#179 Mail Right Show: What Are the Leading Online Real Estate Online Marketing Solutions in 2019

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In this final show of series of three episodes we discuss what we feel are five of the best and leading real estate CRMs on the market at the present moment.

We don’t pull any punches in this episode where we finished of from last weeks episode where we review what we feel are the real leading real estate online marketing platforms on the market at the present moment and the one you should look at at the beginning of 2019.

#BoomTown
#RealEstateWebmsters
#BoldLeads
#RealGeeks
#Inboundrem

Jonathon: Welcome back folks to the Mail Right show. This is episode 179. I’m still a little bit ill folks. I’ve got a lingering after effects of my cold. Robert has been working like a demon and sounds like he hardly had any sleep. This should be interesting an episode. We’re going to finish off our discussion about CRM. Last week’s was a little bit negative, but we’re going to finish off on a high note. Because we realized we really didn’t tell you enough detail about the 3-4 CRM`s, that are specifically aimed at real estate agents. That we highly do recommend and think have some usage for you. So Robert, for our new listeners and viewers would you like to quickly introduce yourself?

Robert: Yeah, I would love to. So my name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of a company called the Inbound Real Estate Marketing and a website called inboundrem. I’m going to add some stuff to what John says, which I often times do. And he just loves the tickles pink. I’m going to say that we spend a lot of time on a list of five serums that we came up with, kind of arbitrarily. KV Core, Playster, Agent Fire, Curator and Easy Agent Pro.

And if you didn’t check out our previous episodes as we’re talking about those website CRM combinations, you should. As it turned out though, none of them were really strong on hey, go out and use this service kind of list. So John, this morning, wisely and infinitely smartly said, hey, why don’t we talk about? I’m like, we’re done with CRMs. Why are we going to do CRM`s again? And he’s like, well, we didn’t really actually tell anybody what they should use and he was right. So today we’re going to cover a few CRM should that we do think that you should use. And we’re going to try to illustrate the reasons that we think that you should use them. Even though it’s a little hard to do over the.

Jonathon: Audio.

Robert: Yeah. Audio. Thank you sir. That’s the hours of less sleep talking. Guys, I want to inform you so you can be as excited as I am. That John’s very next stop this morning, is the doctor’s office. So this.

Jonathon: I am going to get my legal drugs folks.

Robert: Yeah, this is a determined man. He is limping onto the field of play.

Jonathon: Nothing will stop us from our listeners and viewers Robert.

Robert: And he’s proceeding through anyway at the God awful time at 9:00 in the morning on a Tuesday. So hopefully we give you guys a once in a lifetime. Never to be forgotten. Show filled with information that you just couldn’t live without. Was that a good preamble, John?

Jonathon: It was. This is going to be a part 3. This is going to be our finishing off episode of this. I thought it`s a really good time of the year to really delve deep in CRM`s. Also part one; we really outlined what a CRM was. Why it was important. And we mentioned a few names. But time went quick and we really didn’t go into that much detail. Some of the names that we think are quite credible. And then we had our list last week, which we weren’t that enthusiastic about some of the names on that list last week. So I think it’s a good opportunity to round up. So let’s start with Boomtown. What it is and why do you think it’s a really good product for what it does and who it’s targeted for.

Robert: Okay. Well Boomtown essentially sells a very landing page; ask real estate website built on WordPress. And all of their websites look almost identical to each other. And they’ve looked at way for quite a while. It’s like three little circles and then a whole bunch of listings down on the home page. What makes boomtown work really, really well is two separate items. One, the front end of the website is designed for only kind of traffic that they really focus on, which is paid traffic. And what they do is they have a very, very good, many very good ways of capturing leads. And they’re designed to ask for registrations early on into the search process. And they do so in a fairly organic whoever way. Because and they also have a slightly slicker appearing IDX than other IDX, so they built a better search tool.

Robert: They ask for information, in a slightly more credible way. And then once you’ve registered with the search tool, that’s where boomtown then really starts to excel in terms of the search experience. That gives you the ability to build your own little list of listings and you basically get an account. And the account that you’re getting as a searcher. It’s quite different than all other IDX is out there. So already the experience with boomtown on the front end, for the consumer side, it’s different. What does that mean? What’s the other side though? Because we keep saying CRM, that’s not a CRM. That’s the IDX. Well, the other side of it is that boomtown. Then collects these user accounts and sends them to your team. And you can have a whole bunch of different ways that your team can actually utilize this information. You can assign the leads you can do a Round Robin. You can see what your team has been doing with the weeds.

Robert: In other words, you can take an eagle eye view of the activity that they’re doing on each of these user accounts that you may have assigned them. In other words, they give you a lot of clarity and insight in terms of what’s happening with leap once is actually registered with your boomtown platform. also a lot more clarity about whether or not your employees, your real estate agents or brokers, whoever it is that you’re distributing these to, what they’re doing with those leads. You can contact them through the platform too. You can email them, you can log a call to them. I believe, I may be wrong on that one, but I know you can email them through the system. And just basically, besides Follow-up Boss has one of the best team views in all of real estate lead management. And last but not least, and I think this can’t be understated enough, you’re paying a ton of money with boomtown.

Robert: You’re paying $1,500 a month for the licensing fee. But unlike so many other platforms that really don’t necessarily do something for that money, boomtown does. They have an assigned account manager. And this manager usually is walking you and your entire team through a personal training on how the system works. So you’ve actually been trained in addition there are available to you for questions. Boomtown is one of the few platforms that do not get bad reviews about their service. They get great reviews about their service. So people like you’re spending extra money, but you’re actually getting something for your, kind of getting a personal concierge which teaches you how to use the tool that you purchased. So for some reason you’re not a tech genius and you’re having, I don’t know, questions about some of the services, like you said, Oh, we listening to Robert and John on this podcast and they said, my thing can do this.

Robert: Well guess what? You’ve got somebody that you can email that will be responsive, that will immediately say, oh yeah, here’s how you do that thing. Those guys said you could do. So Boomtown gets high marks for me, really high marks. They are from everything I’ve seen read and looked at personally, they are probably one of the best real estate lead generation platform specifically for real estate teams that is out there.

Jonathon: So you got the $1500.00 per month and then I imagine you to include a budget for pay per click advertising as well. Is that correct?

Robert: Oh yeah. Boomtown is a $3,000 a month minimum investment, minimum.

Jonathon: So really its aimed at power teams, power principle that`s handing out leads to sub agent. Or a brokerage really. Would you agree with that?

Robert: I would. There are also brokerages that have gotten really clever about the way that they manage their boomtown account. They’ll have 9,10 agents and they’ll make sure that each agent takes in. Let’s just call it three to $500 a month and everybody basically shares the expense of the platform and the advertising budget goes along with it. Or the broker maybe pays the $1,500 licensing fee and lets the team pick up the PPC fees.

Robert: Another thing about boomtown is they have this way of listing a lot of neighborhoods on their landing page. You can target major cities and get like 150 different neighborhoods on this landing page. Based upon they’re the way that they present the properties and it’s always showing how many available listings. All that means though is that you could have like a team working a very large city and still use a boomtown site. And basically everybody could get covered, which makes that passing along the feeds. Your agents actually pretty, pretty clever. If you had 16 guys and each one works 16 different neighborhoods, that guy could just give you some money for his neighborhood and it was still make sense.

Jonathon: We’re going to go for break Folks. When we come back, we’re going to be talking about webmaster websites and Bold Leads. We will be back in a few moments.

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Jonathon: I’m still here folks. I might be dying slowly but I am still here folks. For you listeners and viewers and my beloved cohost Robert. So Webmaster websites. What are they about? Why would you put them on the recommended list?

Robert: Real Estate Webmasters. Okay. Well one of the things that Real Estate Webmasters, so they’re complex topic. Because they’ve been changing a lot of shit so much so it’s hard to keep up with them. But fortunately I still talk to three or four realtors a day and I still get real estate webmaster clients who still give me the logins to their sites. So I still get to see what’s happening to, with Real Estate Webmasters in real-time. And here’s what’s happening. They had an old platform and they had the CRM on the back end and it was sweet. And then they changed it. They said they were upgrading it and then they bastardized it. They took a lot of the functionality away. And then they realized that that wasn’t working and they start to get a lot of client complaints as they raised fees and did a whole bunch of other crazy shit.

Robert: So what they’ve done is they’ve gone back to like a scale down version of the old CRM. So even talking about the Real Estate Webmasters CRM is a little complicated because they keep changing it back and forth, back and forth. So I will say this, the version that I’ve looked at, which I’ve looked at as of January 18th and this year. Is a version of the CRM that they’re using all the way throughout 2018 is a very, very slick CRM? They went back to what I considered to be one of the best CRM`s that’s out there. And here’s one of the reasons why they have a really rock solid content page builder inside their websites. Their websites used to be designed so well that all you, as a realtor had to do, was go in and write content pages on the neighborhoods you were interested in. And you had a reasonably like you had a chance of ranking.

Robert: And that’s pretty hard to do. I build websites that’s difficult to build a website that is that good, that without link building or other SEO efforts that you might get on the first page for anything. Yet real estate webmasters was doing something so that they really kind of taught you in a very specific way how you were supposed to be doing these pages like they told you what the URL`s we’re supposed to be. The slugs are supposed to be because consistently and across the board, Real Estate Webmasters sites are built the right way. And I think the reason for that is that Real Estate Webmaster actually knows how to build websites that rank. And so they can educate their clients the right way on how to do that. And they built a page builder that built a page with all the right elements. Either a whole bunch of like a picture carousel or video carousel right on the page for the little bit of verbiage.

Robert: And then they have a really, really nice IDX that’s highly functional. They can tie users scores from a Google in addition to all the listings appear to be listings that are unique to that website. Which makes that whole combination of things makes the front end. A real estate webmasters sites work really well. Here’s the cool thing on the back end, they are once again, as with so many things, they have consistently been first in class and they still are in some ways which breaks my heart to say but it’s true. So I cannot tell a lie and there’s still first in class and what. What you can do once somebody registers with the site is not only to get to see the property that triggered the registration, so you get to look at the specific property. But then you can email them within the same like so it pops the lead on your screen and says so and so was looking at this property and registered as a lead and then gives you right on the same panel.

Robert: Do you want to call them or email them? So now you have the registration and you have the ability to call them and if you do place a call to them, you then automatically create a customer record that you then can leave notes in. It’s pretty sweet. It’s one of the most functional CRM and IDX combinations that you’re going to find inside real estate. Now having said all that, for the love of God, listeners, hear me now please, because you cannot say the name Real Estate Webmasters without understanding that they are the least friendly real estate website provider that I know of. The management and the ownership there is. You’re going to do exactly what they say. You’re going to wait in enormous cues to get any changes done to your website. Months Long, you’re going to pay $250 an hour, 10 hours in advance, so $2,500 for any change that you want to make.

Robert: And their contracts usually range in value from 30 to $60,000. So it’s way by far the most expensive platform. It’s the least friendly customer service. I am telling you that my opinion is they make one of, if not the best real estate website. So I have to say that reluctantly, and you have to hear me on the other, these other things. Because despite the fact that they’re the best, they’re customers leave in droves. So that’s what I have to say about those guys John.

Jonathon: I think just to clarify. How do they get people to the website to this fantastic experience? Is it just solely through organic search?

Robert: Most of the time. Yeah. A lot of their clients don’t even use PPC. Their sites tend to rank organically and that’s, like I said they’re alone. There is nobody else. There’s not actually, that’s not true. My company.

Jonathon: It`s your company isn`t it?

Robert: My company, there is my company and then the Sierra interactive that takes over Real Estate Webmasters accounts. But Sierra interactive doesn’t as far as I can tell, doesn’t really actually understand the SEO principles. They just do a very good job of taking over real estate webmasters accounts. You don’t own the site, but they will make, they will do a good job if you want to transfer off real estate webmasters. I have not had a chance to look at their CRM and track their CRM, so they’re really not going to be up on this particular review. Because I haven’t had a chance to see how they manage their leads once they’re created by the system. I can tell you that they have a very solid IDX search experience, probably better than Real Estate Webmasters actually.

Jonathon: You started to confuse me here. This is a totally separate company that`s in competition with webmaster.

Robert: That’s correct. Sierra Interactive is been, as of 2018 was on my top 10 real estate website a company to build a real estate website with. And they’ve stayed there. They’re going to be there on the 2019 list as well. And it’s a company that’s built like; it’s another IDX search provider there. They’re just doing a better job on building custom, real estate websites. But they’re building it using their own technology. Either they’re not messing around with WordPress. They’re never going to give ownership of the site over to anybody. There are a lot of limitations with Sierra interactive.

Jonathon: So the other thing about webmaster, do they build their websites in WordPress?

Robert: No, they also build them on our own proprietary stack that built using PHP website.

Jonathon: So you don`t own the website? Or do you?

Robert: Nope, never will that God lord have mercy. You never will because then they couldn’t hold you over the barrel for and basically take as much money as they possibly can take. Which is pretty much always been what it feels like. Their philosophy is because they raise prices arbitrarily. They charge twice, three times as much as anybody else. And of course I’m sure the prevailing logic would be, hey, we are worth it. And they are, they build a website that makes money. But the owner is on record as having said he’s made nearly a hundred million dollar off his company or 75 million, I don’t know, just something ridiculous.

Jonathon: I think we will move on to Bold Leads. But I think Webmaster, bless their hearts, it’s either at the top of the real estate agent pyramid. Or its broker level really. When you started talking about that kind of money. Now let`s talk about Bold Leads. Which compared to the two that we’ve talked about is a very different animal, isn’t it?

Robert: It is, correct, yes. So you’re not getting a website with Bold Leads, but you are getting a CRM and a good one. So, I don’t know if they skinned chime or not. I think originally they did because it looks very similar to a chime CRM, which anybody listening to our show can go out there and can take a look at a demo at chime. And then you’ll have a reasonably close understanding of how the Bold Leads back in looks.

Robert: So they provide you, again, this is a real estate lead generation service that happens to include a CRM with it. So also on this list by the way of CRMs you should use is Line Dust and Follow-up Boss. But let’s just stick with Bold Leads for the moment. So what Bold Leads does, is they combine a funnel along with your lead, with your actual lead page, with your landing page. Sorry. And this funnel is awesome. So a funnel is a series of activities that take place to record the customer record. And a funnel is like, I’m going to call you, I’m going to email at a certain time. What Bold Leads does, which is pretty incredible, is they can apply a funnel for upwards of two years. So really when you’re in your customers in this funnel that is happening with Bold Leads, so they’re getting automated follow-up for years. This means that all of your lead nurturing needs except maybe property drip information is being taken care of by Bold Leads.

Robert: So all you have to do is maybe occasionally throw a call out through the customer record. And the customer record, by the way, has a complete list of all the touches that either the system or you or they have something called the texts concierge, which is where they have a real live human that actually throws the text out to this person. And also responds by text message to all your inbound messages. in terms of a technical savvy, Bold Leads is way ahead of the pack because they copied click funnels. And click funnels is way ahead of the pack. like everybody wants a, like I want you to dumb it down and make this simple for me so that I don’t have to spend five, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 hours learning how to use the system or learning how to do this.

Robert: Bold Leads is the only person inside real estate that has done that. You can learn how to use their system in 20 minutes. You can become an expert in two hours. There’s so simple. It’s so easy to use. And that’s why I really always strongly talk about them. I mean in any marketing system, anything that you use, it’s very similar like to talking to a stockbroker. Not everybody’s results are going to be the same. I just have things that I liked from a technology perspective or I look at a system and I go, this is more solid than other systems that I’ve seen. And that’s the case with Bold Leads that you don’t even have a website. So if you’re looking for a website solution, this isn’t it, it’s not a website CRM Combo like real estate webmasters. Is it straight up a lead generation system that happens to have a good CRM with a marketing funnel on the backend.

Robert: You can build the same marketing funnels using hubspot if you are a professional marketer type. If there for the one or two of our listeners that considers themselves to be an expert level marketer and if you happen to have a real estate website that you own that’s built on WordPress. Then hubspot because it has integrations with WordPress that are pretty insane, becomes the best CRM that you can possibly find on the market. It’s what I use.

Jonathon: So we have got one other actually folks. But its links, because we’ve talked to Top him about Bold Leads. And before I go on the other one which is Real Geeks to wrap up. The price point we’re talking about Bold Leads compared to the two previous. We’ve discussed these in a very different price point is that correct, isn’t it?

Robert: Oh yeah.

Jonathon: So we’re talking around the $500.00 to a $1000.00 a month mark. Aren’t we?

Robert: Bold Leads tends to be a less expensive system. They’re kind of a starter system and most agents can probably afford it. Not most, well, I don’t know, never mind, but if you’re going to be able to afford a marketing system, Bold Leads Is certainly more reachable than others.

Jonathon: I think everybody, but I think if you’re serious about your career, you probably should be at a stage where you could consider that kind of price point on self. Now, Real Geeks. Let`s rap up with Real Geeks. What are they, what do they do?

Robert: Well Real Geeks makes the least expensive, like solid website, direct marketing platform kind of combination that you can find. And their sites if you’re clever with a content management system can even be used for SEO. Not very well, but they can. So Real Geeks makes a great website for about $239 a month and they have a CRM that comes in on the back of it. The content management system is not that great. They don’t have a page template thing that builds their pages also. Not that great. They do have an excellent text messaging service on the back end of their platform. They also have an excellent Facebook plugin on the back end of their platform. Their CRM is even simpler and not as intuitive as let’s say, Real Estate Webmasters or Bold Leads. But they do have one and it does work. It does the trick and a lot of people use it very successfully. So when I’m saying that, like I’m just a guy that looks at something goes, oh my God, this is the best in class. And that’s what I aim for with my own products and services.

Robert: And it takes a long goddamn time as you all know, because you’re doing the same thing with your service to build up something where you feel like you’ve managed to ring the bell on every single thing that the bell can be wrong on. Real Geeks kind of does everything second best, but they do it all. They do it all. They’ve got a CRM, they’ve got a website, they’ve got. You can build pages, their sites work fast, and they’re mobile friendly. I like Real Geeks. I mean, I don’t want anybody to think on painting them because I’m not. For the money you’re going to get a good website. And it’s going to be connected to a decent CRM, and if you use direct marketing to push people into the site, which is what it’s made for, real clear here, those sites are made to be direct marketed to. That means you’re spending money on Facebook or Google to drive traffic.

Jonathon: And they are a little bit of a hybrid really because they use Google paid for click and Facebook. Where Bold Leads utilizes Facebook, generate traffic to go to their landing pages. I’m correct about that. Aren’t I?

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I am. I’m strongly in favor of Real Geeks. I haven’t looked.

Jonathon: And the actual website again, how much does that roughly cost per month?

Robert: It’s $239. Usually a onetime only $500 setup fee. They send you one of three subcontractors that they do business with that actually build the site out for you.

Jonathon: I didn’t know that. And but you’ve got to pay extra or do you pay them $500 extra a month for either.

Robert: Just one time.

Jonathon: Who runs the Facebook campaigns? Who runs the Google paid campaigns? Do you have to?

Robert: You have to run them yeah. Or you can spend $300 a month and let a Real Geeks run it. So you’ve got two choices. You can run it yourself or you can send them, give them $300 a month and I may be wrong on the fee because I think I’ve gotten two different fees from two different people that I’ve talked to recently about Real Geeks. Because the way that my information stays so updated is every single time I get on the phone with somebody, which like I said I’ve always said I do that two or three times a day every day. And every time I get on the phone with somebody I’m like, who are you using? What are you doing for marketing? How much you pay and how’s it work? That’s where a lot of my opinions come from, is from listening to actual people using these services and asking questions. And so with real geeks, I got one person that said $300 and another person said $500 to do to manage the campaign. And that was recently. So seeing as how they were just sold not so long ago, maybe the prices are changing, I don’t know.

Jonathon: So fundamentally we’re looking at around a $1000.00 a month. So folks, we have looked at two packages, that one package. You’re looking at $3000.00 a month, plus you look at another which will be over $3000 plus. And we’re looking at two packages at around a thousand a month, 12,000 a year. So I think it was really, really well worth us doing this episode because I think we clarified now what’s out there. And what you should look at and obviously look at your products as well. Because you’re trying to do a hybrid aren`t you? That’s the impression am getting between the top tier. But you’re trying to offer organic at a slightly lower price but, but still get effective results. Would that be correct?

Robert: Yeah. Currently that is correct. Currently I’m offering organic results in there. There’s another major difference. I’m already least less expensive than Real Estate Webmasters and I include SEO and they don’t. And that’s another thing that I do is as I’m trying to make like an all done for you, no hand you don’t need to do squad kind of service. Because in all the conversations I have with realtors, the frustration is always how do we find time to learn about these technologies? How do we find time to even use these services? Because I thought I was paying for a completely 100 percent self-maintenance self-managed campaign. And most of the time that’s not true. Even with Real Estate Webmasters. If you hire them for SEO on top of what it starts at like $2,500 a month, it’s like crazy how much they charge. At the starting rate. I mean, I’m not saying that that when that’s your starting campaigns that’s high. Not that that’s high in general for every single campaign, but when you’re starting there, that’s pretty high.

Jonathon: Robert how can people find out more about you and what you are up to?

Robert: Boom, baby. Love it when you asked that question. Let’s go to inboundrem.com. I am a little slow on the uptake on content this year guys. I’m going to do three or four posts. I do have a lead on KV Core and Curator, everybody’s favorite. I’ve got somebody who may be sending me a login in the next couple of days. So hey, you should come to my site and subscribe because I might be dropping some wildly, highly requested reviews.

Jonathon: We will be the next week. We got a quest next week folks. He is returning. I’m going to keep it a secret, but it’s going to be an interesting discussion. Will you be back next week folks. And hopefully I am going to be feeling 100 percent and really active to give you the value that are looking for and also your family. We’ll see you soon. Bye.