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.

Visit Market Leader

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

Visit Market Leader

The post Market Leader Review + Video Walk-through appeared first on The Close.

Why, as a real estate professional, should you care? Simply put, with reliable predictive analytics, you can better target the most likely buyers and sellers in your market and have better insight into which homes and neighborhoods are likely to produce transactions. In other words, you can spend less time marketing, have better conversations as a result of the marketing you do, and explode your overall conversion rates.

• Data-driven: Predictive analytics are based on data. As we get more data points about consumers and observe the results of our earliest predictions, we can better understand where our algorithms are accurate and where they need to be tweaked. The result: Predictive analytics marketing is only going to get better as time goes on.
• Listing-focused: A lot of real estate marketing grabs the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to leads: buyer leads. Though there’s nothing wrong with working buyer leads, we all know that there’s only so far you can scale your business as a buyer’s agent. Since a predictive analytics marketing approach is very listing-focused, you have the opportunity to grow your business further and faster.
• Exciting for investors: For those of us working with real estate investors (or who are investors ourselves), we know that real opportunity for profit is tied directly to timing. With predictive analytics, investors may be able to identify opportunities earlier and more often, thereby increasing their profits on each transaction and outpacing their competitors.

Predictive Analytics in Real Estate: A 60-Second Explanation

Need a quick refresher on how predictive analytics actually work in the real estate industry? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Watch this video to get up to speed.

How Predictive Analytics Real Estate Marketing Will Get You Twice as Many Listings

According to a case study conducted by AccuData, direct mail marketing driven by predictive analytics saw response rates more than double that of marketing without algorithmic smart targeting. Why?

It all has to do with conversion rates. When you use predictive analytics in your real estate marketing, you’re focusing your message on people and property that are more likely to produce transactions.

Armed with data on the most likely buyers, sellers, and productive neighborhoods, you can laser-focus your efforts where your opportunities truly lie, rather than spending your time and resources blanketing neighborhoods and prospects that may not be interested in your marketing.

How Predictive Analytics Will Slash Your Marketing Budget (& Still Make You Money)

Agents using the traditional scattershot approach to real estate marketing need to hit a large swath of prospects with their messages to be profitable. Since their conversion rates are so low (often less than 4%), they need to deliver hundreds or even thousands of marketing emails, texts, postcards, and more every single week.

Sure, this approach can be profitable, but it requires a hefty investment just to get people into the top of your funnel, and it can be very labor-intensive. With predictive analytics, your marketing outreach is focused on the most likely buyers and sellers in your area. This approach drastically decreases the amount of cold, initial outreach you need to do—saving you time, money, and effort.

THE BOTTOM LINE: This targeted real estate marketing lets you reallocate many of your top-of-funnel marketing resources toward generating referrals and maintaining relationships with your existing sphere of influence. You’ll increase your overall business strength and diversify your lead sources. Predictive analytics aren’t just good for new clients—they’re good for your business as a whole.

OK, So What’s the Catch?

It’s important to note that while predictive analytics are likely to produce quick wins here and there, the typical nurturing time on a predictive analytic-powered lead is relatively long—sometimes as much as 18 months. This makes sense, since you’re establishing a relationship with these leads in their curious-about-the-market stage, and sometimes even earlier.

However, since most of us are in this business for the long haul and are looking for career-sustaining strategies, this only means that you’ve got to add patience and consistency to your recipe for success when working with predictive analytics.

The Close Recommends Smartzip

If you’re sold on predictive analytics as part of your marketing strategy, we suggest checking out Smartzip as a data provider. Smartzip provides all the data you need to craft targeted marketing campaigns, a solid CRM for managing your leads, plus the ability to sync with just about every real estate CRM on the market. You’ll also gain a host of other related options you can use to power your business.

What Realtors Get When They Join Smartzip

When you become a Smartzip agent, you immediately get access to the Smartzip CRM, which is prepopulated with the contact profiles of buyers and sellers identified by the Smartzip algorithm as highly likely to become active in the next 18 months. Each of these lead profiles includes details about residents and the homes they own (courtesy of tax records and MLS data). You’ll gain access to their contact information, including phone numbers, email addresses, social media profiles, and more.

Other Smartzip Tools Worth Checking Out

When you join Smartzip, you can opt in to their Smart Targeting tool, which can automate your marketing to more effectively cash in on the leads Smartzip generates for you. You also can opt in to their Reach150 program, designed to solicit and manage online reviews.

Their Sphere program applies predictive analytics principles to your personal sphere of influence to give you a better chance of cashing in on referrals and repeat business. It can help you prioritize your relationship nurturing.

Each of these programs comes at an additional cost, but for agents who can use the tools effectively, they provide a solid return on your investment.

Smartzip Cost

Smartzip’s cost depends on the median property value in your market plus the amount of Smart Data you’re investing in. The minimum monthly spend with Smartzip is $350. Most agents report their typical monthly spend is about $1,000.

Visit Smartzip

Learn More

Want to learn more about Smartzip? The Close did a deep-dive review of Smartzip. Check it out to learn about features, pricing, and more. If you’ve had success using Smartzip in your part of the country, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Looking for more real estate marketing advice and strategy? Check out Managing Editor Emile L’Eplatennier’s real estate marketing plan template every agent needs, and join us in our Facebook Mastermind group, where you can learn from weekly conversations about how realtors, teams, and brokerages can more effectively market their services and expertise to their local community.

The post Predictive Analytics: How to Get More Listings With Less Marketing appeared first on The Close.

Is Chime right for you and your real estate business? In this review, we’ll dive into what Chime is, what it does well, and how much it costs, and also make a recommendation for precisely who would (and wouldn’t) benefit from Chime.

The Close Recommendation

If you’re looking to increase your productivity while decreasing the number of tools you use each day, you should consider Chime. Chime provides a comprehensive way to gather leads, convert them into clients, manage them through a transaction, and activate them as referral sources (and repeat clients). Yes, this system has a premium price tag, but in our opinion, the return on an investment from the Chime platform can be substantial.

And since Chime is designed to scale with your business, it’s a solution that will likely serve you throughout your career—whether you’re a single agent, running a team, or operating a brokerage.

Visit Chime

While our overall review of Chime is positive, it’s not a tool for everyone. Here’s a breakdown of who Chime is (and isn’t) a good fit for:

Chime Works Well For:

• Agents with a growing business that they’re willing to invest in. If you’ve got a budget and a business plan that incorporates paid lead generation, referral nurturing, farming, and more, the Chime option is a good one for you.
• Teams who are looking to take their lead generation, distribution, management, and nurturing to the next level. Teams who use Chime have access to advanced analytics, reporting, transaction management, and forecasting tools—all essential for building your real estate empire.
• Brokerages that are looking for a top-down solution to managing all agent operations from a single dashboard. Brokers using Chime also have access to Inside Sales Agents (ISAs), a brokerage website, and websites to offer your agents. You’ll also get 50 hours of dedicated technical support every month.

Chime May Not Be Ideal For:

• Agents who have a tight budget or part-time real estate professionals who don’t have the time to commit to learning the Chime system and using the tools provided.
• Teams who are still sorting out their structure and lead distribution strategies, and don’t have hours set aside each week to review reporting and analytics. Chime provides a lot of data on the performance of your marketing, your individual agents, and your team as a whole. If you don’t have the bandwidth to use this data, this likely isn’t the platform for your team.
• Brokerages that aren’t interested in offering any sort of leads to their agents. A large part of Chime’s value to large teams and brokerages is their ability to integrate their lead generation with their customer relationship manager (CRM). If you don’t plan on offering leads to your brokerage, the value of Chime for your business likely won’t match the price.

How Much Does Chime Cost & What Do You Get?

Chime offers multiple packages, add-ons, and discounts based on the combination of services you choose. The base price of Chime starts with the package you select. Those options are:

Chime Base Package Pricing

(Updated September 2021)

How Do These Packages Differ?

Each Chime package comes with their CRM, a customer-facing website, and access to their lead generation tools. But not all Chime packages are created equal. Here’s what users can expect in terms of features from each of Chime’s three packages:

Foundation Platform Features

Business Platform Features

Enterprise Platform Features

Chime Optional Add-on Pricing

After choosing a Chime base package, you can begin adding on optional services. Here’s a breakdown of your many options (prices updated in September 2021).

Facebook Ad Management

Google Pay-per-Click (PPC) Ad Management

Text Message Marketing

Phone Dialer

Premium Professional Services

Breaking Down Chime’s Most Important Features

Chime’s services can be divided into three basic categories: CRM, website, and marketing. Let’s look at a couple of the most important features in each of these categories to better understand how they could help improve your real estate business.

CRM

Chime’s CRM is all about finding the most efficient ways of achieving your goals. The tools available to Realtors here include automatic lead scoring and analysis. Plus, you’ll get “smart suggestions” from Chime on the most effective way to communicate with your leads based on how they’ve responded in the past. Some other powerful Chime CRM features include:

• Lots of automated marketing options, including email and SMS texting
• A built-in power dialer (up to three lines available)
• An available artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to automatically respond to inquiries from your website
• Built-in transaction management
• Dynamic lead distribution based on team member performance
• A native mobile app
• Hundreds of available integrations with companies like Zillow, Gmail, BombBomb, and more

Website

Chime’s websites are easy to use, all IDX-enabled, and if we can be so bold, damn pretty to look at. But, the Chime website’s most powerful feature is its direct integration with the Chime CRM. When visitors come to your Chime website and complete a lead form, they’re automatically added to your CRM.

After that, nearly every move they make on your site, including the number of properties viewed, searches made, even the number of visits made daily, are logged and factored into the Chime lead scoring system—allowing you to better prioritize who you reach out to first, based on their website activity.

Some other Chime website features of note include:

• In-depth neighborhood data, including demographics, turnover and absorption rates, and more
• Advanced school district search capability
• Excellent landing page options, including Home Valuation, Mortgage Calculators, Showing Requests, and more
• An easy-to-use site editor that makes keeping your website updated easy, even without coding knowledge and experience

Marketing

Their online lead generation strategy powers the Chime marketing engine. Relying heavily on the “ad agency approach” used by other lead gen companies like BoldLeads and Real Geeks, Chime steps it up a notch by doing two things differently:

1. They’ve integrated Facebook’s Lead Forms into their campaigns, allowing leads to convert without ever leaving the social media platform.
2. They use a retargeting strategy to create ads for properties an unconverted prospect viewed on your website to encourage them to give their lead information.

These power-ups, paired with direct integration with the Chime CRM, make this a highly effective lead generation and conversion strategy. Apart from this, some other marketing tools available from Chime include:

• Branding advertisements you can deliver to your ZIP code or your sphere of influence based on custom lists generated by the Chime CRM
• Direct mail options that will automate your circle prospecting and real estate farming

A Day in the Life of a Chime User: Video Walk-through

Where Chime Could Improve

Chime has many things going for it, but like most things, it isn’t perfect.

For starters, Chime is expensive. While we believe that Chime’s return on investment potential is very high, there are going to be some real estate professionals who won’t even get in the door because they simply can’t afford the base price. It would be nice to have some sort of express version of Chime for realtors operating on a leaner budget.

Secondly, Chime is so incredibly feature-rich, sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly where to start your day in terms of how you’re using the system. We found ourselves experiencing option-overload when exploring our demo account. Though a regular Chime user would likely develop a daily rhythm on how they use the platform, there isn’t a clear, prioritized, “do-this-first” sort of direction.

Interested in some alternatives to Chime? Check out our review of Propertybase (the CRM competitor most similar to Chime) or LionDesk (an affordable, all-around workhorse CRM).

Bottom Line

Chime has successfully developed a platform that consolidates your CRM, website, and lead generation efforts into a single interface. They offer a ton of shortcuts toward a productive, profitable business and provide the data and analytics to measure your success and set better goals.

Chime is definitely an investment, one whose efficacy has to be measured over the long run. Still, if you have the budget and the attention bandwidth to invest in Chime, this is a system that will benefit your business.

Visit Chime

The post Is Chime the All-in-One Solution the Real Estate Business Has Been Waiting For? appeared first on The Close.

Predictive analytics apps like SmartZip claim they are the best use of your resources. But are they really?

In this article, we’ll talk a little bit about how predictive analytics work, how SmartZip harnesses them to produce results, how much it costs, and ultimately, whether it’s the right tool for you and your business.

Wait, What the Heck Is Predictive Analytics?

I bet you’ve heard this term before, but are probably a little hazy on what it actually means. So we’re all on the same page, here’s a basic definition:

Predictive analytics use data, both current and historic, to make better predictions about what will happen in the future.

When it comes to real estate, predictive analytics are based on the past and present behavior of homebuyers and sellers, as well as the behavior of the market, so we can better understand which homes and homesellers are the best targets for marketing.

Why Predictive Analytics Matter

OK, so now that we know what predictive analytics are, why are they important to the future of real estate marketing? Here’s an example:

I’m sure there are neighborhoods in your market that are very popular with first-time homebuyers. A typical first-time buyer stays in their property five to seven years, so a sale date of six years ago could be used to predict that a sale in the next 12 to 18 months is likely. This is an example of market behavior, and a data point that can be used to predict future behavior.

But using a single data point like length of ownership is just the tip of the iceberg. Sophisticated predictive analytics models incorporate dozens (if not hundreds) of data points to create a detailed picture of a property and a consumer, allowing for a much more accurate guess as to what will happen next. That’s where SmartZip comes in.

Real estate agents who can use predictive analytics to correctly identify likely candidates for sale will have an advantage over those who don’t since they can focus their marketing efforts on these homeowners instead of blanketing an area with a message that, for most homeowners, will fall on deaf ears.

How Does SmartZip Use Predictive Analytics?

SmartZip uses a proprietary algorithm that aggregates data from more than 25 sources to generate a list of the homes most likely to be listed for sale in a particular market. Some of the data sources that SmartZip uses to feed this algorithm include:

• Property data: Your MLS is ripe with information, including hundreds of data points like number of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, and year built. The MLS also houses sold data like the last time the property was sold, whether it was listed and expired or withdrawn, and other important information about the property’s history in the market. This data helps SmartZip identify trends like typical turnover rates for neighborhoods, popular architectural styles, and other factors that might affect demand.
• Behavioral data: Spending a lot of time on Zillow lately? For a real estate-focused predictive analytics model, that is a behavioral indicator that you’re likely to list your home in the coming year. Companies like Google, Facebook, and even your cell phone service provider or your home internet service provider catalog almost all of your behavior online, then package and sell that data to companies so that they can better serve advertisements to you, or to analytics companies (like SmartZip) for further study.
• Consumer data: Every time you swipe your card at the checkout, those purchases are logged by your credit card company, and that data is packaged and sold to companies who are trying to better understand what your purchases today will say about your purchases (and behavior) in the future. For instance, if you’re at Home Depot every weekend buying supplies for a bathroom remodel, this could mean you’re finishing projects necessary to getting a higher price when selling your home.
• Demographic data: Are you a parent of a child about to graduate high school? Maybe the last of your kids has launched their lives and you find yourself with a house bigger than you need? These sorts of life events are demographic indicators that can suggest a move might be imminent.

On their own, each of these categories provides an interesting insight into your life. But combined together and fed into the SmartZip algorithm, SmartZip users have a powerful tool to separate the homes and property owners who are the most likely candidates for sale in the coming months.

How Much Does SmartZip Cost?

SmartZip’s pricing varies depending on two factors: median property value and the size of the market you purchase. The minimum monthly cost with SmartZip is about $350; many agents report their typical SmartZip spend is about $1,000 a month. SmartZip also requires a 12-month contract to get started.

This entry cost gets real estate agents access to Smart Data, the results of the SmartZip algorithm for the market you’re working in. With Smart Data, you get a list of the most likely properties to list for sale in the markets you’ve opted into, including lead profiles with contact information like phone numbers and social media accounts for each of the homeowners who will allow you to target marketing you create specifically to them. However, Smart Data isn’t the only tool offered by SmartZip.

When I Sign Up With SmartZip, What Do I Get?

After signing on the dotted line with SmartZip, Realtors will get access to the SmartZip CRM that, unlike a traditional CRM, comes populated (and is constantly updated) with the contact profiles of those the algorithm has identified as “high likelihood sellers.” These profiles include details about the homeowner’s property (square footage, bedroom and bathroom count, etc), tax records (date the home was last sold, taxable value changes, estimated equity, etc), and of course contact information (name, phone number, mailing address, even links to social media profiles). 

If it’s available, the profiles also get populated with demographic data too; things like age, income level, education, and even occupation. 

Can I Link SmartZip Data with an Existing CRM?

Yes, this is possible, but there’s a good reason to consider using the SmartZip CRM, even if it means you’ll have two platforms active. 

When you get a SmartZip lead, you aren’t just getting the basic contact information you’d get from another lead source; you’re getting a highly populated lead profile with a ton of extra data. Most CRMs don’t have the capability to set up the high number of custom fields necessary to accommodate all this data, and moreover, are most likely not equipped to handle the sort of integration that SmartZip offers to get all the data in the right place. 

Long story short, the juice may not be worth the squeeze here, especially when the SmartZip backend CRM is so easy to use. 

Our suggestion is to use the SmartZip CRM for their leads, and if you’re using another CRM, once you make contact with a SmartZip lead and start a relationship with them, migrate the data you can use over to your primary CRM.

What Other Tools Does SmartZip Offer Real Estate Agents?

In addition to Smart Data, there are a few other tools real estate agents can add to SmartZip. These tools have an additional cost (again, determined by the median sale price and the number of homes in your market), but provide significant benefits for agents who want to take their use of Smart Data to the next level. These optional tools are:

Smart Targeting

This automated marketing solution takes Smart Data and builds marketing campaigns across multiple platforms to reach your targeted leads. The SmartZip-identified potential sellers will see marketing from you in the form of direct mail (postcards and letters), email marketing, and ads across social media and Google, driving traffic to lead converting branded landing pages.

Remember, the Smart Data includes a lead profile with things like social media accounts and contact information including phone numbers and email addresses, on top of mailing address data, so utilizing the Smart Targeting service takes all the guesswork out of assembling the marketing to reach your prospects.

Real estate agents are given the option to review every piece of marketing before it goes out too, so you can rest assured any message being sent will be in line with your branding and business model.

Reach 150

If you want to further augment the marketing value of Smart Targeting, Reach 150 is a unique and effective way to do it. With Reach 150, SmartZip uses an automated process of Smart Targeting to reach out to past clients, specifically those who haven’t given you a review. They’ll also send communication to current clients after their purchase or sale has closed to solicit a review.

Why go after reviews? So that they can take these reviews and plug them into the Smart Targeting system, using the positive feedback you receive from your clients to build additional ads to be served to your potential clients at just the right time, adding an element of social proof to your marketing.

This clever system is great for active real estate agents with a high-closing volume, but also works well for newer agents because you have a chance to pick and choose exactly the reviews you want to highlight on your personalized review website. Even if you only have a couple of reviews, the Smart Targeting tool can use them to build ads and send traffic to your lead converting landing pages.

Sphere

For successful real estate agents, upwards of 30% of your annual business comes from your sphere of influence. But, if you’re like most Close readers, the Contacts app on your phone is jammed with so many people it’s hard to know exactly who you should be reaching out to and which referral source you should be nurturing.

This is why SmartZip took their predictive analytics algorithm and applied it to your contact database. Just upload your contact list and SmartZip will identify which of the people you know are most likely to list their home for sale in the next year or so.

With this information, you can be a lot more strategic about who you reach out to with regular touches, prioritizing the most important relationships first.

SmartZip also offers other back-end tools like a basic customer relationship management (CRM) tool, but the functionality there is relatively basic. If you’re using Smart Targeting, much of the marketing automation connects back to this CRM, so it’s a required part of the ecosystem. But, SmartZip does easily integrate with just about every major CRM on the market, so you can still use a system you’re already familiar with.

SmartZip Drawbacks

We’ll be honest: We’re a big fan of this technology and the advantages it gives agents who can effectively employ it. But it’s not perfect.

For starters, SmartZip doesn’t offer exclusive leads. In other words, if another real estate agent in your market is also a SmartZip user, both of you are vying for the same property owners the algorithm has identified.

Secondly, as we mentioned before, SmartZip is pretty pricey, especially since they require a commitment of at least 12 months to get started. If you’re just getting started in the real estate business, you may not have an operating budget that would allow for this sort of annual expenditure.

Lastly, as a product of the way the SmartZip system works, the leads here take longer to nurture. Remember, you’re reaching out to homeowners and establishing relationships with them before they have even decided they want to put their home on the market, so the time it takes to convert them to listing clients is going to be greater. If your initial follow-up and sustained lead nurturing skills aren’t up to snuff, this is going to be a challenge.

Is SmartZip Right for You?

So, now you know the ins and outs of SmartZip. The question remains, “Is SmartZip right for you?”

Yes, if:

• You have a great follow-up and nurturing strategy that can take the leads you connect with and carry them the rest of the way down the funnel.
• You have vision and strategy for the long term. Remember, SmartZip isn’t an overnight success tool; you need to plan to keep sellers in the “lead” category for months or even years before they convert.
• You have the budget to invest even without early-stage returns.

No, if:

• You’re looking for quick win, one-off leads that are ready to convert to listings very quickly (if this is you, give Inbox Real Estate Leads a try).
• You’ve got a small (or non-existent) monthly budget for lead generation (if this is you, try a prospecting tool like REDX).
• Your business plan hasn’t been fully developed, making it difficult to commit to a long-term strategy (if this is you, check out our article on developing a real estate business plan).
• Your lead nurturing strategy is weak.

So…Is SmartZip the Future of Real Estate Prospecting?

There’s no doubt about it; predictive analytics are going to play an increasingly important role in real estate marketing in the months and years ahead. Real estate buyers and sellers have more choice today than they’ve ever had in terms of the number of agents looking to help buy or sell their home, plus options to conduct a FSBO transaction. Real estate agents who can create relationships with likely buyers and sellers early will definitely have an advantage.

Will SmartZip be the leader in this? It may be too early to say. But one thing is clear: The technology, strategy, and results that SmartZip is producing right now indicate that agents who bet on them now are likely to see big returns in the future.

More Resources

There are lots of players trying to be the dominant force in real estate predictive analytics, and while no platform is perfect, we think that SmartZip is getting closer. It’s definitely a more techy approach than most real estate prospecting strategies.

We expect predictive analytics to be more and more mainstream as a proven real estate lead generation idea in the next couple of years. Check out our list of underrated lead generation ideas if you need some more fresh ideas.

The post Is SmartZip the Future of Real Estate Prospecting? appeared first on The Close.

There are lots of lead generators out there; Real Geeks is more than that. It’s a self-contained strategy. In this article, we’re going to walk you through exactly what Real Geeks is, how it works, how much it costs, and ultimately reveal whether or not you should consider it for your real estate business.

Let’s get started!

What Does Real Geeks Actually Provide for Real Estate Agents?

While nobody has rolled out a true end-to-end solution for real estate professionals when it comes to managing your entire business, Real Geeks is getting close. Their suite of offerings includes high-converting, IDX-powered websites, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that integrates with their website to track lead activity, time-saving marketing tools, and lead generation strategies that will fill the top of your funnel.

Though there are a ton of different things that Real Geeks does for real estate agents, here are the five that, for our money, will have the biggest impact on your bottom line:

Check out the Real Geeks website to see their in-depth explainer videos about how the system all works together, or schedule a free demo.

Visit Real Geeks

Real Geeks Pricing

The price for Real Geeks starts at $299 per month for one or two users, plus $25 per month for each additional user. For this price, you get access to an IDX-enabled website, the Real Geeks CRM, and their vast library of how-to’s and strategy guides for effectively using their tools.

One of our favorite parts of the Real Geeks pricing model is the al a carte availability of extra services that you can add on as your business grows, allowing you to start small and add features as your real estate empire expands. Here’s a breakdown of those features and their costs:

Real Geeks Extended Pricing

Feature	Cost	Great For
Home Valuation Landing Pages	FREE w/ your base package purchase	Powering up your lead funnel and increasing your seller lead volume
Real Leads PPC & Facebook Marketing	$300 / month + ad spend	Real estate agents who want to integrate Google & Facebook Ads into their marketing strategy but don’t have the time to do it themselves

Curious about where Real Geeks stacks up against similar platforms? Check out the comparison table below:

Real Geeks’ Competitor Pricing Comparison

Platform	Users	Monthly Cost	Additional Cost per User	Setup	Commitment	Advertising
Real Geeks	1-2	$299 (some features are additional)	$25	$250	12 months	Additional
kvCORE	1-100	$499-$1,800	N/A	$900-$1,800	12 months	Additional
Chime	1-100	$299-$899	$15	Waived if prepaid	12 months	Additional
BoomTown	1-25	$1,000-$1,500	N/A	$750-$1,700	12 months	Additional

Going Deeper: A Closer Look at the Most Important Real Geeks Features

Now that you know the basics of what Real Geeks can do for you and how much it costs, let’s dig into the major features a little bit deeper. Here’s exactly what you need to know about our five favorite features of the Real Geeks platform and how they might help you close more deals.

Real Geeks IDX Websites: The Hub of Your Marketing Wheel

Your real estate website is the hub of your marketing wheel. This is where you direct traffic using other Real Geeks tools like Real Leads and the Facebook Marketing Platform, and ultimately, this is where that traffic turns into leads.

Real Geeks websites have all the features you’d expect, including a blogging tool, limited customization options, and lots of calls to action to convert your traffic into leads. Where Real Geeks stands out is their dynamic mapping functionality, the ability clients and prospects have to seamlessly transition from the desktop experience to a customized mobile app, and, of course, the direct link between the website and the CRM, transferring your leads’ activities straight into their contact profile, making meaningful conversations with them later easier.

For those of you who geek out (see what we did there?) over the details like we do, Real Geeks also offers really solid search engine optimization (SEO), A/B testing options for landing pages, an easy-to-use back-end interface, and a fully integrated IDX, not i-framed in. Not sure what all this means? Don’t stress. There’s a ton of resources on the Real Geeks website to get you in the loop on all your options.

The short version of the story is that the websites are set up for success from a client-facing perspective as well as behind the scenes.

Real Geeks CRM: Your Lead Nurturing Control Center

Your Real Geeks website is where your prospects, leads, and clients interact with the Real Geeks ecosystem, but the CRM is where you, as the agent, spend most of your time. Though the dashboard and interface aren’t anything fancy, the clean design and well-organized profiles are a breath of fresh air. We’ve test-driven a lot of CRMs; it’s easy to overwhelm a user with too much information in too little space. Thankfully, that’s not the case with Real Geeks.

You get standard CRM functionality here like custom email drip sequences, comprehensive lead profiles, and mass communication options. It also has a built-in SMS texting interface that allows you to communicate via text right from your desktop and schedule messages to go out whenever you want or as a part of drip sequences. The open and read rates for text messages can be as high as 98%, making this a powerful strategy, especially for the first contact with new leads from your website.

Speaking of websites, it bears repeating how powerful the linkage is between your Real Geeks website and the CRM. Not only do you have your leads’ website activity right in their CRM profile, but you can also use this information to schedule automated communication flows based on how often website visitors are viewing particular properties, saving searches, or favoriting homes for sale.

Real Geeks Property Valuation Lead Magnet: The Ultimate Conversation Starter

There’s a basic formula in real estate lead generation that just about every strategy uses: Entice leads with something of value, and before actually delivering it to them, require their contact information. When it comes to potential homesellers, there isn’t much they want more than an estimate of the value of their home. This is why, despite being relatively maligned by real estate agents everywhere, the Zestimate remains such a popular feature.

Real Geeks delivers on this desire with their customizable, unlimited home valuation landing pages, offering would-be homesellers an estimate on their home’s value and giving you the lead information you need to start a conversation.

You might be asking yourself, “Why would I need more than one home valuation landing page?”

Well, if you’ve read our article on real estate farming, you know that the more targeted your media and marketing is, the more effective it is. With unlimited options for landing pages, Real Geeks users can create a home valuation landing page for every major area of their market, allowing the ads they create using a Real Geeks service or their own strategy to be more targeted and therefore get higher click-through rates.

Real Geeks Real Leads: Harnessing the Power of Google for Lead Generation

What’s the most powerful website on the internet? No, it’s not Zillow, and no, it’s not your professional website (at least not yet). The most powerful website on the internet is Google; most people use this platform multiple times a day to search for what they need most. Real Geeks’ Real Leads platform lets you harness the power of this search engine and ad platform to show up in relevant search results every time one of your prospects is looking for real estate information.

A lot of real estate agents complain that they don’t have the time to learn Google Ads, and even those who do report the platform confusing and difficult to use, which is why for $574 a month plus your ad budget, the marketing experts at Real Geeks will manage your Google PPC campaigns for you. All you need to do is provide them with the information on who you want to target with the ads, where you want to send them (one of the home valuation landing pages or your website is usually a great start!), then you sit back and rake in the both buyer and seller leads.

We get it—$574 a month seems like a lot to spend on anything other than maybe a mortgage or a car loan, especially if you have to supply the ad budget on top of the monthly fee, but hear us out. A single listing that comes your way as a result of your PPC ads that sells for $200,000 (assuming a 3% commission) will get you a gross commission income (GCI) bump of $6,000. Just about any real estate agent in the country would happily agree to exchange $1,000 for $6,000, so, all you need is a single conversion per month to make this strategy wildly worthwhile.

PPC marketing shouldn’t be your only lead source; Real Leads should fit into your overall strategy for filling your lead funnel. For real estate agents who are looking to up their lead volume and diversify their lead sources, this is a great place to start.

Real Geeks Facebook Marketing Solutions: Turning Real Estate Agents Into Master Social Marketers

Successful social media marketing has two sides: organic and paid.

Examples of organic marketing include creating posts for your business page, going live at open houses and for property walk-throughs, and creating Facebook Groups for neighborhoods and communities.

Paid Facebook marketing is all about creating ads that will extend your reach beyond those who follow you organically and introduce your message to potential new clients. Facebook’s ad platform offers a lot of options for creating custom audiences, ad types, and delivery options. So many options, in fact, that many real estate agents find it overwhelming and difficult to use.

This is why the Real Geeks Facebook Marketing Tools are so helpful. Their self-serve platform streamlines and simplifies the ad creation learning curve, saving you up to 75% of the time you would be spending otherwise. If you want to get all the benefits of Facebook Ads but do none of the work, Real Geeks offers a concierge service similar to the sort of attention you get through their Real Leads platform that will do all the heavy lifting for you.

When leads come in from your Facebook Ads, they’re automatically populated into your CRM, allowing you to create communication drips so that contact is immediate and they’re directed down the lead funnel without you having to make a single click. Again, just like Google PPC ads, these should be a component of your lead generation strategy, not the whole kit and caboodle, but for agents looking to level up their game and become top producers in their market, diversifying their lead funnel with Facebook Ads is a must.

Where Does Real Geeks Come Up Short?

Real Geeks has a lot to offer, and we’ll be honest, we’re fans of their tools and all the ways they work together to create an overall strategy for real estate agents, but Real Geeks isn’t perfect. Here are some of the things we found left us wanting a little more.

Website Customization

Though there are some customization options, the Real Geeks websites are highly templated and there isn’t a lot you can do to create a customized experience for your visitors. For most agents, this isn’t a problem as long as the website is converting visitors into leads. But for real estate agents who have a very strong brand image and are looking for a specific aesthetic, layout, and design, you may run into some problems.

It’s worth mentioning here that most real estate websites struggle with this problem; this isn’t a unique issue for Real Geeks, so don’t discount this platform just because of this. If you feel like you need more customization options, make sure to check out our article on the six best real estate website builders of 2022.

Content Marketing Opportunities

Real Geeks’ websites have built-in blog sections, but the content management system, blogging resources, and strategies for content marketing are limited at best. For many agents, this isn’t a problem, but if you plan on leveling up your Google (and community) authority with an active blog to demonstrate your expertise in the real estate business, you’re not going to get many bells and whistles here.

For ardent content marketers, you’re probably going to be better off going completely custom; a WordPress site or even a site like Squarespace can provide you with the tools you need to get your content front and center.

Limited Agent Options on the Mobile App

Real Geeks offers a customized mobile app for agents to give to their customers and leads. Once logged into the app, the customer’s or lead’s experience is synced with their desktop website activity, importing their saved searches and favorited homes, now on a native mobile experience. This app is helpful, especially for clients who live in metropolitan areas where they may be frequently walking by real estate they want information on immediately.

However, the agent-facing mobile app—the one used to manage your CRM—is a little frustrating in its (lack of) capabilities, most notably the inability to respond to SMS messages in-app. Sure, you can switch over to the texting functionality of your phone for this, but not being able to respond in-app with a customer profile up in front of you is challenging.

Our Managing Editor, Emile L’Eplattenier, put together a list of the 29 Best Real Estate Apps for 2022. If you’re on the hunt for ways to improve your mobile real estate game, that’s a great place to start.

So… Is Real Geeks Worth It?

In short, yes. Real Geeks provides a comprehensive lead generation, website, and CRM strategy for real estate agents looking to break into the business, level up their game, or cement themselves as a top producer. There’s a decent monthly investment required in order to get the most out of Real Geeks, but agents who buy in will be rewarded with consistent positive return on investment (ROI).

That being said, Real Geeks isn’t a magic bullet. In order to get your money’s worth (and then some), you have to follow up relentlessly with your leads, stay top of mind with your current sphere of influence, and be proactive about expanding your reach beyond your organic following. Many agents who wind up frustrated with Real Geeks are so because their follow-up and lead nurturing game isn’t strong enough.

What Are Some Real Geeks Alternatives?

Real Geeks is far from the only provider of lead generation, website, and real estate CRM services. We suggest checking out our buyer’s guide for the Top 6 Real Estate Lead Generation Companies of 2022 as the best place to get started.

Where Can I Get Other Lead Generation Ideas to Use With Real Geeks?

Start by visiting our article, 37 Underrated Real Estate Lead Generation Ideas for 2022. Here, you’re going to get a fantastic overview of a ton of different ideas for real estate lead generation, including some great strategies to use on Real Geeks. After that, visit the popular How to Create a Real Estate Lead Generation Plan (+ Template) from real estate veteran Sean Moudry.

Your Turn

Have you used real estate lead generation platforms like Real Geeks before? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below, and if you’re sold on the platform, visit Real Geeks today to dig in.

Visit Real Geeks

The post Real Geeks Review: An In-depth Look at Pricing & Features appeared first on The Close.

Combining the state-of-industry IDX websites from Boston Logic, a rock solid and highly customizable Salesforce-based CRM, marketing tools, lead gen tools, and transaction management we think Propertybase is the new elephant in the room for real estate tech companies.

If you’re looking for a new CRM or an entire lead-to-close platform for an entire brokerage, then read our Propertybase review to hear what happened when we decided to kick the tires a bit.

Propertybase Pricing

Propertybase Salesforce Edition is ideal for larger teams and brokerages starting at $79/user per month with a minimum of 10 users. The additional IDX integrated website is an additional $299/month. You can also inquire about Propertybase GO—ideal for teams and brokerages of all sizes.

For the CRM this might be a little on the high end, but considering the features and quality of the platform we think it’s well worth the money.

For the entire platform CRM+IDX website, this is around the same price that competitors charge, that may or may not match Propertybase feature for feature.

The New Heart of Your Real Estate Business? A Closer Look at Propertybase’s CRM.

While it seems like everyone and their cousin is making a CRM these days, not all CRMs are created equal. Sure, you can get a CRM like Hubspot or Insightly that won’t cost you a dime, but at the end of the day you and your agents will find yourselves doing things the old fashioned way most of the time.

For example, will that free CRM talk to your MLS? Will it work with Zillow or BoldLeads without a liberal application of digital duct tape like Zapier? Can you build out pipelines and custom reporting? Will that effort have an ROI? Will it scale with your business as it grows?

If you’re going to take the time and effort to integrate technology into your business, you need a solid platform that can grow with you. Built on the industry standard Salesforce platform, Propertybase can do that and more.

Propertybase CRM Basic Features

One of the problems with choosing a great real estate CRM is that you sometimes don’t know what features you want until you start using them. That said, there are baseline features that every sales professional in real estate wants a CRM to do.

As you might imagine, Propertybase knocks the basic CRM features out of the park. Leads can be sent into Propertybase from pretty much anywhere, and can be segmented, set up on drip campaigns, and endlessly sliced and diced to match people with properties quickly and easily.

You can also create custom pipelines to track each stage of your deal from inquiry to nurture to close, and pull sophisticated reports to track your progress.

MLS Integration

Considering that Realtors’ primary role is to match people to properties, it boggles my mind that so few real estate CRMs manage to integrate MLS into their products. Instead, they expect their users to bounce back and forth between open tabs and copy/paste until their fingers get numb.

Sure, this isn’t really that big of a deal, but think of just how much time you spend juggling between your CRM and your MLS today. Most of you probably immediately tallied up a half hour or so, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case. Now, think about team leaders and broker owners. They need to multiply that haf hour by five, ten, or fifty. Suddenly, the money “saved” with a bargain basement CRM starts to evaporate. Quickly.

Propertybase allows you to manage MLS listings, search for and curate listings to add to drip campaigns, and more. Your agents might even start to abandon the MLS altogether.

Marketing Automation

While pretty much every CRM has marketing tools that can be automated, the vast majority of them seem to miss the mark. After all, a big part of matching people to properties is marketing those properties along with your brand. Here again MLS integration saves the day.

Bulk Email & Drip Campaigns

Want to automatically pull together a listing alert to send out to one lead or groups of leads? Well, instead of flipping back and forth between tabs, with Propertybase you can set these up automatically using any criteria your MLS allows. That means your leads will get basically custom listing updates without you lifting a finger.

Texting & Print Marketing

Since Realtors spend so much time texting back and forth with leads these days, having texting features in your CRM is a no brainer. While it doesn’t come as a standard feature for the CRM, Propertybase does offer texting that can be seamlessly integrated into your workflow for listing alerts, drip campaigns, etc.

You can even quickly design and send out flyers, letters, or other print materials right from the CRM. Once again, since you have MLS integration, you can automatically pull in listings instead of wearing out the control C and control V keys on your keyboard.

Reporting & Scalability for Teams & Brokerages

If you or anyone on your team is a numbers wonk, then you’ll find a lot to love in Propertybase. They seem to offer a widget, graph, or dial to display and compare pretty much any metric you or your team leader might want to see.

You can compare leads by source, total sales, response rates, conversion rates, and agent productivity at a glance. Even better, since Propertybase is on the Salesforce platform, you can set up your reporting and analytics dashboards to report on whatever it is you find important.

As far as scalability goes, Propertybase’s CRM is one you can use for the long haul. It comes standard with team features like listing management, lead assignment, and more. Combined with the IDX website and maybe a transaction management platform like their own Backagent or Dotloop, you can happily run a team or any size brokerage.

Ease of Use & UX Design

Like most CRMs on the market today, Propertybase is pretty easy to use once you get some guidance or spend some time poking around. Of course, since they offer so much to customize and an almost endless number of integrations from Salesforce, it’s also easy to fall down a rabbit hole. If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you’re going to need onboarding.

As far as UX design goes, Propertybase is a nice place to spend time and a joy to use. The layout is clean, friendly, and intuitive, and response rates are as snappy as you’d expect from enterprise quality software.

By the way, if aesthetics aren’t near the top of your CRM wishlist you might want to reconsider. First, think of the hours and hours per day you and your agents are going to spend staring at your CRM. Do you want to spend hours in an ugly, unprofessional looking workspace?

Lead Generation

With their recent acquisition of BoldLeads, Propertybase can now offer powerful purpose-built lead generation software to their already strong toolkit. They can generate buyer leads and seller leads with the added benefit of exclusivity. They’ve also seamlessly integrated BoldLeads into their system so no need to worry if your CRM has a BoldLeads integration.

Propertybase’s IDX Websites: Pretty, SEO Friendly, and Optimized for Lead Capture

Next, let’s take a look at the place where most all-in-one platforms let Realtors down. The IDX websites. Yes, they all technically have MLS listings and a place to hang your digital shingle, but like CRMs, not all websites are created equally.

Aesthetics

The biggest problem with most all-in-one platform IDX websites is that most of them look like what they are. An off the shelf solution they “customized”. Propertybase’s websites on the other hand look bespoke.

They offer excellent layout and typography, as well as the bells and whistles customers expect from high-end brands like parallax scrolling, video hero images, and professional looking lead capture.

SEO Friendliness

Yet another area where these packages fall short is SEO. Many Realtors think they’re going to rank on Google just for having a website. These days this couldn’t be further from the truth. It can take years of hard work to rank on Google at all, and if you don’t have the right strategy the chances of capturing leads from Google is pretty much zero.

Propertybase solves this by having great widgets and pages that can be customized with content and auto populated listing to laser target micro neighborhoods, types of homes, or even just sought after blocks or subdivisions. It can also generate custom market reports for the site or to send out to leads on a drip.

While ranking on Google will still take a lot of planning, time, and effort, the tools Propertybase offers give agents, teams, and brokerages a nice head start.

Lead Capture: Contact Forms, Pop-Ups, Landing Pages, & More

The days of using your website as a static brochure for your business are long gone. These days, if your website isn’t set up to capture leads you may as well not even bother. Propertybase websites offer lots of ways to capture leads.

You can set up landing pages for social media ads, home valuation, or pretty much anything you want. There are also lead capture forms that can be dropped into any page and feature any agent on your team.

Finally, you can set pop-ups to trigger when your visitors search for a certain length of time, or whenever you think they’ll be most likely to enter their contact info.

Live Example Websites

Want to see what a few good Propertybase websites look like in the wild? Check out these examples below.

• https://www.oceansir.com/
• https://www.flavinrealty.com/
• https://www.pinkrealty.com/
• https://www.coloradogrouprealty.com/
• https://www.nantucketrealtyadvisors.com/

Propertybase: The 30,000 Foot View

As a relatively new all-in-one platform Propertybase will tick pretty much every box that today’s Realtors, teams, and brokerages have. It combines a rock solid Salesforce-based CRM with MLS integration, and killer IDX websites that work together seamlessly. Throw in an available transaction management platform and you may not need to buy any more software ever.

The post Propertybase Review: The (Old) New Kids on The Block Get Serious appeared first on The Close.

Leads.

Your lead gen platform can have everything from mass texting to a built in coffee maker, but if you’re not delivering agents well qualified, top of the funnel leads at a good price then what’s the point?

What is Ylopo Exactly?

Ylopo is a marketing platform built for one purpose and one purpose only. To deliver agents well qualified buyer and seller leads who are just starting their hunt.

Since NAR statistics show that the vast majority of sellers only interview one agent, making contact before other agents do can mean more signed listings. On the buy side, it gives you the chance to build rapport with buyers before Zillow becomes their new obsession.

As Ylopo told us:

“Effective lead generation is not about who you’re acquiring, but when you’re acquiring them.”

Makes sense right? Imagine getting a call back from a $10 million seller lead but they texted you a day before they closed with 5 other offers on the table… What kind of ROI do you think you’ll get from that lead?

That Sounds Pretty Great, How do They do it?

We’ll get into the weeds on this a bit more below, but the elevator pitch is that Ylopo uses advanced industry leading techniques like targeting leads with demographics and psychographics, and integrating MLS feeds with dynamic Facebook ads to name a few.

They then give agents a custom lightning fast IDX website that is designed to be a sleeker, more user friendly version of Zillow.

Once they’re on your site, you can then track which homes they look at and when, how long they look at them, which homes they saved, and every time they log in to look. Having this kind of data is almost like being psychic. It means you can touch your lead at exactly the right time, with exactly the right message, every time…

On top of all that, they also offer a way for you to warm up all those dusty cold leads in your CRM. They do this by something called retargeting, which essentially means tracking someone online and exposing them to laser targeted messages on Facebook.

How Much Does Ylopo Cost?

The monthly cost for Ylopo depends on whether or not you want just the websites and lead nurturing backend, or if you want Ylopo to manage all your lead generation for you. Ylopo breaks this down into two pricing tiers, Without Leads, and With Leads.

Here’s a basic breakdown of Ylopo’s pricing:

Without Leads: (includes ad tech, IDX Website, Branded Site, auto texting, & Facebook Remarketing)	With Leads: (Everything in first tier + Ylopo manages your digital marketing)
$295 per month	$495 per month + Ad spend & Remarketing spend (varies by zip code)
+$1,000 onboarding fee	+$1,000 onboarding fee

Note that the fees for the With Leads package can vary depending on the zip code and the average price of the homes you’re targeting.

They have a helpful calculator on their site in order to get an idea of pricing for your area. To see what a typical spend might be, we plugged Kansas City in as our farm area, targeting homes in the $200,000—$350,000 range.

Ylopo’s calculator came back with a very attractive price of $6—$8 per new lead, based on generating 38-50 leads per month. It also included pricing for Facebook remarketing, as well as marketing to our sphere. Here’s a quick breakdown of those costs:

Budget for Generating New Leads	$300
Budget for Nurturing Your Database (Remarketing)	$75
Budget for effectively marketing your sphere	$75
Budget for Generating New Leads	$300
Ylopo management fee	$495
Monthly total	$945

This pricing, especially when broken down to cost per lead, is comparable to or more affordable than many lead services on the market. When you add in remarketing for both website visitors and your sphere, then it becomes even more attractive.

Okay, now that we’ve gone over the basics and pricing, let’s kick the tires a bit and see what you’re really getting for your money.

We’ll start with the IDX and branded websites.

IDX Home Search Websites Designed for Ease of Use & Conversion

The IDX custom IDX websites that Ylopo builds for agents are lightning fast, easy to use, and optimized for conversion and tracking leads. Let’s go over each of these quickly and see why they’re crucial to lead generation.

Speed

According to data from Google, a whopping 53% of users will abandon your site forever if it takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s right. Three seconds.

This is why building out a WordPress site and overloading it with clunky code, dozens of plugins, and fancy pants javascript sliders, can actually lose you a ton of potential business.

People coming to your site, especially from a Facebook ad, are extremely fickle. Sure, they might want what you’re offering, but the trust just isn’t there yet. This is what a fast loading site is so crucial for generating leads.

Ease of Use

Have you actually tried to search for a home in Zillow recently? It’s a bloated, convoluted mess. Pages take forever to load, the map is wonky, and you have to drill down into many menus in order to do anything. Worse, sometimes there is information missing from the MLS. ‘’

Ylopo’s sites are intuitively laid out and dead easy to use. There are no bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles. Instead, you get a minimal site with lots of gorgeous pictures a granular way to search the MLS.

Tracking Leads on Your Ylopo Site

After their integration of big data and cutting edge ad strategies, the most innovative feature Ylopo offers is the ability to track leads on your IDX website.

It’s one thing to know when people are on your website, but quite another to know that they just spent 15 minutes flipping between two properties, or that this is the 5th time in the last two days they looked at 123 Main Street.

Ylopo lets you do just that. If a hot lead is lingering on a hot listing… well, let’s just say you don’t have to be Barbara Corcoran to figure out what to do next.

Branded Websites

In addition to their IDX websites, Ylopo also offers sleek, lightning fast branded websites that make perfect homepages for Realtors. For an example of a Ylopo branded websites, check out Barry Jenkins’ site here.

Mission Control

One unique feature that Ylopo offers is their Mission Control page. The Mission Control page offers you a quick overview of how each of your ads are performing in granular detail. While this may seem like a no brainer, you might be shocked to learn that most digital advertising companies don’t do this. Instead, they just send you leads and you’re left guessing how or why they did what they did to get them.

Amazingly, Ylopo i so confident in their tech and marketing strategies that they actually show you everything they’re doing to promote your business online. Using the dashboard you can even decide if you want to participate or not.

Some agents (wisely) allow the experts to do their thing while they focus on showings and listing presentations. However, some agents are a little nosier, and may want to get their hands dirty. While Ylopo allows you to adjust many of their settings, this is bit like making decisions for your mechanic about which parts your car needs and the best tools to install them.

As you might imagine, Ylopo generally encourages agents to let them handle most of the work, but they still value your insight into the process. After all, you know the ins and outs of your market better than most marketers would.

Industry Leading Facebook Advertising

When agents first dip their toes into Facebook advertising, they invariably say the same thing after a week or so. Facebook’s advertising platform is complicated.

Actually we have first hand experience of this. While setting up and running simple ads may be easy, generating great leads for a reasonable price is not. Far from it actually.

There are just so many variables, features, and strategies that Facebook offers that running and optimizing (targeting them to more specific people and tailoring your message) them can be, and actually often is a full time job.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Even Firepoint, who makes a highly advanced team CRM with drop dead gorgeous IDX websites, outsources their Facebook lead generation to Ylopo. They’re just that good at it….

Combining Big Data, Years of Strategic Experience, and Dynamic Real Estate Ads = Great Leads

The reason that Ylopo is so effective at generating leads using Facebook ads is that they have come up with a winning formula both to target leads and make sure they click through to your site. No easy feat.

By partnering with big data companies, Ylopo is able to access demographic information generally not available to the public in order to really, really, laser target your audience. As anyone who has ever tried PPC advertising knows, this is a crucial first step.

Your MLS Feeds Right Into Your Dynamic Facebook Ads

Ylopo’s technology also allows them to automatically parse data from your MLS and match it to that of your target leads. For example, Ylopo can sort out the properties suitable for horses from your MLS and only show those properties when showing ads to Facebook users who have expressed interest in horse properties specifically.

By now you’re probably wondering if their system updates ads from the MLS automatically. The answer of course is yes. For example, that means that no sold properties end up in front of your leads on Facebook. It will also update price changes as well.

Remarketing: Advanced & Automated Lead Nurturing

Perhaps the most innovative and useful solution that Ylopo offers is called retargeting. Once again, the concept is simple, but the proper implementation can be extremely difficult.

Here’s how it works. After someone visits your website, or you have their contact information, Ylopo can install a tiny piece of code on their browsers which tracks them online and shows them highly targeted ads.

This is not only a great way to nurture newer leads, but is absolutely perfect for breathing life back into the old, stale leads clogging up your CRM.

While we could offer much more detail here, from our experience, most readers tune out once we start getting too nerdy so we’ll leave the nitty gritty tech details for another day.

Or, if you have a few minutes, here’s Ylopo Co Founder Juefeng Ge going a little bit more granular on how Ylopo manages to get such amazing leads on Facebook.

How Ylopo Generates & Nurtures Leads from Ylopo on Vimeo.

Remarketing to Your Sphere: Breathe Life into Cold Leads Without Picking up Your Phone

In addition to using Facebook remarketing for your website visitors, Ylopo can also use the same advanced targeting and demographic info to remarket to dead leads in your sphere. This is perfect for leads that have been tuning out your drip emails.

Drawbacks & Compromises

The only thing that’s really missing from Ylopo’s platform is a CRM. For some new Realtors, this may be seen as a drawback, but in reality, like every real estate software decision, it’s more of a compromise, and generally speaking, one that works in your favor. Here’s why:

You don’t have to give up the CRM you’re already using

This is a big one. Most agents who have been working in the industry for more than a year or so already have a CRM they’re comfortable using. I fact, many agents might be locked into a 6 month or year long contract with their CRM provider.

So that means either abandoning their current CRM and starting over with a brand new one, or simply not using the included CRM in other lead generation platforms. The only problem of course is that the cost of that CRM is baked into the price of your lead generation platform… Why pay for something you might not even use?

You Can Experiment With New CRMs & Still Keep Generating Leads With Ylopo

Even better, instead of feeling stuck using a new CRM you’re paying for anyway, if you use Ylopo you can experiment with dozens of CRMs until you find the one that’s perfect for you. While you’re trying out CRM’s you’re still going to be generating and nurturing leads with Ylopo.

Need a Great Real Estate CRM to Use With Ylopo?

If you’re looking for a new CRM to try out, check out our in-depth reviews of Firepoint, Wise Agent, LionDesk, and Follow Up Boss.

Over to You

Have you used Ylopo or other real estate marketing or lead generation platforms? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

The post Ylopo Brings Big Data & Social Ad Mastery to Lead Generation appeared first on The Close.