without breaking the bank.

Visit LionDesk

4. Top Producer

Pricing: $60 – $105 per month

Related article: The Best Real Estate CRM for 2022: In-depth Reviews & Pricing

One of the best CRMs on the market, Top Producer recently upgraded their user experience (UX) back to the drawing board and revamped its flagship CRM to compete with the new kids on the block. The new Top Producer looks and works great. Even better, Top Producer is leading the pack with access to MLS data, market snapshot reports, and native integrations.

Visit Top Producer

5. Propertybase

Pricing: $349+ per month

In-depth review: Propertybase GO Review: The Next Generation of Real Estate CRM?

When it comes to real estate software, you might have noticed that every tech company wants to be a one-stop shop. Propertybase actually is one.

First and foremost, Propertybase has a Salesforce-based CRM. Salesforce is the global CRM leader for a reason: Leads can be sent into Propertybase from pretty much anywhere and segmented, put on drip campaigns, and endlessly sliced and diced to match people with properties.

Beyond the CRM, Propertybase has a powerful website builder to drive your marketing, lead generation, and lead capture. Once your leads are coming in, use its customizable dashboard to divide and conquer farm areas and nurture leads. You can try Propertybase for yourself with a free demo.

Visit Propertybase

6. kvCORE Platform

Pricing: $499+ per month

In-depth review: kvCORE Review: What Does It Offer Teams & Brokerages in 2022?

One of the early movers in the all-in-one real estate lead generation and CRM platforms, Inside Real Estate’s kvCORE platform is finally ready for its close-up. Its team-focused platform boasts lead generation, a robust CRM with artificial intelligence (AI) features like a behavioral lead response, text messaging, and even an auto-dialer.

kvCORE also offers back-office solutions for agent billing and accounting, a comparative market analysis (CMA) and presentation tool, and listing marketing tools.

7. Real Geeks

Pricing: $249+ per month

In-depth review: Real Geeks Review: An In-depth Look at Pricing & Features

Founded 2010 by real estate agent Jeff Manson, Real Geeks core mission has never changed: To build IDX websites and a CRM that generates tons of leads for real estate agents. While other IDX sites might be flashier, Real Geeks’ focus on lead generation means that you will spend more time on the phone with real people who want to buy homes and less time fiddling with graphic design and code.

Visit Real Geeks

8. Placester

Pricing: $64 – $240 per month

Related article: The 6 Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2022

In 2022, agents have a million options to build a pretty website. But if your website isn’t generating leads, it isn’t doing its job. That’s why Placester almost always makes it to the top of our list of the best website builders. Their sites are designed for one purpose: lead capture.

Don’t get me wrong—Placester’s websites are beautiful. But they are also A/B-tested to ensure lead capture. They even offer helpful features like prewritten content libraries, a CRM, and a brand-new services marketplace to help you find design and tech talent quickly. If you’re a National Association of REALTORS (NAR) member, you qualify for a Placester website complete with an IDX feed and basic lead capture options for just $64 per month.

Visit Placester

Social Media & Marketing Software

9. Artur’In

Pricing: $199 – $399 per month

Since social media algorithms reward engagement above all else in 2022, creating and posting local content every day is a must. Artur’In makes this easy. They create and automatically post engaging local content to your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts. They will also write your blog for you, advertise for you, and much more.

Visit Artur’In

10. Canva for Real Estate

Pricing: Free – $6.49 per month

While we normally recommend real estate-specific design tools, Canva is a widely used platform for collaborative design that now offers a host of design templates specifically for real estate agents. Canva is available at an affordable price and designs can be accessed across the internet by multiple team members. One feature we especially like is the ability to create graphics and schedule them to post on social media directly from Canva.

Visit Canva

11. LabCoat Agents Marketing Center

Pricing: $59 – $499 per month

When it comes to marketing and design software, today’s Realtors are spoiled for choice. Canva is free or cheap, and there are dozens of other platforms promising agents beautiful marketing materials even if you don’t have design skills.

The problem is that many of these platforms aren’t designed exclusively for real estate agents. The templates are generic and not designed with conversion in mind. LabCoat Agents Marketing Center changes that. They offer agents an easy-to-use platform that lets them create custom-branded flyers, postcards, business cards, social media posts, and more.

Visit LabCoat Agents Marketing Center

Lead Qualifying & Nurturing Software

12. Freshdesk Messaging

Pricing: Free – $39 per month

Related article: The Pivot: Are Real Estate Chatbots Still Worth It in 2022?

When it comes to your website, you owe it to yourself (and your bank account) to invest in the latest technology to turn site visitors into leads; in 2022, that means connecting with leads instantly. Freshdesk Messaging, advanced chat software that you can easily plug into your website, lets you do just that. It gives your site visitors exactly what they want: instant gratification!

You can have it ping your phone whenever someone has a question, or better yet, easily program a chatbot to engage them until they’re ready to talk to you. Best of all, Freshdesk Messaging is free for basic chat features and costs only $15 to $39 per month for advanced AI chatbots, multi-language support, file attachments, and more.

Visit Freshdesk Messaging

13. RealScout

Pricing: $39 per month

Let’s face it—buyers only really want one thing from you: new homes for sale that they might want to buy. The problem is that scouring your MLS for new listings is time-consuming, especially for leads that might be years away from making a move.

RealScout solves this problem by sorting listings in your MLS by 400 criteria and emailing contenders to your leads. Their real estate software even uses machine learning to compare new listings for your leads side-by-side. When they’re ready to tour a listing, you get instantly notified on the platform.

14. Structurely

Pricing: $179 per month (for up to 50 leads)

Taking the concept of automated lead nurturing to the next level, Structurely uses artificial intelligence (AI) to respond to your leads to qualify them instantly. After that, their AI assistant will even follow up with them … for an entire year.

Of course, robotic lead nurturing isn’t perfect, so Structurely is designed to notify you the minute your leads are ready to talk so you can land that appointment.

Real Estate Prospecting Platforms

15. REDX + Power Dialer

Pricing: $99+ per month 

In-depth review: REDX Review: Why Smart Realtors Use REDX and Power Dialer

If you’re cold calling without using an auto-dialer like Power Dialer, you’re leaving money on the table. Period. Ask any agent who cold calls. There’s just no way you’re going to keep up with the volume of numbers you need to dial, not to mention dealing with voicemails, hang-ups, and wrong numbers.

So if you want to start cold calling FSBOs, expireds, or just want to circle prospects around a listing effectively, then you owe it to yourself to upgrade to REDX + Power Dialer. Even better, REDX is offering The Close readers $149 off the setup price, automatically deducted when you click over to their site from this article.

Visit REDX + Power Dialer

Predictive Analytics & AI Software

16. Revaluate

Pricing: $139 per month for 2,000 contacts

While terms like predictive analytics and AI have been floating around the industry for a few years now, only a handful of companies live up to the hype. Revaluate is one of them.

Revaluate leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and big data to analyze past and current events to predict future events. In simpler terms, they use super-smart software that sifts through millions of pages of data to figure out when someone will move. As if this wasn’t enough to pique your interest, they also use that same real estate software to reinvigorate all the old, cold, dead leads in your CRM.

17. Offrs

Pricing: $200 – $500 per territory, per month

In-depth review: Offrs Review: Are AI & Predictive Analytics the Future of Real Estate?

Offrs is another major player in the predictive analytics space. Offrs uses the same big data sources that Revaluate uses to help agents target potential sellers and buyers before they reach out to an agent.

They also offer FSBO and expired leads and a Smart Farming app that gives agents contact information for homeowners and leads. They also provide agents Plug-and-Play ad templates to help them reach the right lead, with the right message, at the right time.

Visit Offrs

18. First.io

Pricing: Call for pricing

First.io is another real estate software platform that uses predictive analytics to help agents find listing opportunities. First.io scans your network using 700 personal and property-related data points as well as AI to help you target people who are more likely to move.

First.io focuses on conversations, not campaigns. Their mobile app makes it easy to start conversations with people before they’re ready to move. It uses a simple star rating system and prompts to remind you exactly when to reach out.

Home Valuation Software

19. HouseCanary Property Explorer

Pricing: $29.99 per report

When it comes to using AI and predictive analytics to improve home valuations, HouseCanary’s Property Explorer is the real deal. It’s a game-changer for agents.

HouseCanary’s home valuations are based on dozens of data points, both public and private. Instead of going back a year or two, they consider trends from the past few decades when coming up with their valuations. Think of it as Zestimates with a brain transplant.

Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) Software

20. Cloud CMA

Pricing: $45+ per month

When it comes to cranking out CMAs, most agents would rather get a root canal. Cloud CMA, the industry-leading CMA generation software in the Cloud Agent Suite, transformed putting together CMAs from a tedious chore into something you can fire off to a lead while you’re waiting in line at Starbucks.

Recently, the entire Cloud Agent Suite was purchased by Lone Wolf Technologies along with LionDesk. Does this mean Cloud CMA will only be offered at the brokerage level? We think so. We also believe that this provides a golden opportunity for competitors to make direct-to-agent products to compete. Watch this space!

Open House Software

21. Curb Hero

Pricing: Free

Related Article: 9 Open House Apps Tech-savvy Agents Are Using to Get More Leads

Formerly Block Party, Curb Hero offers agents open house sign-in software for free. It might not have all the bells and whistles of competitors like Open Home Pro and Spacio, but it has touchless QR code sign-in, single property websites, background info collection, and integrates with over 200 CRMs, all for free.

Visit Curb Hero

22. Open Home Pro

Pricing: Free – $20 per month

Used by over 90,000 agents, Open Home Pro is a must for agents who run many open houses. It’s a simple solution to a problem that every agent who has run an open house has faced—smudged, illegible sign-in sheets.

Open Home Pro also offers basic CRM functionality like lead management, automated lead follow-up emails, and even automated seller’s reports to show off how successful your open houses are.

23. ShowingTime

Pricing: Contact for pricing

Even though it’s getting a little long in the tooth, ShowingTime is still a vital tool for real estate agents. 950,000 real estate agents can’t be wrong. Well, they could, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? ShowingTime ain’t broke.

It does the job it’s supposed to do without the drama. Hard to complain about that.

24. Calendly

Pricing: Free – $16 per month

Of course, that doesn’t mean that ShowingTime doesn’t have competition. When it comes to scheduling appointments online, Calendly has them beat. How many times have you gone back and forth with a lead trying to schedule a showing? Calendly makes it easy. All your lead needs to do is pick a date from a calendar, and Calendly will only show them the times you’re available.

Community Engagement Software

25. Parkbench

Pricing: $3,500 – $6,500 per year

Related article: How Parkbench Helps Agents Drive Community Connections (Even During a Pandemic)

Every agent knows that the best referrals come from locals. The only problem is that taking the time to meet local business owners is hard. Showings, prospecting, social media, and a million other tasks get in the way.

Parkbench simplifies the process by giving you tools and an excuse to network with local small business owners to build up your referral network organically. They also offer agents extensive training to make sure they’re not just wasting time talking about the weather.

Visit Parkbench

Transaction Management Software

26. Dotloop

Pricing: $29 per month

Although the competition was fierce, it looks like Dotloop has come out on top for the best real estate transaction management software for another year.

If your office doesn’t offer real estate software like Dotloop along with your other perks, then it might make sense to jump in and track your deals with Dotloop.

Did we mention the industry-leading transaction management platform is now FREE for individual agents?

27. Amitree Folio

Pricing: Free – $18 per month

Amitree Folio has always been the well-kept secret weapon of many newbie agents. After all, it’s free, sits right on top of Gmail, and offers some pretty fantastic transaction management and organization tasks for busy Realtors.

Even better, Sand Hill Road has taken notice. Amitree closed a $7 million round of funding to build out more functionality into an already reasonably robust platform. Try out their free version with a 14-day trial.

Outreach Automation Software

28. Contact Junkie

Pricing: $199 – $599 per month

There are two types of agents when it comes to outreach automation software: those who will get a ton more leads using it and everyone else. Cold callers use dialing software like REDX’s Power Dialer or Mojo, or they’re getting left in the dust. Advanced CRMs like Propertybase are making manual texting and email obsolete, and apps like Slydial are automating even the (very) old-fashioned voicemail.

Contact Junkie takes all of that potential automation and wraps it up into one neat package for agents and teams. The app will automatically reach out to your leads with voicemail, text, and email, and will stop once contact is made. Even better, Contact Junkie integrates with BombBomb, Real Geeks, Pipedrive, and even Slack.

29. Avochato

Pricing: Free – $35 per month

If you want your team to double-down on text messages this year (and why wouldn’t you?), you need to check out the latest text messaging software, like Avochato. Avochato gives agents, inside sales agents (ISAs), and other team members a fully featured desktop dashboard to text with many leads and clients at once.

You can access easy-to-use message templates, send texts one-to-many, and of course, click-to-dial for hot leads or clients who need extra help. It also gives you 10 unique phone numbers so you can easily segment leads from online sources, signage, open houses, and so on.

Expense Tracking Software

30. Expensify

Pricing: Free – $9 per month

Instead of a shoe box, I had a manila folder stuffed with receipts for yellow cabs, lunches, printing, and printouts of my (terrifyingly expensive) Uber bills. Come tax time, I was ankle-deep in paper and miserable.

Smarter agents use expense tracking software like Expensify. Expensify automatically scans and tags your receipts, so you don’t have to. If you start using it today, come April, you’ll have everything organized and ready for your accountant to scrutinize.

Writing Software

31. Grammarly

Pricing: Free – $12.50 per month

Let’s face it. If there is one group of professionals who need work on their writing and grammar, it’s real estate agents. Maybe it’s the low barrier to entry, or maybe agents are just always busy, but we all know that agents need help with writing.

Yuo cna porbalby raed tihs desptie teh msispeillgns rhigt? Your leads probably can too, but are they going to call you back when you send them yet another email riddled with typos? Why risk it? Grammarly checks your grammar, spelling, and even sentence structure and style with both a free & paid version. It operates inside your email server and through your browser so it can correct your blogs posts, Google documents, and outgoing email messages.

Over to You

Have a suggestion you’d like us to add to our list of the best real estate software? Let us know in the comments.

The post Best Real Estate Software 2022: Our 31 Top Picks for Agents (+ Pricing) appeared first on The Close.

Since choosing a real estate lead generation company can be tough, we’ve done a deep dive into the top six real estate lead generation companies and reviewed them side-by-side so you can make the best choice for your business. Let us help you determine where to spend your paid lead generation dollars most effectively in 2022.

Best Real Estate Lead Generation Companies for 2022

Company	Prices Starting At	Best For
Market Leader (Best Overall)	$139 /month, plus $25+ or per lead (varies by market)	A guaranteed number of leads each month
BoldLeads	$399 / month, plus $250 minimum ad spend	Exclusive, unique leads you won’t have to share with other real estate agents
REDX	$40 /month	Real estate agents who are great at phone or direct mail prospecting
Real Geeks	$299 / month	Leads you can easily share with your team or brokerage and track the progress of
Zillow	$250 / month	A high volume of mostly buyer leads
SmartZip	$400 - $500 per month, depending on market	Predictive analytics-generated leads focusing on sellers likely to list within a year

Visit Market Leader

Best Lead Generation Company for Guaranteed Leads: Market Leader

Prices starting at $139 / month

Market Leader Pros	Market Leader Cons
Guaranteed number of leads every month	Missing some key analytics features
Great mobile app	Public-facing websites are a little dated
Easily scalable for teams and offices	Leads tend to be higher funnel than other providers

How Market Leader Generates Real Estate Leads

Market Leader pricing starts at $139 per month, plus $25 or more per lead, depending on your market.

To generate real estate leads, Market Leader takes the ad agency approach (similar to BoldLeads), placing targeted ads in places your prospects are already spending their time (Facebook, Google, and so on). These ads direct prospects to Market Leader’s landing page HouseValues.com (for seller leads) or a personally branded, IDX search-enabled site (for buyer leads).

Once a lead gives their information, it’s automatically populated in the Market Leader customer relationship management (CRM) system (or wherever you’d like it to go), and then you take over with nurturing and conversion.

[Related resource: Lead Nurturing: Tips & Scripts to Avoid Overtasking]

Get Started With Market Leader

Best Lead Generation Company for Exclusive Leads: BoldLeads

Prices starting at $399 / month

BoldLeads Pros	BoldLeads Cons
Exclusive leads	No low-cost options
Fully functional CRM included	Limited control over the ads run on your behalf
40+ landing page templates available	BoldLeads territories are no longer exclusive to a single agent

How BoldLeads Generates Real Estate Leads

BoldLeads pricing starts at $399 per month, plus a $250 minimum ad spend.

Like Market Leader, BoldLeads generates leads by creating and placing ads on platforms like Facebook and Google to draw prospects to customized landing pages. There, your leads are enticed to provide their contact info, and BAM—you have another lead in the hopper.

However, they differ from Market Leader by providing more landing page and lead magnet customization, as well as providing specialized follow-up tools like their automated text concierge to help you better convert your leads to clients.

Since BoldLeads ads are created specifically for you and your business, the leads you get are yours and yours alone, unlike other lead gen companies that will create generic ads and then divvy up the leads among subscribed agents.

[Related resource: The Close Deep Dive BoldLeads Review]

Get Started With BoldLeads

Best Real Estate Lead Generation Company for Prospecting Leads: REDX

Prices starting at $40 / month

REDX Pros	REDX Cons
Affordable, a la carte pricing	Relies heavily on cold calling
Different types of leads are available	A time-intensive strategy
Dialer is available for phone prospecting	Little or no performance analytics

How REDX Generates Real Estate Leads

Rather than creating a system where you wait for leads to come to you (like all the other providers on our list), REDX flips the script with an outbound real estate lead generation system. REDX users choose from lead types like Expired Listings, FSBOs, and Preforeclosures (just to name a few), and REDX provides contact information for you to reach out and start real estate conversations.

With a constantly updated system, you’ve always got an up-to-date list of the leads in your area, and you decide how much time you want to spend reaching out, following up, and converting them to clients.

[Related resource: The Close Deep Dive REDX Review]

Get Started With REDX

Best Lead Generation Company for Team-distributed Leads: Real Geeks

Prices starting at $299 / month

Real Geeks Pros	Real Geeks Cons
Great for teams and brokerages	Websites could use a facelift
More control over the ads run on your behalf (if you want it)	Limited CRM functionality
Lead capture widgets for your personal website to extend your reach	Limited customization options for your lead magnets

How Real Geeks Generates Real Estate Leads

Real Geeks follows the well-trodden path of BoldLeads and Market Leader on their initial lead generation approach: they strategically place your ads on sites like Google, Facebook, and Instagram that drive traffic to landing pages designed to convert your prospects into leads.

However, Real Geeks is different in that the landing pages that your prospects arrive at are ultra-personalized and customizable for you and your business. And once you actually capture leads, Real Geeks gives you some pretty sophisticated tools to distribute them across your organization, making it a great option for teams and brokerages.

[Related resource: The Close Deep Dive Real Geeks Review]

Get Started With Real Geeks

Best Lead Generation Company for Buyer Leads: Zillow Premier Agent

Prices starting at $250 / month

Zillow Premier Agent Pros	Zillow Premier Agent Cons
Ads run on the largest real estate website in the world	Customer service track record is not strong
Proven track record of success	Almost entirely buyer leads
Zillow Live Connections connects you directly with leads over the phone	Leads aren’t exclusive

How Zillow Premier Agent Generates Real Estate Leads

Zillow harnesses its 229 million unique monthly visitors to put real estate agents directly in front of active home shoppers in their market. Zillow sells display advertising for Premier Agents next to listings in specific ZIP codes, the price of which varies depending on the number of agents competing for space and the median sold price of a home in that market.

Zillow leads are either transferred to the Zillow CRM or into whatever CRM you’re using (they are famously collaborative and can connect to just about any platform). Then, you take over with outreach, nurturing, and eventual conversion. Pricing starts at $250 per month for most markets.

Zillow’s lead generation approach is unique in that they rely only on ads on their platform, which is great because you know that buyer intent on Zillow is high compared to places like Facebook and Google. On the other hand, Zillow’s system doesn’t prevent leads from clicking on multiple agents, so your leads aren’t necessarily exclusive to you.

[Related resource: The Close Deep Dive Zillow Premier Agent Review]

Get Started With Zillow Premier Agent

Best Lead Generation Company for Seller Leads: SmartZip

Prices starting at $400-$500 / month

SmartZip Pros	SmartZip Cons
A focus on seller leads	No month-to-month payment option
Predictive analytics makes your marketing more targeted	Leads are likely to take longer to convert than the average
Customizable landing pages	No onboard CRM

How SmartZip Generates Real Estate Leads

SmartZip uses sophisticated algorithms that take into account hundreds of demographic, geographic, and consumer behavior data points to predict which homeowners in a particular market are the most likely to consider selling their home in the next 12 to 18 months. SmartZip then gathers contact information for these potential sellers and packages it for real estate professionals.

Their predictive analytics approach is an outbound marketing strategy (similar to REDX’s), since it’s up to you to make the calls, send the direct mail, and connect with the leads on your SmartZip list. This format makes SmartZip more labor-intensive than the inbound strategies of Market Leader, BoldLeads, Real Geeks, and Zillow.

But, unlike REDX, SmartZip allows you to focus your marketing efforts (and budget) on only the most likely sellers in your market, making the bang for your buck much bigger. Pricing depends on your market, but starts at about $400 to $500 per month.

[Related resource: The Close Deep Dive SmartZip Review]

Get Started With SmartZip

Real Estate Lead Generation Companies FAQs

Before diving into paid real estate lead generation, take a look at some of our readers’ most frequently asked questions. If there’s something we haven’t covered here, please leave your question in the comments section.

Do any real estate brokerages provide leads?

How do most real estate agents get leads?

Is there a lead generation source with no upfront cost?

Are paid lead generation companies worth it?

What’s a good price per real estate lead?

A Note on Methodology

As a part of this buyer’s guide, I reviewed dozens of paid real estate lead generation companies and pinpointed the very best options for our readers based on each company’s strategy and approach, price, usability, scalability, service, support, and more.

As lead generation companies continue to improve their processes and increase their efficiency, I’ll continue to update this guide and review new and existing lead gen companies to reflect the best available options for realtors.

Your Turn

Did we miss a real estate lead generation company you want more information on? Comment below to suggest new additions to this list.

The post The Top 6 Real Estate Lead Generation Companies for 2022 appeared first on The Close.

But how can you make sure you’re not just throwing money down the drain? Not all lead sources are created equal, which is why our experts have done the research to help you find the best and most credible lead generation sources.

So, What’s the Best Place to Buy Real Estate Leads?

There are plenty of sources and no lack of places to buy real estate leads. The best option for you will depend on what type of real estate agent leads you’re looking for, your budget, and how much time you are able to commit to nurturing leads.

To help you find the best option for you, we’ve reviewed the top options out there and chose six of the best real estate lead sources in 2022.

The 6 Best Real Estate Lead Sources of 2022

Provider	Starting Monthly Cost	Best For
REDX	$39.99	Agents who want a budget-friendly option and want to be in control of their own lead volume
Market Leader	$99 per month, plus $25+ per lead	Agents looking for a guaranteed number of leads every month
Offrs	$200 per month	Agents who haven’t had success with traditional lead generation strategies in the past
The Faces Of	$250 per month	Agents who are looking to generate mostly referrals
Zillow Premier Agent	$250 per month	Agents looking for primarily buyer leads
BoldLeads	$399 per month, plus $250 minimum ad spend	Agents looking for a hands-off, agency-managed approach to lead generation

Not sure which provider is right for you? Answer a few questions below to find out which lead source is right for your budget in 2022.

Ready to go deeper? Let’s take a closer look at each of these lead sources. Don’t forget: buying leads shouldn’t be your only strategy for business development. Grab a copy of our Lead Generation Plan template to help organize and prioritize your efforts so that you’re taking a balanced, profitable approach.

Best for Agents Who Are Great at Prospecting: REDX

REDX is an outbound real estate lead marketing system that works by bringing together data like property details, FSBO and Expired listings, contact information for buyers and sellers in your community, and more. They then categorize and prioritize this data in VORTEX, their proprietary customer relationship manager (CRM), for agents to use in their outbound prospecting efforts.

This approach is perfect for HUSTLERS who happen to be real estate agents. If you can commit to regularly cold calling and emailing prospects and pitching your business, this is an affordable option that can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Even better, REDX is offering The Close readers a waived setup fee when you get started—a $149 savings.

REDX Pros & Cons

REDX Pros	REDX Cons
Unlimited lead generation potential for a single monthly fee	Outbound lead gen—more work for the agent on the front end
A fantastic approach for agents who are comfortable with cold calling	Not great for agents who get discouraged by frequent “no”s
No lengthy contracts to sign	CRM doesn’t offer any communication or automation options

[Read more: REDX Review: Why Smart Realtors Use REDX and Power Dialer]

How Much Does REDX Cost?

REDX provides an a la carte pricing for their different features with discounts for paying in advance. There is also a setup fee to get started, which is waived for Close readers.

REDX Pricing (as of December 2021)

Lead Service	Price per Month
FSBO Leads	$39.99
Expired Leads	$59.99
Geoleads	$49.99
FRBO Leads	$79.99
Preforeclosure Leads	$39.99

REDX also offers upgrades to their lead packages, including additional data insights like Financial, Home and Building, and Lifestyle, all to help you learn more about your prospects before you ever make contact with them.

[Read more: The 7 Best FSBO Scripts of 2021 & Why They Work]

Who Should Use REDX?

REDX is the perfect place to buy real estate leads if you’re a realtor who isn’t afraid to pick up the phone or knock on a door. Your performance and return on this platform are entirely determined by you and how hard you work, so if you’re willing to put the time in and have a sharp pitch—especially for cold prospects—this is the perfect lead source.

Also, with a monthly cost starting at just $39.99, it is difficult to find a lead source with a better value proposition.

Visit REDX

Best for Agents Looking for Guaranteed Leads Every Month: Market Leader

Market Leader is a real estate lead generation tool that uses strategically placed ads on Google and social media networks like Facebook to drive traffic to one of two places: a home valuation page for potential sellers and a personally branded IDX search-enabled landing page for potential buyers. In order to use the tools on these pages, visitors are required to input their lead information, which gets passed directly to you.

This strategy probably sounds familiar because a lot of competitors (e.g., BoldLeads and Real Geeks) use the same approach. But with Market Leader, there’s a difference: guaranteed lead volume. If you make the payment, you’ll have the number of leads (or more) they projected for you—just that simple.

Market Leader Pros & Cons

Market Leader Pros	Market Leader Cons
Guaranteed lead volume every month	Lead quality isn’t always premium
Guaranteed contact information (and a refund for fake leads with bogus emails and phone numbers)	Can get pricy at scale
The perfect tool for long-term business forecasting

How Much Does Market Leader Cost?

The cost of Market Leader includes a flat fee of $99 per month that allows you to use the Market Leader CRM, lead scoring, and follow-up tools, then a monthly cost for the leads themselves, starting at $25 each and going up from there, depending on how many leads you commit to every month.

Who Should Use Market Leader?

Market Leader is great for agents who have done the math on their conversion rates and know exactly how many leads they need on a monthly basis in order to make paid lead generation profitable. For many agents, that means having a potentially larger-than-average budget in order to create that critical mass of leads. Therefore, Market Leader agents should also have a healthy amount to invest in leads.

If you’ve got your forecasting, conversion, and budget ducks all in a row, Market Leader is a great tool for you.

Visit Market Leader

Best for Agents Who Haven’t Had Success With Traditional Lead Gen Methods: Offrs

Offrs is a real estate lead generation company that employs a predictive analytics strategy. Rather than creating ads that aim to reach entire segments of your community, Offrs uses sophisticated algorithms based on the vast amount of consumer, demographic, and market data we have at our disposal to identify the 20% of your target market that is most likely to buy or sell a home in the next 18 months.

Armed with this information, you can then market to only these likely clients, thus driving your conversion rates and the quality of your interactions through the roof. Similar to REDX, Offrs isn’t delivering you warm leads—they are delivering you information that you can use to make better prospecting decisions and sign more clients.

Offrs Pros & Cons

Offrs Pros	Offrs Cons
Predictive analytics (PA) are, without a doubt, the most exciting real lead gen strategy of 2022	A young technology, still improving
With this strategy, you can spend more time on relationship building with those likely to buy and sell	Can be expensive depending on how many areas you’re targeting
Conversion rates using a PA approach are often double (and sometimes triple) standard lead prospecting

[Read more: Offrs Review: Are AI & Predictive Analytics the Future of Real Estate?]

How Much Does Offrs Cost?

The cost of Offrs varies depending on market conditions (similar to the way that Zillow varies their pricing). However, unlike Zillow, the sky is not the limit as far as how much you can spend per geographic territory.

According to Offrs’ website, most geographic areas are available for between $200 and $500 per month, though to be fair, we had to really dig deep to find that information.

Who Should Use Offrs?

Agents who have tried other lead generation strategies and have been unsatisfied with the quality of their leads should give Offrs a try. Remember, many of these leads will have a long tail, requiring nurturing for a little bit longer than average, but since the likelihood of these leads converting is so much higher, this strategy adjustment is worth it.

Also, if you’re an active real estate farmer, Offrs would fit in very nicely with that approach, supercharging your farm efforts to ensure that you’re talking to the most important homebuyers and sellers in your target neighborhoods on a regular basis.

Visit Offrs

Best for Agents Looking to Generate Mostly Referrals: The Faces Of

The Faces Of Your Town is a real estate lead generation company that sets participating realtors up with a highly personalized community website called The Faces Of (fill in your town’s name here).

Using your custom website, users are coached by The Faces Of marketing experts to create valuable content. Your site will feature the best and brightest of your local community, from graduating seniors at the local high school to thoughtful and charismatic business owners to nonprofit leaders near you.

Using The Faces Of, you can create solid connections with the pillars of your community, often making them the number one source for referrals and new business, while also reaping the benefits of being the sponsoring realtor for positive community stories.

The Faces Of Pros & Cons

The Faces Of Pros	The Faces Of Cons
A fantastic lead gen / branding crossover strategy	Requires hands-on work and content creation
Affordable	No tracking in place to determine how effective this strategy is for each individual agent
Exclusive; 1 realtor per community

[Read more: 6 Emails to Send to Clients to Drive Repeat & Referral Business]

How Much Does The Faces Of Cost?

The Faces Of costs $250 per month with a 12-month commitment, plus a one-time fee of $650.

Who Should Use The Faces Of?

The Faces Of is a great choice for agents who have a well-developed or developing brand reputation in their local community and are looking to take it to the next level. If you’re well-known in your area but are closing less than 30% of your transactions as a result of referral and repeat business, The Faces Of may be the perfect tool to increase your referral generation and create more business for you and your team. They only allow one real estate agent per area; check to see if your town is available.

Visit The Faces Of

Best for Agents Who Want Buyer Leads: Zillow Premier Agent

Zillow is, without argument, the largest real estate presence on the internet. Their incredible traffic and visitor statistics alone make them a perfect spot to pick up leads. Zillow sends buyer and seller leads (but mostly buyers) to members of the Zillow Premier Agent Program by advertising those agents on their platform. Zillow can put you in a lineup of options for consumers to choose from when they want more information about a property.

When a consumer chooses you, they fill out a quick form with their contact information and Zillow sends you (and only you) that information.

This approach only really works if you can be a champion of the reviews section. Most of the time, Premier Agents are advertised with other Premier Agents who are paying for the same ZIP codes. The agent with the best review track record usually wins the leads, so if you can get your review solicitation game down, Zillow is the place for you.

Zillow Premier Agent Pros & Cons

Zillow Premier Agent Pros	Zillow Premier Agent Cons
A large infrastructure for leads of all types from all places, making choosing the right plan for your business easy	A minimum of a 6-month contract in most regions
The most important place for real estate reviews on the internet	Leads aren’t exclusive
High-quality ancillary benefits, including a CRM and an IDX website	Almost no seller leads available

[Read more: Is Zillow Premier Agent Worth the Cost?]

How Much Does Zillow Premier Agent Cost?

The Zillow approach to buying leads is a little amorphous in terms of price since the final number depends on a number of factors, including the average home price in an area and the number of other real estate agents who are competing for space. Zillow’s budget tools give good estimates on the number of leads you can expect for your money each month.

Most agents we’ve talked to have said that a budget of at least $250 per month is the bare minimum needed to really get started, but depending on how competitive your area is, even that may not get you the results you want.

Who Should Use Zillow Premier Agent?

This might be a relatively unpopular opinion, but everyone should have at least a free account on Zillow. This is where our clients are spending their time, and we need to be there too.

If you want to move beyond just a great place to collect reviews and start getting active leads, Zillow Premier Agent is a good option, as long as you’re quick to follow up with new leads. Zillow leads convert at a much lower rate the longer you wait to follow up. For this to work, you must be willing put in the time to maintain and update your Zillow profile.

Visit Zillow

Best for Agents Who Want Hands-off, Agency-managed Leads: BoldLeads

BoldLeads is a lead generation tool that acts like a specialized marketing agency just for real estate agents. They create targeted Facebook and Google ads to attract prospects to high-performing landing pages that convert prospects into real estate leads.

With BoldLeads, all you need to do is set your budget and their marketing experts will create, place, and optimize your ads so that the right audience is seeing them at the right time, driving more traffic to your website and your lead capture pages.

BoldLeads Pros & Cons

BoldLeads Pros	BoldLeads Cons
Exclusive leads not shared with other agents	High cost
A hands-off approach, nothing but lead follow-up and nurture required	No guarantee in terms of lead volume or quality
Solid extras, including a great CRM complete with follow-up and nurture tools	Must sign a contract

[Read more: BoldLeads Review: How Does It Work & Is It Worth It?]

How Much Does BoldLeads Cost?

The cost of BoldLeads is broken into two categories: the account fee, which is $399 per month, and the budget for your ads. The minimum BoldLeads ad spend is $250 per month, making the starting cost for BoldLeads $649 per month.

For that cost, BoldLeads will create, implement, and manage all your ads and lead forms, as well as help you manage your ad budget across the different platforms where your BoldLeads ads appear.

Who Should Use BoldLeads?

BoldLeads has a great approach to acquiring leads, but they really stand out in the field with their customer relationship manager (CRM) and nurturing after a lead is yours. Automated SMS texting, emailing, and even voice messages make moving your leads closer to a sale easier. If you’ve got the budget to spend and are looking for a more comprehensive solution for paid lead generation, BoldLeads is a good place for you to buy real estate leads.

Visit BoldLeads

Buying Real Estate Leads – FAQs

A lot of agents have questions they need answers to before making a commitment to buying leads. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions we hear about buying real estate leads. If there’s something we haven’t covered, feel free to drop your question in the comments section.

Is buying real estate leads worth it?

Do most real estate agents pay for leads?

Do brokerages ever buy real estate leads to give to agents?

How can I get free real estate leads?

Over to You

Do you buy real estate leads? We’d love to hear about your successes, whether it was on these or other platforms. How has your business changed since adding this element to your marketing toolkit?

Have any epic failures, horror stories, or advice for other agents looking to buy real estate leads? Drop a comment below, and let’s keep the conversation going!

The post The 6 Best Places to Buy Real Estate Leads appeared first on The Close.

But this last part—cost—is where a lot of agents (especially new agents) get tripped up. Lead generation can be expensive, and even though there is the clear incentive of a big payday when your deals close, some agents don’t have the budget to invest in lead generation upfront.

That’s where a program like Zillow Flex comes in. Zillow Flex is a new option from Zillow Premier Agent that allows real estate agents access to Zillow-generated leads at no upfront cost. If a lead turns into a client and closes a sale, then—and only then—do you pay Zillow.

The catch? Instead of paying an upfront cost for your lead, you pay a percentage of your commission, upward of 35%. Is it worth it? Every agent’s business is different, so in this article, we’ll give you all the information you need to determine that for yourself.

What Is Zillow Flex?

Zillow Flex is a payment option for Zillow Premier Agents, Teams, and Brokers that allows them to receive Zillow leads without paying any upfront cost. Using Zillow Flex, real estate agents only pay Zillow after a transaction successfully closes. Participating agents report Zillow Flex costing anywhere from 25% to 40% of the gross commission.

Zillow Flex is not the first program to offer this referral-style lead generation option. Companies like OpCity (now a Realtor.com asset), HomeLight, and Agent Pronto have been operating for a number of years, but the major difference between these options and Zillow Flex is that Zillow has unprecedented traffic and user trust.

Agent Pronto boasts on their homepage that “over 200,000 homebuyers and sellers have trusted Agent Pronto to introduce them to an amazing agent,” which is not bad for the lifetime of a business, except when you consider that Zillow’s monthly traffic exceeds 36 million visitors, generating them thousands of leads every month.

Their command of the space is overwhelming compared to their competitors; the available pool of leads for Zillow is orders of magnitude bigger than these three other options combined.

Where Is Zillow Flex Available?

According to Zillow’s website, Zillow Flex is only available in the following select markets:

• Fort Collins, CO
• Pueblo, CO
• New Haven, CT
• Norwich, CT
• Phoenix, AZ
• Atlanta, GA

Though this seems like a small selection, Zillow typically rolls new features out to select markets before rolling them out on a large scale, so you can likely expect to see Zillow Flex in most major markets by the end of 2021.

We’ve had reports from brokerages in the Buffalo, NY, area being offered the option to enroll in Zillow Flex in November 2020, so it’s clear that this option is expanding to a wider audience.

Who Is Eligible for Zillow Flex?

In order to qualify for Zillow Flex, you must meet the following criteria:

• Be a current Zillow Premier Agent in a participating market
• Have written permission from your managing broker to participate in an ongoing referral-based lead generation program

There are no performance-based qualifications for joining Zillow Flex, though there are for maintaining a place in the program. In order to continue to receive leads from Zillow Flex, you must:

• Work every connection: Since Zillow has a vested interest in agents turning the leads they send into closed sales, they want to make sure you’re working with them. Agents using Zillow Flex are required to use the Zillow Premier Agent CRM, a platform that is monitored by Zillow for your progress.
• Consistent engagement: Lead profiles on the Zillow Premier Agent CRM are expected to be updated weekly.
• Maintain positive ratings: Zillow Flex sends satisfaction surveys to consumers who have been connected with Flex agents to ensure every connection has a quality experience. Zillow hasn’t stated what the specific rating expectations are, just that agents “maintain a standard of excellence.”
• Confirm every closing: Agents are expected to pay the Zillow Flex fee on the day of closing, preferably directly from the closing company as a part of dispersal.

The Close Pro Talks Zillow Flex

Over on The Close Pro, we get together to discuss strategy, best practices, and the newest options for real estate agents looking to level up their business in our weekly Kick Off and Kick Ass Coaching Call. This week, I got a chance to discuss Zillow Flex with my co-host Sean Moudry about our thoughts on the program. Check it out.

The Case for Using Zillow Flex

Zillow Flex might be exactly the lead generation you and your business have been waiting for. Here are three reasons why you should consider using Zillow Flex.

Leads With No Upfront Cost

Success as a real estate agent can be a bit of a chicken-or-egg scenario: It’s hard to get leads with no budget, but it’s hard to have a budget if you don’t first have leads to close sales. Zillow Flex solves this problem by allowing agents to pay after a lead has turned into a sale.

Sure, you’re going to make less on each closed sale, but some is better than none, and if you’re new to the biz, the experience is nearly as valuable as a commission check.

If You’ve Got a Big Profit Margin, This Is a Nearly No-risk Option

If you’ve got a strong system in place that yields you high profit margins and just not enough leads to fill your time, Zillow Flex is a great option.

This is especially true for agents leading a team. Maybe you’ve got buyer agents without enough clients to keep them busy. These agents would rather work for a little less profit than sit in the office not working at all; Zillow Flex allows you to capture leads that you can use to fill out your team’s calendar without having to invest extra team resources to get them.

A Viable, Scalable, Brokerage Lead Generation Model

If you’re a broker looking to provide extra value to the agents in your brokerage or another carrot to dangle in front of agents you’re working to recruit, being a part of the Zillow Flex program could be just the ticket.

By buying into Zillow Flex at the brokerage level, you could absorb half of the Zillow Flex referral cost, then ask the agent to cover the rest. Once an agent hits cap, you can pass along the entire lead cost. This model would allow you to scale more agents toward hitting their cap goals and supporting the overall health of the business, as well as the success of the real estate agents in your firm.

The Case for Not Using Zillow Flex

It’s true: Zillow Flex isn’t going to be the ideal option for everyone. Here are three reasons why this program might not work for your business.

These Leads Are EXPENSIVE

As paid lead generation goes, these rank as some of the priciest.

It’s true: The cost-per-lead formula that you use on other platforms can’t be applied here, because you’re actually not paying for leads, you’re paying for CLOSINGS. Here’s an example of what we mean:

If you’re a standard Zillow Premier Agent, you’re paying for leads upfront. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the following conditions are true:

• The typical sale price for a home in your market is $300,000
• The typical commission you get for selling a home is 3%
• Your typical closing rate for Zillow Premier Agent Leads is 5% (one out of every 20 leads converts within 90 days of reaching out)
• Your typical nurture rate for Zillow Premier Agent Leads is 10% (two out of every 20 leads converts within one year)
• Your monthly spend with Zillow is $4,000, and that nets you 20 leads a month

If all of this is true, you’re paying $200 per lead. If you’re closing one out of every 20 leads presented within 90 days, your cost-per-closing is $4,000. Given a typical commission of $9,000 ($300,000 x 3%), your cost-per-closing with Zillow Premier Agent is 44%.

But, when you factor in the nurture leads that will close within a year, your cost per closing drops to $1,333, or 14.81%.

Plus, you still have the other 17 leads you’ve collected over that time period to keep in your database, continue to nurture, and possibly capture referrals from down the road.

However, when you’re using Zillow Flex, you don’t get any of the back-end benefits of the leads you receive. You get a single lead, and if it closes, you pay on it. Your future benefit of Zillow Premier Agent using Zillow Flex is then limited to the possible repeat business from the lead Zillow provided, as well as any referrals they could send your way. It has been reported that the Zillow Flex fee ranges from 25% to 40%.

The bottom line is that the math is pretty clear here: Zillow Flex leads are significantly more expensive than traditional Zillow Premier Agent leads. Yes, the risk is lower since you’re not paying for them unless they close, but with lower risk comes a substantially lower reward.

Zillow Flex Consolidates More Control Over the Industry

Support of the Zillow Flex could have the effect of creating more power for Zillow in a real estate industry that already bucks a bit at the idea of how much influence a single company has over the livelihood of more than two million active real estate agents in the U.S. Zillow Flex payments aren’t payments for lead generation—they are referral fees, even if they aren’t named as such.

The acquisition of broker licenses in all the states where Zillow Flex is available and the requirement that your managing broker also agrees to the terms and conditions of the program is a clear sign that Zillow is working on fortifying its emerging brokerage business model. This is something they swore up and down (and which we heard live from Rich Barton on stage in 2018) they weren’t going to pursue.

With the incredible market share advantage Zillow has in terms of consumer web traffic, becoming a full-fledged broker could give them an even more powerful position in markets across the country, making competing with them very difficult.

Zillow Flex Could Shrink Real Estate-supported Industries

With a lower profit margin on sales, Zillow Flex agents will have less discretionary income to spend on products and services they use to support their work. When agents have less to spend on things like marketing, you can expect to see a decrease in professional photographer contracts, less frequent professional staging, and so on.

For the real estate photographers, videographers, drone pilots, stagers, and other professionals who depend on real estate agents as clients, this could be bad news.

So, Is Zillow Flex Worth It?

For some agents, yes. This program is definitely a great opportunity for real estate agents who need transactions under their belt in order to level up their game. Yes, it is expensive, but if you can still carve out enough commission to be able to operate your business, pay the mortgage, and buy yourself an occasional cup of coffee, it seems like it would be a good option.

However, for agents who have other lead generation opportunities that work for them, Zillow Flex likely will not be a good option because it is almost certainly one of the most expensive lead sources on the market today.

Next Steps

Want to give Zillow Flex a try? Great. If you’re a real estate agent in a participating market and meet the criteria for getting started, you can get the process started. Zillow isn’t offering open enrollment in the program just yet, but you can get on the list by selecting “Contact us” from this Zillow Flex information page.

If you’re not in a Zillow Flex market or don’t meet the requirements to start in the program, you can still sign up for Zillow Premier Agent.

If reading this has reassured you that Zillow isn’t for you, or you just want to know what other lead generation options are out there, check out our guide to the Top 6 Real Estate Lead Generation Companies.

Your Turn

What do you think about Zillow Flex? Are you excited about this option coming to your market, or is this a big no-go for you? Tell us how you feel in the comments below, or make your opinion known in our Facebook Group, The Close Real Estate Agents Mastermind Group.

The post Is Zillow Flex Worth the 35% Referral Fee? appeared first on The Close.

In fact, many brokers don’t spend a dime on lead generation.

After all, they’re paying the damn rent! Why should agents, especially newer agents, expect to be given leads for nothing? Most brokers would laugh if you brought this up in a meeting.

Luke Monroe is not like most brokers.

The Investors Approach to Attracting & Keeping Talent

While Luke Monroe wasn’t exactly a real estate industry outsider, he came to residential brokerage from the cold, cut throat world of investing.

He leveraged this experience by focusing on the mistakes other brokerages make when trying to expand into new farm areas. They always start out with expensive office spaces, branding, ad campaigns, the works.

Then they scramble to find talent and get them working.

Instead of the traditional model, Luke decided to run the brick and mortar side of his business, Kendrick Realty in Pleasant Hill and Orange County California lean, and invest heavily in the lifeblood of any brokerage; undercutting the competition by buying leads directly from Zillow, Realtor.com and a few other sources.

Scaling ROI

Since you’re reading about him on The Close, you already know how this ends up. Luke’s strategy was massively successful. He was not only able to recruit and keep top talent, but devised a points based training program that saw brand new agents closing deals in their first month and recently opened up a second office in Orange County.

Check out our in-depth interview with Luke below to learn how he scaled his lead generation, where he buys leads, how his teams nurture leads and more.

Emile:
… Where your company is because that makes sense for all of those things basically to happen. For us, I am buying leads where I have the opportunity to do it. Where it makes sense according to our metrics, as opposed to just where I live. We’ll find the opportunity first, secure the lead source, and then find the agent to take advantage of, plug into our system, take advantage of that lead source second.

Luke Monroe:
So, it’s very important to me as the broker and also kind of to our brand and our promise to our realtors that the leads always come first. I’m never going to say, “Hey, join our brokerage and then we’ll try to find some leads, and all of these good things will happen.” The order is reversed where I’m saying, “Hey, look at the screen. This is what I have coming in in the area. Currently, we don’t have somebody here. That could be you; let’s talk about that as an opportunity.”

Emile:
Right, I think that’s a really smart way to handle it because you’re going to the places where you think there’s going to be new business. Maybe a missed opportunity where other brokerages are kind of dropping the ball, which is pretty frequent, I’ve had at least in New York. So, one other thing that a lot of the smaller teams, or people that are just starting a boutique brokerage, one of the biggest kind of pain points they have is scaling, scaling your business.

It makes sense because you’re already outlaying money, maybe you’re renting office space, you’re hiring two ISAs instead of one. So, it’s a little scary, you know? So, can you talk about maybe when you guys were starting out, even from an agent level, or maybe as a brokerage level; whichever you think would be more apropos here. And then just how do you, “Okay, look. I’m spending 400 bucks a month and I’m doing okay.” How do you make the call to say, “Okay, I’m going to just 10x this thing and go up to three grand a month or five grand.” How do you make that decision? Is there a tipping point that you guys have found over the years? It’s like, “Okay, now we can turn up the heat.”

Luke Monroe:
Yes, but I think the timeline for us was much more condensed. I came to our brokerages from a real-estate investment background. I didn’t have a background in real-estate brokerage operations, which has been to our advantage and disadvantage in the sense that we weren’t constrained by the group-think of how it’s been done in the past. But also, the reason this happened that way for so long is some of those things make a lot of sense. That we had to discover on our own, so to speak. When we were setting up our brokerage, the first one in Northern California, it was really with the end in sight. I didn’t have an interest in starting with one agent trying to do more organic growth, figure out how to make it work with one person and then go to the second and the third and the fourth. We were buying leads primarily at that point from Realtor.com, and the reason I liked that product is because it let us scale very quickly. It gave us a little bit of predictability and it let me go from being a no-one. No brokerage, no agents, to being one of the 20 largest buyers of real-estate advertising in the country where we were still in my living room before we got our first office.

So, we were able to achieve scale very quickly. That was very important to what we were trying to do because a lot of people that have worked with online leads before and usually struggle with online leads. In my view, the problem they have is that they can’t achieve scale. So, they’re spending 500, 1000 bucks a month and that’s getting them three or five leads a month. You can’t do anything about that. You can’t build systems around it, it’s not predictable; you can’t build scale from that. You have to be available 24/7 for an entire month to take eight phone calls that could come in at any hour of the day. That’s just not effective in my mind for anybody.

So, one of the first things that I knew I had to do was get to a scale a certain number of leads that would allow me to justify having an in-house call center team. Basically in-house ISAs so that we could 24-7 respond to every lead as it came in, whether the agent was available or not, and start engaging that client, start a conversation and be able to move those relationships forward. So, when we’re talking about, “Where do we start. Did we start at $125,000 a month?” No, but I think we started at $30,000 a month and grew at five or six thousand a month since then pretty consistently to get to where we are now.

And that was necessary, kind of, to create that scale. It was difficult also, certainly at the time obviously, it’s a big cash outlay for what we had as an unproven concept, and the call center team salary’s were all in addition to the direct ad sense. It was a very expensive business model to set up, but I had a very strong belief that it was going to work. There were some questions along the way that whether or not it would work with me or with somebody else, but I knew that it was going to be a successful strategy.

Emile:
Yeah, it’s really interesting because it’s sort of the opposite of what most people think a brokerage is … They conceive of how a brokerage starts or how a brokerage grows and it seems like you’re taking kind of, “Oh, we got the great people and we scrimp and save. We got the good people, and then better people, then we hire slightly better.” And you’re like, “Well, why don’t we get the market first?” Let’s get the customers then maybe we start build up the team to work those customers.

And that seems like how it works in most other businesses. You need the product itself and you need the customers sort of first and foremost. Having a huge staff of people who are paid, which I think that’s sort of maybe one of the flaws of the system in the real-estate issue where, “Oh, no one gets any salary.” And it’s easy to justify just a body count. Getting thirty people and you get some sort of spread out distribution where 10% reduces 80% of the deals.

Luke Monroe:
Right, exactly.

Emile:
Let’s sort of switch gears a little bit and see if we can drill down into the weeds a little. So, do you find … and this is something, again, that is a super common question. And again, it’s a very personal answer and it’s something that’s going to change depending upon what skill levels someones at etc, etc. Do you find that there’s a different quality of leads, say, from a Zillow premier agent or a realtor, or maybe boutique company’s with bold leads, or market leads, or any of those guys. Have you found a qualitative and/or quantitative difference where like, “Hey, Zillow’s great for seller leads, realtor’s great for buyer leads, I get crummy leads or bold leads” or something. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Luke Monroe:
Yeah, I think there’s always a difference in quality from lead source. We buy primarily from Realtor.com because I’ve found the overall quality of the leads coming through Realitor.com to be superior to the leads we get from any other source. We do buy from Zillow, we buy from TORCHx, we buy from Boom Town, we buy from several other lead sources as well, as well as generating our own leads. So, our own ad words and real-estate website, at this point those things are all in place to augment the lead generation we’re doing with Realtor.com as the consistent base for our lead generation.

Emile:
Okay, cool. It’s also like I said. It’s really, really hard to … Because a lot of times people will say, “Oh, well, I signed up for Zillow or realtor, or TORCHx or whatever, “Oh, I stand there for three months and I got nothing.” And there’s so many variables. It’s like a social science experiment in sense because it’s like, “What season did you sign up, what kind of lead nurturing program do you have?” There’s so many, so many, so many variables that it’s hard to get a review from an agent who’s getting a small amount of leads and to take it seriously sometimes, you know? So, really, really-

Luke Monroe:
I think that’s very much the case.

Emile:
Yeah, so again. You read a lot of these reviews online and you’re like, “Ah, this company sucks, they’re terrible.” Well again, you’re talking about four tipping points, maybe you need to scale it up just a bit. You go from 500 to 650, who knows, maybe that’s the tipping point where you get 10 more leads or six more leads or three more good leads. It’s always a tricky thing, so it’s good, nice to hear someone who’s thing is that scale to sort of have the similar idea here. Now even more nitty gritty, I heard that you guys built a custom CRM and I’m just curious since, again, CRMs are a dime a dozen. There’s so many CRMs, and all the features are feature creeps, so they haven’t [inaudible 00:10:26] what weren’t you guys getting from stock CRMs that are on the market? What features were you missing when you said, “Look, we need our own solution here.”

Luke Monroe:
I think the biggest features, honestly, that we’re missing was a true brokerage management level oversight built into CRM. Most of the products that were available did an okay job at doing whatever it was they were supposed to do. Typically, it was at the agent level for essentially just organizing data. For me, when we’re spending that much money, I need to know exactly where it’s going, who’s doing what with it, how we’re performing on it. And that wasn’t a level of transparency I could get from any other products existing on the market. It was worth it, made sense for us to develop in-house. In addition to that, there are things that come up on the recording, on the interaction side that we thought were important.

In many cases those features … it’s not necessarily about adding additional features to the CRM so much as it is streamlining the experience. I think there are many CRMs that are out there that have far too many features, and so that user really gets lost. In the, “Do I sign them up for a 3DX lead on this campaign?” Nobody’s going to remember all of that stuff. We want to keep it simple so that our agent’s user experience is very efficient and the data’s very easy to track and we can create standardization and keep everybody moving foreword; including all of the leads moving foreword as quickly as possible.

Emile:
Yeah, I think that’s well said, again, the feature creep. Granted, they have to, it’s sort of an arms race in a sense because there are so many CRMs on the market that if they’re not offering the latest bells and whistles and, “No, we’re AI.” Whatever people are saying is AI these days. But then often the latest bells and whistles are kind of done in the water and people aren’t going to spend the 60 bucks a month. And I think, again, building your own seems like it’s going to be something that’s going to be a lot easier to do going forward. Hopefully it will be a little less expensive. People can kind of cobble together a system from disparate parts, and Insightly or something is free and you work that into dot loop that you get from your association. So, I think we’re going to get to a point where a lot of that stuff is free, and I think also that a lot of times the tools don’t really matter. Do you give your agents their own IDX website? It seems kind of moot at this point.

Luke Monroe:
Yeah, at this point our agents don’t have their own IDX websites, and that is something that we’re kind of playing around with because we do have, for the company, several IDX websites that we operate. We have an interest in doing more hyper localized branding around our agents, but on what we would call their territory level. So, a grouping of several zip codes, not necessarily the being higher MLS IDX feed. So, at this point we don’t have anything that’s in place, but it is something that we’ve talked about and are still considering.

Emile:
I think that’s something that’s maybe a little redundant, almost, in some senses because if you have your brokerage website, you’re based on the brokerage website, okay fine, it’s not your website quote unquote. At the end of the day people are looking on Zillow, people are looking on Realtor, and you guys are getting the leads before they get disillusioned with Realtor and Zillow and then they go to some random realtor site and it’s like … 100% chance they’re going to be at Zillow and Realtor, and there’s a 1% chance they’re going to be on a random realtor’s website.

So, I think a lot of people are maybe pushing money into the wrong thing. And they’re not cheap, the place through sites you can get for … Okay, the baseline one is free, but it’s very, very limited. People are spending 250 a month, and I think that it’s fine if that’s what you want to do and you’re sort of on your own, but if you have a decent brokerage, I think it makes more sense to focus on that. Especially since trying to rank an individual realtor’s site on Google is a full time job.

Luke Monroe:
It’s very tough.

Emile:
We write articles for a living. We rely on Google for a living, we literally have an entire SEO team that does nothing but do that. At a brokerage level, sure, yeah. You build out individual pages for sort of mini, micro neighborhoods and you long-tail keywords that have very low search volume. But if you build that 1000 pages that are for these very low search volume keywords that people are very interested in, again, your really small neighborhood, maybe 20 people search for Alemeda Heights, I just made that up, it probably is a neighborhood in Southern California. Alemeda Heights best block, the best block to live, etc.

A very small number of people will search there, but if you build out your site to catch all of those keywords, eventually you cobble that together and then you can get a few thousand page views a month, something like that. But again, at a realtor level it’s so much work and I think people are kind of fed a false bill of goods where it’s like, “Hey, here get this website for 250 a month, then you can rank on Google above Zillow.”

Luke Monroe:
That’s not a viable way to go, but for us when we look at that, and one of the reasons we are considering potentially doing that in the future is because we can peel off, like you said, some of the long-tail keywords for the very few leads. But if we can come up with an agent website template that just becomes part of a SAS platform that the brokerage has developed. Agents come on, we’re plugging a bio, we’re plugging in a photo, we’re plugging in your local IDX, but it’s all controlled by the brokerage so we’re not paying 250 an agent for all of these websites. It’s just a part of what we can offer our agents and we can peel off another one or two leaves a month, but higher quality leads more likely to convert, that’s something we have an interest in. But at this point we need a latter to climb up the tree to get to that fruit. There’s a lot more low hanging fruit that is a lot easier for us to convert at this point.

Emile:
Definitely, definitely. So yeah, I guess the last question is just about recruitment. And I think that’s the second, even scarier pin-point than, “How do we grow.” It’s “How do I recruit good people, A. And then how the hell do you keep those people. Especially when you have company’s like Compass that are coming out. I remember I was thinking Compass started out in Manhattan, and they were called Urban Compass and they hired a bunch of college kids with red backpacks to go take pictures of big apartments. And that didn’t work, it was failed pretty much immediately, but they had some D.C. money and they said, “Look, we’re going to recruit agents from Corcoran and Sothebys and Stribling, we’re just going to pay them.”

And I think it’s such a cutthroat, maybe even more cutthroat than getting needs is getting the quality talent. And I know we talked to Barbara Corcoran about a year ago and we’re like look, “This is a different era in the 80s. As a startup, how did you get the top talent from the the old school players, she’s like, “I literally and go, and if they made a big sale, they had a deal, I would send them a bouquet of flowers because he knew that their brokerages didn’t care, you know?” The broker wasn’t patting him on the back and taking him out to dinner, the broker was like, “Thank you.” And then … So, no one seemed to care about the agent back then.

So, as far as I think now you guys are probably going to have a super easy time. I’m sure there’s people lining up out your door because they know they’re going to get awesome leads from you guys. Was that always the way you handled recruiting? Or did you have a different strategy that you decided to just say, “Hey, we’re going to give you tons of leads?”

Luke Monroe:
Yeah, so I’ll actually tell you two funny things on recruiting, and then get a little bit more serious. When we were starting, one of the things we discovered over time with recruiting, we put ads on Craigslist, on Indeed, on Monster, on all of the other job board sites. In our job tagline, one of the things that we do, and we were telling our agents, “Hey, this is going to make it really easy to recruit. I’m going to spend $4000 a month on lead generation just for you.” The response we got back from that was really low. It shocked me. I’m trying to give you gold and you’re telling me, “No, no, no, I’m good.” So, anyway my partner found this Facebook post for somebody else doing recruiting in Orlando from another broker who said, we do, I think it was $800 of lead generation for you a month. And he’s looking at this Facebook post and it’s got a ton of comments. People saying, “Wow, this is amazing, it’s too good to be true. We need to sign up here.” For us the ah-ha moment was, people just … you think it’s too good to be true.

They’re not even engaging with our ad to come to us to have a conversation because they’re saying, “Nah, nobody is going to spend three or four thousand dollars a month on real-estate ads to grow my business.” That’s not how the industry works. And so, we started changing the ad, and we brought it to 3000 and then to 25,000 and then to 2,000 a month and the lower we made the number for what we do for our realtors, the more response we got back. That was fascinating. We didn’t actually change anything that we do on our side. We still do the same lead generation, but the perception just to get people to start the conversation and understand what we’re doing was very different. So, I thought you would appreciate that.

Emile:
That’s great, yeah.

Luke Monroe:
And the other thing that we’re doing now. I’m in Orange county this week. I just wrapped up the Realtor.com top 20 conference down here and we’re staying over a couple more days because we’re looking at starting our next office in Orange County. One of the things we did, I put up the same ads to start talking to an office manager and talking to agents to join us for this office. The thing that we changed for that ad was how the first sentence says, “Join our growing team. Be a part of this startup getting up on the ground floor.” Basically those keywords: new company, startup, it’s exciting. The response has just been tremendous. It helps that we are growing, we are expanding, we are having success. People identify and like that, but just saying, “Hey, we’re a startup and we’re coming to open a new office and you can be in on the ground floor” has really gotten a lot of people excited. Which again, for us is the same thing everywhere we go, but just changing that little bit of our presentation has gotten people very excited about what we’re doing and wanting to come and join us. That’s been great. As far as …

So, I was just going to say. Going back to the original question just as far as recruiting, what we’re trying to do. When one of the biggest things, honestly, that we look for in recruitment is what my wife calls people who want to grow the pie. Somebody who is coming to us because they are excited about doing better. They’re excited about us doing better, they’re excited about clients doing better. One of the things that … Here I am with my two offices and forty agents telling Compass what I think they need to work on.

One of the things that I’d have a concern with in that growth model is so much of what they’re doing. Paying agents to come on board. They’re getting really great top quality agents, but it’s just the latest shiny object. So, if you’ll come join me because I paid you this, then you’ll go join somebody else because they paid you this plus what, right? For us, I am very proud of all of the agents that are part of our team, and the retention that we have with those agents because we really have a great relationship where it is truly mutually beneficial for us, for our agents, for our client. Everybody is growing their business together, and that’s something that is really central to how we function as a business. I’m not going into a new office saying, “Okay, we need to get deep penetration, we need to get to 200 agents.” Our focus is much more on an office is going to be 15 or 20 people. We’re all going to get along very well in a smaller set-up, and that’s how we can all be successful together.

Emile:
Yeah, and again such an important lesson. The broker joint I worked for in Brooklyn a couple years ago, we’ll remain nameless for now, but same thing. The broker focused on small area that was just gentrifying like mad and there was new developments and there was some land use things that have changed. That’s what we had, we had a small team. I think we had twenty something people and it was five or so years before you say, “Okay, let’s get another office out in Crossford heights and let’s, you know. So, it’s just a slow growth thing but after, I think about 10 years, the company was totally dominating a huge swath of North Brooklyn. Which, when we started out, it wasn’t such a valuable … I mean, it was still a valuable …

It doesn’t matter what, even an area that has low home price is still valuable because there’s a lot of movement there and a lot of people moving, whatever. But still, it’s just a slow growth sort of strategy, and the one thing he said that kind of stuck with me is basically what you said. And he’s like, “Look, I could hire 10 times as many agents as I have with the drop of a hat. New York City we have exclusive buildings or I have a waterfront.” But he’s like, “I don’t want you.” I want to know everybody I worked for. I want everyone to get along, I want to have sort of a teamwork thing where it’s … a lot of agents sort of see their co-workers as the competition, which they are in some sense. But we truly felt like a team. I would walk into work and I’d know everybody there and, “Hey, can you take this showing for me?” Or, “Hey just saw this crazy listing, you got to bring your client.” etc.

Luke Monroe:
I really think that’s critical to building the strong foundation that any brokerage can grow from. Especially the way we’re set up with our territories, our agents can feel like a team. There’s no concern that I’m going to take leads from you or you’re going to take leads from me because everybody knows that I get the leads that come in to my territory and my zip code. They come just to me. So, we’re not in competition, we can be friends, we can collaborate, and we can grow together, which I think is really an unfortunate miss for many other brokerages because everybody is in competition. I can never really be your friend because we are colleagues, but competitors. And the way we’re set up, what you just described really can happen. We can get along together, you can watch my leads when I’m on vacation, I’ll watch yours while you go on vacation. Part of what the brokerage does is provide the consistency and trust that our agents aren’t worried about, “I have to get every lead.” Because they know that we’re good at it. We’re going to deliver on that promise. There’s always going to be more opportunity so we really can collaborate as friends, as a team; not just as competitors.

Emile:

Awesome.

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