Elevate is a real estate customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing platform designed as an ecosystem through which Realtors can coordinate, customize, and streamline their marketing, resulting in more clients, better conversion rates, and ultimately, more transactions. It’s a big promise. But, can they deliver?
In this review, we’ll break down what Elevate offers real estate agents, how much it costs, show you around the platform in a detailed video walk-through, and ultimately decide whether or not Elevate gets The Close recommendation.
What Makes Elevate Different From Every Other Real Estate CRM?
First off, Elevate isn’t just a CRM. Most competitors in this space focus primarily on their CRM dashboard and the management of existing contacts as their bread and butter. But not Elevate. Elevate’s approach considers their CRM to be only a component of their overall system—a system that includes:
- An IDX-enabled website
- A content creation service for your blog
- A social media management and content creation service
- Paid lead generation optimized for buyer leads, seller leads, or both
Does this more holistic approach actually work? That’s what we’re going to find out. We recently spoke with Elevate’s Senior VP of Elm Street at Inman Connect about the company’s comprehensive approach and desire to be true tech partner to those in our industry.
She predicts that providing a full suite of solutions to meet Realtors’ needs is the way forward for real estate tech companies like hers. Check it out!
How Much Does Elevate Cost?
Because Elevate has a lot of different approaches to marketing and managing your real estate business, they offer a number of different packages (at different price points) for agents at all stages in their marketing journey.
To learn more about each of these components, read on for our analysis and review of each Elevate offering.
Elevate charges a one-time onboarding fee of approximately $500 in order to get you set up with your MLS, your website, plugged into all the Elevate systems, and ensure all your integrations are functioning properly.
Elevate Packages + Prices (as of November 2021)
| Elevate Package | ||
|---|---|---|
| Social Pro | ||
| DMS | ||
| DMS + Buyer Leads | ||
| Elite Leads | ||
| Elite Pro |
*CRM access is limited to basic functionality and does not include automated email marketing.
Breaking Down the Elevate Package Components
Elevate offers an integrated platform of products to market you and your listings, and level up your real estate business. We’ll share details on each of the major components and our thoughts about them.
Real Estate CRM
Elevate’s straightforward real estate CRM links directly to your Elevate IDX website (and other marketing efforts). It helps you manage your new opportunities and nurture those already in your sphere of influence. Elevate’s CRM offers a reasonable amount of features for the price.
Real Estate CRM Features
- Email and SMS text marketing
- Decent automation options
- Available voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) service for a dedicated real estate marketing phone number
- IDX integration for easy market search
The Close Grade: B
As a standalone product, Elevate’s CRM isn’t going to turn too many heads. Don’t get us wrong—it’s functional and serves its purpose well within the overall ecosystem of the Elevate suite, but it doesn’t offer some of the more advanced features offered by CRM-forward products like Propertybase or LionDesk.
It’s important to note that the Elevate CRM has limited functionality on the Elevate Social Pro plan, so if that is a plan you’re considering, you won’t get full use of the CRM.
LionDesk CRM Review: Is It the New King of the Real Estate CRM Jungle?
CMA Wizard
Elevate’s Comparative Market Analysis (or CMA Tool) is built directly into your CRM. It’s where agents and brokers can quickly and easily create attractive, templated CMAs for prospects and clients. Since this tool has an IDX integration, updating your CMAs as new comps become on the market is a breeze.
CMA Wizard Features
- All-digital CMAs are created, edited, and shared with clients straight from your CRM
- IDX integration, making real-time updating easy
- All CMAs are saved in a searchable database for easy reference later
The Close Grade: A-
CMAs are a major time-suck for a lot of Realtors. Elevate’s CMA Tool streamlines the process for you. We could easily see someone who is running a real estate farming campaign using it to create multiple CMAs for entire neighborhoods and integrating them into email marketing campaigns.
The reason this platform didn’t get a perfect score from us was that it lacked some customization that would be nice if you have specific factors that affect value in your market, but not a deal-breaker by any means.
How to Do a Comparative Market Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide
Performance Tracking
Elevate offers limited analytics, a feature they call “Performance Tracking,” focused on gross commission income (GCI) tracking. Analytics are available in other tools on their platform (like their website, paid lead generation tools, and more). However, to access the data, you’ll need to gain access to these tools. If you are a broker using Elevate’s BOSS option, there are some individual agent performance metrics available too.
Performance Tracking Features
- Basic tracking that monitors total sales volume, average sale price, and number of units sold
- Some brokerage-level tracking available in the BOSS package
The Close Grade: C
This Elevate feature doesn’t wow us. Don’t get us wrong—we’re happy to have access to any data that helps measure performance. However, Elevate’s lack of a dashboard seems like a swing and a miss. Adding easy access to analytics from our lead nurturing, social media, and paid lead gen in one place would, dare we say it, elevate this product.
MLS-connected Real Estate Website
Elevate websites are an important part of their marketing ecosystem. They offer all the bells and whistles of their major competitors, plus some handy bonus features. Here are some of our favorites:
MLS-connected Real Estate Website Features
- Native IDX integration—making property search, saving, and automated updates easy for your prospects
- A direct connection with your CRM so that a prospect’s lead profile is updated with their website activity, including homes they view, articles they read, and more
- Attractive, well-designed
- Extremely customizable with an easy to use back-end management system
The Close Grade: A
The Elevate website experience is a really good one. We were very impressed with how attractive the websites are, how easily they can be managed (even by someone who is not very tech-savvy), and how integrated they are with other parts of the Elevate platform.
If this website were available without all the other Elevate tools, it would likely make the cut for our annual Best Real Estate Websites buyer’s guide.
The 6 Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2022
Paid Lead Generation
When you’re ready to boost your reach beyond your organic website traffic and your personal following on social media, paid lead generation is the way to go. Elevate offers an easy (and honestly, pretty inexpensive) way to do this, offering pay-per-click ads on Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Bing.
Paid Lead Generation Features
- Similar to the BoldLeads “ad agency approach,” these are exclusive leads that convert on your website, automatically adding to your CRM
- A guaranteed number of leads per month, based on which Elevate package you choose
- The ability to choose between buyer and seller leads
The Close Grade: TBD
The paid lead generation options from Elevate sound amazing. They are well-priced for what you get, the Elevate strategy fits really nicely into an overall marketing approach and business plan. However, we can’t give this a grade yet because, at this point, we haven’t actually seen the system generate real leads. We will continue to monitor this, and when we have better data, we’ll update this section.
Content Marketing Service
The fastest way to establish yourself as an expert in your market is through consistent, high-quality content marketing. Filling your website’s blog with content that’s chock-full of value for your readers gives them more reasons to reach out and start conversations.
The problem is, who has time to write all that blog content? Elevate eliminates this concern by doing it for you.
Content Marketing Service Features
- Original content written by Elevate’s in-house experts
- Market-specific, data-driven content perfect for including in marketing like mailers or email newsletters
- Automatically uploaded and optimized on your Elevate website
The Close Grade: B+
We’ll be totally honest, we were skeptical about this Elevate feature when we first heard about it. Content marketing is difficult to do if your content is being created by someone who isn’t familiar with the specifics of your local market, niche, and client base.
However, the Elevate system produces some interesting, shareable content that will do the job for most agents. Their hyper-local market update content is pretty basic, but for most readers, it absolutely provides value.
Is it perfect? No. Do we expect a centralized content producer to be perfect for agents all over the country? No. Elevate exceeded our expectations on this, though.
Social Media Marketing Service
In today’s day and age, potential real estate buyers and sellers use social media as a form of street cred, helping to verify who you are and what you do. An active social media presence demonstrates to your prospects that you engaged in conversations on topics that matter to them.
Like blog content, well-curated social media content is challenging and time-consuming, which is why all Elevate packages include done-for-you social media.
Social Media Marketing Service Features
- Robust, daily, weekly, and monthly content calendars that are full of attractive, thoughtful posts
- Regular content for both Facebook and Instagram
- Property marketing posts will shout out new listings, price improvements, open houses, and more
The Close Grade: B
The Elevate Social Media Marketing feature has all the hallmarks of a blockbuster, shout-it-from the rooftops tool. Many of the agents we speak to regularly call out social media as the number one marketing effort they want to get better at or outsource.
Elevate offers attractive posts and great content themes—plus, they make it really easy on agents. This is practically a hands-off application.
The problem we’re finding is engagement. In the list of accounts provided to us by Elevate to see this tool in action, 90+% of the posts had little to no engagement on them. No likes, no comments, no shares. No matter how much we like this aspect of Elevate, we can’t give this product an “A” if there’s no evidence that people are actually engaging with it.
Video Walk-through: A Day in the Life of an Elevate Agent
Because we know The Close readers want to actually see what life is like as a user of the products we reviewed, we convinced Elevate to give us a completely unlocked version of their platform to try out for ourselves. Here’s what we found.
Bottom Line: Does The Close Recommend Elevate?
Yes. Elevate’s value relative to its cost is very compelling. A lot of real estate agents could benefit from this platform’s unique blog and social media content creation and management tools.
But, there’s a catch: Elevate is only going to be successful if you consider their tools and content to be the starting point for your marketing efforts. Their social media content will mean nothing if you aren’t engaging others in conversation around it. Their lead generation will be useless if you don’t have a solid plan for client nurturing and follow-up.
That being said, if you have the strategies in place to take advantage of the opportunities Elevate offers, this is absolutely a tool that realtors should consider.
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