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Empower your real estate business with ChatGPT & AI mastermind. Revolutionize client interactions and boost sales with cutting-edge technology.
Experience a paradigm shift in real estate dynamics with ChatGPT & AI Mastermind! Witness firsthand how intelligent automation is reshaping the way agents operate in a competitive market landscape. Gain valuable insights on leveraging AI for lead generation, market forecasting, and personalized client experiences. Elevate your real estate game by embracing the future.
#1 – Writing Property Listings
When creating property descriptions based on fundamental details about a property, including its location, the number of guests it can accommodate, and other essential qualities, ChatGPT real estate can be a huge time-saver. Input this data into the chatbot, and its artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms will highlight the property’s advantages like a human would.
#2 – Creating Email & Social Media Marketing Campaigns
The real estate ChatGPT is an excellent listing description writer and can also construct fascinating email marketing journeys for your real estate leads. The same method applies: you provide some essential characteristics about the client—such as the sort of property they are interested in, when their lease expires, or any other information you would like to emphasize in the email—and ChatGPT for real estate takes care of the rest.
#3 – Personalizing Property Listings & Emails
Every potential buyer or tenant has different requirements and tastes regarding the property. While some people prefer natural light and space, others might emphasize proximity to facilities like subterranean stations. However, you only have one listing for a property that, with the right marketing, you know would work for both of them. And ChatGPT for Real Estate can help in this situation.
#4 – Improving Your Emails & Texts
Real estate brokers can use ChatGPT’s capabilities because, if your initial attempt fails to yield the intended outcome, you can always ask the chatbot to modify your copy by providing additional context or explicit instructions, such as “Your email is too long.” “Your copy is too wordy and formal. Please keep it as short as possible.” Could you keep it shorter and more informal?
#5 – Writing Scripts
Before Chat GPT on the scene in 2022, one of the most time-consuming jobs in real estate was writing scripts for films and virtual tours.
ChatGPT can write a screenplay for you in seconds, whether for a funny video, an engaging advertisement, or a formal corporate presentation.
In response to my prompt, ChatGPT real estate produced the following for me: “Write a two-minute script detailing Chat GPT’s applications in the real estate industry.”
#6 – Generating Ideas & Topics
Apart from writing compelling copy, Chat GPT in real estate can help agents brainstorm fresh ideas for their social media marketing, YouTube videos, blog posts, and newsletters.
#7 – Drafting Legal Documents
Thanks to its extensive knowledge base and natural language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can save you time and effort by helping real estate agents create various legal documents, including contracts, lease agreements, and rules.
For example, the gpt-3 real estate produced a quite convincing-looking contract in answer to my request that it “draft me a tenancy agreement”:
Lease contract ChatGPT
#8 – Summarizing Long Documents into Short Abstracts
Asking ChatGPT to condense a lengthy text, such as an article or document, into a manageable abstract is another excellent way to use it in the real estate industry. Here’s what the chatbot produced for me when I asked it to summarize the article that contrasted Dynamics AI advancements with Salesforce:
#9 – Translating Emails & Texts
Another ultimate benefit of using Chat GPT in real estate is that realtors and brokers can easily translate their correspondence or property listings into another language. For example:
#10 – Enhanced Customer Support
Customer assistance is another area where ChatGPT for real estate can benefit clients and realtors alike. Here, I see two primary strategies:
ChatGPT can assist with copywriting by crafting tailored responses to clients’ questions. When a client submits a request, a complaint, or feedback, ChatGPT may promptly provide an intelligent, customized response that considers their particular issues.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 430 of the MailRight Show. John and I were having a lively conversation about this subject, and here’s what the subject is. Chatgpt, an AI Mastermind for Real Estate Agents. Now, Mastermind is It’s an old Napoleon Hill concept that John may or may not know, and it is definitely something that he probably pulled out of a keyword titling thing. But a mastermind generally takes people with different parts of expertise, puts them together in one room, and discusses it. Right now, the mastermind will be John and I, but we’re hoping that all of you will make this a more live, robust conversation wherever you see this content, wherever you listen to it, which is a podcast tool or like YouTube. We will ask you to do us a favor and join this conversation. We want to know about your experiences with ChatGPT as it applies to practically applying it to your real estate business. Right, John? Yeah, sure.
No, not yet. Sure. Go, yes. Go, yes. We would really love to hear from you.
Well, I was going to tell them how they can join us. Okay, go. We do this every Thursday at 2:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. You can ask us questions if you go to the Mel-Right YouTube channel or the Mel-Right Facebook page. You can be part of the discussion discussions. We’re quite open to answering any questions during the show, and you can be part of the discussion. So remember, join us at 2:00 PM every Thursday.
Brilliant. What John said, agreed. As John constantly says in the show notes, we will both say, actually, he does the donkey work on the show. It’s just his English way of saying he produces the show. And so most of this stuff is on his channels because I’m not putting it on the Inbound R&D.
I don’t mind being classified as a donkey, folks.
You classified yourself that way. I like donkeys, especially if you’ve got carrots in your pockets.
But Rob and I are not puppy killers. That’s the main thing.
Wow, that was a tangent. But yes, we’re not puppy killers. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll open up this conversation, but before we do, there’s an English bloke whose voice you hear, and some of you may not know this gentleman. I’m going to ask that gentleman to introduce himself. If you’d like to know him a little better, you have a way to do that. Go ahead, John. Introduce yourself.
I just want to know, Rob, who publishes a book and says they shot their puppy and then they kill a goat?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t keep up with popular culture, so you’re referencing something really popular. I have no idea.
There’s some crazy lady who’s a governor, and she wrote a book where she said she shot a puppy dog. Also, she got rid of a goat she didn’t like. That’s horrible, isn’t it, Rob?
Well, sounds like a psychopath to me, but whatever. That is what it is.
I got my thoughts, Rob, but I’m an animal lover at heart.
Well, us poor, soft West Coast Liberals, not wanting to kill animals and stuff like that. Yeah, we’re big old wimps out here. I’m going to go with you on not killing a puppy dog with your own two hands.
She has done it with her rifle. She shot it right between the eyes as you do.
Okay, well, at least she made it quick. I don’t know. All right. John, you haven’t introduced yourself yet. You were really on one today. Can you please tell everybody how to find you if they want to?
Yeah, thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail-right. Com. We build really great-looking websites on WordPress. Plus, we’ve got a CRM, a lead-generative platform, text messaging, email, a social media calendar, and a way of getting better reviews for Google and for whatever platform you need your reviews on. It’s a great system, folks, at a great price. Back over to you, Rob.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Robert Newman. I am the founder of Inbound. I am another founder, no surprise. I do SEO and search Engine Optimization, meaning we can find videos on YouTube. I can get your hyper-local profile ranked against your competitors. For Google, my business is Google Maps functionality. I could get you found in traditional search, and I also build websites just like John does. But I am a different classification. I am more of a marketing company that builds websites than a website company that markets. If any of you are interested in any of that, go to inboundrem. Com. And true to the inbound marketing bit, we have massive amounts of information to teach you how to do all this stuff for free. You do not need to hire me. So if you’re interested in learning about real estate SEO, go to my website, YouTube SEO, go to my website, Hyperlocal, go to my website. It’s all there. It’s all free. Most of it is written by me, and I’m touched by me as my team writes it. Okay, with that said, let’s jump right into our meaty subject, which has taken us a grand total of six minutes to get into today, which is a record.
It is. It’s all my fault, isn’t it? You’re going to blame me anyway, aren’t you?
Experience a paradigm shift in real estate dynamics with ChatGPT and AI Mastermind. Let’s talk about automation. John did a whole bunch of notes on this here today, and he’s got a number of subjects which I’m just going to briefly encapsulate for the audience. Property listings, email and social media marketing campaigns, personalizing emails, Property listings, again, emails and property listings. Again, emails and text, script writing, ideas and topics, drafting documents, legal documents, summarizing long documents into short abstracts, translating email and text, enhance customer support. Effectively, these are the areas that we’ve heard a lot about AI improving. I’m just going to give this disclaimer. John and I had a long conversation about AI before the show started. John was saying how useful it was for a person that has dyslexia. I was saying how I haven’t actually managed to find a completely perfect application yet for it. I use it, but it barely saves me money because we have to edit every page that we write with it. It is so far a little bit tricky if you’re trying to make sure that your voice sounds authentic. However, we do both believe that there are some strong applications.
We may come at this slightly differently. Having said that, number one, writing property listings, why don’t you share with me what you were thinking when you said to use AI for property listings?
Well, I think it’s the blank page syndrome, as I’ll put it. If you got to knock out some listings and you got the blank page, you say, Oh, I just can’t do this. I just cannot face this today. So you leave it for the next day And then something comes up because you’re a real estate agent, and then the next day comes up and you still haven’t done it because it’s the blank page syndrome. Well, using AI, it can really help if you’re suffering from the blank page syndrome, as I call it. You’re facing that word document or Google, whatever you’re using to write. And it just gets you over the hunt using AI. But you’re You are going to have to edit it because it could get fax wrong, basically. So you are going to have to check it. But I think it’s a really great thing if you’re suffering from that blank Page syndrome.
I don’t disagree with you. I think there’s a lot of limitations and things of that nature in terms of I just… You know what? I think you have to be very, very, very cautious.
Well, for those of you- Yeah, sorry, I’m in to… I think the problem with it is you start knocking it out and you don’t check it and you send it out. That’s the main problem, isn’t it?
I wouldn’t disagree with that. Listen, blank page syndrome, as it was just described, I’m in agreement with that. Okay? My hesitation, the reason I’m sitting here is I haven’t had very many clients that really read this stuff. So making that recommendation So maybe you read it, John. And I believe that if you’re going to say, hey, I read it, I’m going to go, of course you read it. But to say, I’ll give you all an example. Some of this could have been written by AI, some of it absolutely positively wasn’t. Let’s see if everybody in the audience can guess what’s what. So here’s a listing that was for one of my favorite agents that I follow, Christoff, too, and this is what he wrote. We just listed this stunning new home, Embrace the Pinnacle of Beverly Hills Luxury Living on one of the best streets in the Coveted Flats, introducing a mesmerizing, newly constructed masterpiece listed at 23,950,000. Just completed in 2024, this architectural marvel boasts seven opulent bedrooms, 10 lavish bathrooms across an expansive 11,446 square foot floor plan. Nestled on a substantial 15,580 square foot lot, every inch exudes contemporary grandeure, blended with timeless design.
From the Integriate Pathways leading to serene outdoor lounging areas to the bold lines and soaring ceilings within, each space captivates with its blend of elegance and state-of-the-art amenities. This residence is not a statement of luxury. It’s a canvas where your most cherished memories will unfold. Discover the epitome of Beverly Hills Elegance, a home where every detail caters the pinnacle of high-end living. What do you think?
You sold it to me, Rob. It’s a bargain at 23 million, isn’t it?
Exactly. I would say that less than 10% of that could have been written by AI, had you wanted to. When you’re putting it on the page and saying, Let’s use AI to get a conversation started, I feel like you would have probably mostly rewritten that. Is it still a good tool? Yes. Would it work for a certain set of people? Super ADHD, super ADHD, Super neurodivergent dyslexic. Yes, it would. It would probably allow your creative juices to trigger. But for everybody else, I think it would mostly be confusing, in my opinion. There’s no way that Christoff used AI for this or could even use AI for something like this.
We have to agree to disagree there. I see where you’re coming from, though. It’s not that I’m-How would AI even come close to getting any of those details right? Well, I thought it was a bit too wordy anyway. I think most people are going to look at the images, going to look at the video, and I think you could half that in size. It was pretty good writing, but it was going on a bit for my taste.
Got you. Well, for ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the very, very, very rare occasions where John and I strongly disagree. We occasionally disagree. We don’t usually strongly disagree. I think that when you’re competing for a $24 million property, things like, It’s a canvas where your most cherished memories will unfold. Like, John’s laughing because he’s not- Well, I’m a dickhead.
I’m a cynical English dick.
I think that a certain level of person is going to appreciate the poetic flourish. The level of person that I mean is somebody not necessarily educated, much more as driven, who’s going to appreciate the creativity of somebody like Christoff. Seeing as how Christoff is traditionally- I love the guy.
He’s been on the show. He’s a great guy. I really enjoyed the interview. Hopefully, you might come back on it. You have to rustle him up, won’t you? All right. But Yeah, it’s just not that language isn’t my cup of tea. It’s just shorter the better. But everybody’s different.
Fair enough. Number two, creating tend. And ladies and gentlemen, right there is probably the defining difference, the defining debate between you and AI. It’s going to depend on who you are. Probably also explains for everybody listening to show why I’m not using it very much, and John is, which is not to knock anything. If you’re a nuts and bolts, up in your face marketer, pure and simple, AI can do a fantastic job for you and it can save you a lot of time. If you’re already somebody who is probably leading or creating the ideas or creating a thought leader, whether that’s for real estate or anything else, then AI is probably actually going to lower the quality of your work output and you’re going to be like…
I’ve been using it for over a year now. I was an early doctor, and I’ve got my suite of tools now, my AI tools. It took over a year of trying different tools, and I spent a bit of my money on AppSuma. It’s a website, folks, where you can buy new technology at a discount price. Some of the tools I bought didn’t really work out. They were rubbish, didn’t really work for me. Other tools, I’ve got enormous of value, but it’s taken me over a year of different trying, different things, different processes. So that’s my experience. You So you got to play around with it, and you got to find different tools for different scenarios. But I think it’s made a big difference in my output.
Beautiful. All right, so number two, are you using it to do email and social media marketing campaigns? You got that on number two on the list, creating 10 email and social media marketing campaigns. Do you use ChatGPT for these things?
Yeah, for my newsletter, parts of it, I do utilize it, but I read it, I edit it, I humanize it, as I call it humanized. I’m not sure if that word actually exists, but it should do, shouldn’t it, Rob? It’s not a bad word, is it?
It does exist, yeah.
Humanized. I insert my humor. Well, some Americans don’t think I’m very humanized, do they, Rob?
You are very English, I will say that.
Yes, I am very English.
Go ahead, but you use it.
Is that dramatic? You think it’s helped you? Well, because you’re my associate, we’ve never met in person, have we? No. But one day we have to, won’t we? But I think you appreciate some of my comments, but other people think I’m a total dick. I love English humor.
Yeah, you do. But But I’m a dick, too. So what does that say for either one of us? All right, so we’re going to go to break, ladies and gentlemen, because John has… I have twice asked him the question about his email and using it, and he’s only answered it once. So we’re just going to come back from break and jump into number three, which is personalizing property listings and emails. I do not use ChatGPT for any of our emails or social media marketing campaigns. I find the editing process tedious. Yes, I can produce something in a second. I’ve done it many times, and then I completely rewrite it, which drives me crazy. I just don’t use it. But that’s, again, just the defining difference between us. I can make a social post, though, in under 20 seconds. It has some value. There are some areas I do use Chat2PT, which don’t appear to be in John’s email, but I will cover them in the bonus section at the end of the video, I also have a high level of hope for some technology that is related to AI that is John didn’t cover here, and I’m going to cover that, too.
We’ll go to break. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the MailRight Show. We’re coming back from a very long, heated discussion. No, I’m just kidding. We’re not. It was two seconds after I said break. But we’re going to jump right back into the subject matter for the show today, which is personalizing property listings and emails every potential tenant or has different requirements of taste when it comes to the property. While some people prefer natural and light space, others might prefer the importance of subterráumacy stations. All right, so This is one area where I would agree with John. I don’t know if that’s what he intended or not, but I’m going to jump in here because I’ve been handing this off to John many times. But there is something called tone. Very few clients of mine in real estate I’ll never talk to you about tone. You can do personalized, folksy, happy, upbeat, clinical, technical. There’s all these tones that you can hit. Tools like Grammarly and other tools that we do use inside our business oftentimes can alter or change the tone of something for you. Now, I don’t get this often in my business.
We don’t oftentimes getting somebody saying that they want to change the tone. However, every once in a while, you come across an English major or something like that, or a lawyer, or somebody who’s got some very high pedigree degree that I do. And every time, they tend to be extremely time consuming clients.
That’s very helpful.
I struggled with that one. So some of the time, you want to make sure that you’re nailing the writing that they want. In this one circumstance, ChatGPT could do an incredibly fast, efficient job of producing three or four tonally different things above without what they were asking. In that one case, I could see ChatGPT saving me many hours of time, and I really like it for that. John, when I read this statement, that’s what I heard, that’s what I saw, that’s what I wanted to comment What do you think? What did you mean when you put this on here?
Well, basically what you’ve outlined, but I use Grammarly. It’s a great tool. Then I use another product called Hemingway. Hemingway really helps. It depends on how important I think the piece because Hemingway… Well, Hemingway is very different, folks, to Grammarly. You’ve probably heard of Grammarly. I would highly recommend it. I’ve got the pro-version. Grammarly and Hemingway. Hemingway, the free version is pretty good, but I’ve actually got the paid version on both. Hemingway, you put stuff in and it tells you the tone. And also, Because most people read, the recommendation is you write most of your material at a grade seven level, and most people, their writing style, and I think I’ve got somebody in front of me on what that might write a bit sophisticated. You actually need to tone it down to a grade seven level for it, but it just depends on the target audience, obviously.
No, you’re right. For SEO, John is 100% correct. Actually, for search engine optimization, John has touched on one of the very few things that I don’t follow exactly along. Neil Patel, who’s a guy that I’ve read extensively, and one could say, argue that he’s been my mentor in SEO. He’s certainly been one of them. I’ve referred to countless of material, attended countless webinars. Neil has been fantastic, and he doesn’t know me. Never met me, doesn’t know who I am. But he says, Do sixth, seventh grade. So does Nathan Gotch, the only guy that doesn’t necessarily go along with everything is Brian Dean. In terms of major influence- Brian Dean’s turned me down three times to go on my other podcast.
I pursued him over about 10 years, and he said, No, three times. Gosh, he’s the only person that’s done that?
I love… There’s probably reasons for that. But so, ladies and gentlemen, listen, John’s right. Your reading is supposed to be easy and understandable, and I tend to drift towards the theatric. That’s probably because in my personal life, I’m somewhat of an artistic, goth-like poetry guy. And so I do use a lot of flowery words. My lead writer does, too, is a degree from Oxford in writing, which is probably why you appeal to me so much. He’s not a native SEO guy. Technically, neither am I. We’re more like writers, writers. And Now, that probably creates a lot of the tonality that you’re getting from me on ChatGPT, and you really should take my thoughts about it with a grain of salt. If you’re looking for sixth or seventh grade stuff, you’re looking for something to save you some time, you’re not dealing with… If you’re anywhere where your audience, Virginia, and I can go on and on, where your audience is not sitting here trying to check your work for its creative license or flair, ChatGPT is going to be amazing. Gamechanger is great.
Yeah, it’s not meant for… And when it comes to long form, I produce a lot of content, and I normally add video to almost all of it where I put across my personality. But that’s why you have to use something like Hemingway, because it would chat with these AI writing tools, folks, when it comes to medium to long form, it tends to be wordy. Almost all of it, I have to do a strong edit and remove quite a bit of it and then add a bit of my own, put it in him in a way, clean it up and add video and other bits to it to make it a more unique resource that Google’s looking for. But most people, they tend to over Their writing style is too sophisticated for their target audience. But that’s a generality, but that is generally the situation.
Just a quick note for everybody, including John, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re not doing some of these high degree of edits, and I’m just going to say from an SEO perspective, I’ve spent an entire year watching Google pummel what they’re calling low-quality content. It’s another way of saying, if you’ve written something that widely resembles somebody else’s content and you don’t have video or something on there, separating the page from other people, you are not going to do shit inside the SEO world. So please Please don’t look at this as that. If you’re looking to do some technical writing, fill a website up and have it be useful and informative, but not necessarily ranked for SEO, by all means, proceed forward with ChatGPT and other tools. It is almost taking a professional designation to understand what you could and could not do with ChatGPT and rank for SEO safely. That’s probably a whole show unto itself, John.
Well, it might do that next week. Shall we do that next week?
Yeah. Let’s keep going with this one, though. Improving your emails and text. Now, here, finally, is likely someplace we would agree heavily. So go ahead and share your thoughts here.
Oh, sorry. Which one we’re doing?
Improving emails and text. Is that not where we’re on?
Well, it’s… Shall we move on? Sure.
Writing scripts. Writing scripts.
Yeah, I think that really can… Especially because you got TikTok, you got Instagram, you got Short Form on YouTube. We’ve covered this. We’ve actually even covered the tools that can help you put in a long form video and then cut it up. I haven’t done it, really, because I’ve been focused on about three Pacific social media platforms, and I’ve been just individualizing the content on these different platforms because they’re targeted at slightly different audiences. Audiences. The three that I publish a lot to YouTube, I publish a lot to LinkedIn, and I do a lot of SEO writing articles. But they’re aimed at slightly different audiences. So that’s what I concentrate. But I think for real estate, doing video and then utilizing these tools tools and enable you to write scripts. There’s even a tool that a lot of people, they can’t… It took me a long while to be able to look straight into the camera and just yack, basically, and write bullet points and memorize them. I’ve always had a good memory of memorizing a lot of information, so I don’t find it difficult. Other people that really difficult. So they have their notes and they write the whole thing out.
So you’re moving back and forth. Well, this actual technology, you’re looking at your notes, back, notes, back. It actually forms the video, so your eye is always at the camera. It’s amazing. So there are technologies that are really in the AI space, especially around video script production. Production that are really quite useful, Robert.
Copy you. My team is using ChatGPT for metadata, which I didn’t realize. I just logged into our ChatGPT account to do some support research for this show that we’re doing right now and discovered that they’re seemingly using some ChatGPT stuff for what they’re calling a CTA. Home, which is like click through language. And so, discover the serenity of all the Caliente Ranch estates in East two back, explore spaces, properties, nestled in breathtaking natural surroundings. Don’t wait. Visit us today. The click-through was, visit us today to find your dream home. It’s not bad. As a matter of fact, I would argue it’s probably as good as anything that my junior SEO guys would do. So it’s probably improving our overall quality at a certain level as it relates to massive work that we’re doing on the client side. I feel like it would do the same thing for you guys, the people listening to the show. Writing scripts is another thing. Write a script about Caliente Ranches in Tubak. Caliente Ranch. In Tubak, it’s probably not going to be descriptive enough. I I need to make it like what script. Sure, here’s a script for a video.
Drone footage at the expansive landscape surrounding… So opening shot. So it’s drone footage, narrator, Welcome to Caliente Ranch, a hidden gym, nestled in the heart of Toubac, Arizona. Here’s the promising tranquility. Seen transition, aerial view of the Ranch properties in the morning sun, casting a gleaming light. Narrator at Caliente Ranch, each home is a masterpiece designed to blend seamlessly. And what the large What language models are doing is they’re looking around for other people who’ve already done content on Caliente Ranch. Now, Toubach is a very small town, but somewhere, somehow, ChatGPT has pulled this language or is extrapolating. The problem with the tool is the extrapolation part. It may or may not have homes that blend naturally into the landscape and call it into a ranch. I have to check that. I have to check that right now. That’s what I have noticed about AI and writing scripts. However, it just did pull out a massive scene thing. It even told me what to use a drone. It could theoretically be saving me hours of time, just depending upon your level of experience and where you’re at as a human being. For that, I deeply think that writing scripts and things like that, like something more complicated that you require ideas for, I give this It’s a 10 of 10.
It’s a great tool for that, John. Maybe you need to get clever about the way they’re putting in words, but great tool. Generating ideas and topics, I feel like we just covered. Would you agree? Okay. Number seven, drafting legal documents. We certainly haven’t talked about that yet.
You lead into this. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Jesus fucking Christ. Okay, we’re going to skip past that. John’s the one who put this topic here. He probably meant AI. Write the description for the show.
I got these on general. I got from various websites. I don’t agree with everything else. It’s probably written by AI. But no, I think That’s the area that could get you into some really hot water very quickly. I agree.
If you’re going to use something to go to a website like Legal Zoom, where they’ll charge you a pittance, but they could take responsibility for the result. I would not use AI to draft legal documents personally. I would absolutely take the shortcut of going to legal zoom or something similar and spend a few dollars or a membership fee and get my documents templated by them, no problem. I would do that in a heartbeat. Number seven or number eight, summarizing long documents into short abstracts.
I think it’s great for that.
So do I. Let’s move on. Number nine, translating emails and text. Hit me with that one, John.
Well, I think we mentioned that in the first half of the show. If you got a strong Spanish-speaking population, it will make mistakes. I’ve got a lot of experience in websites, in multiple languages, because my other business, and WordPress is really strong. There are some technologies, some specific plugins. Translate Press is one that we use a lot, but then we don’t recommend Google Translate. We utilize another language system. It’s called DeepL, I think it’s called. We’ve got an agency plan with DeepL, and we found it does a better job than Google Translate. And we use that quite successfully with a number of clients.
Beautiful. I’ll tell you what, ladies and gentlemen, I pay $20 for a master ChatGPT license. For that $20, I get access to ChatGPT for and I get lots of interesting things. Right now, I’ve just gotten a complete script, including ideas for what was wrong. I said, Give me an an idea for a real estate marketing video, and they took it to me in real estate, like real estate marketing for you guys. I meant real estate marketing for me. Chatgpt didn’t understand the difference. But it doesn’t matter. I got a cool idea Great. But I will say this, it’s a very good tool for shortening a lot of different timelines for real estate agents. I will probably cover some of the ones that I like, and I will show you what you get for your $20. For many of you, that $20 would be the greatest savings that you’re ever going to find inside your career as a real estate agent. You could save yourself the money for a high-level creative resource. You could do any number of different things. You can get an idea simply and put forward, including voiceover ideas, scene fours. This could shorten the timeline dramatically, even using services like Fiverr.
You could save yourself so much time and money. I don’t have words for it, depending on where you’re at with your career. But if you’re brand new, ChatGPT could be worth tens of thousands of dollars for the $20 that you’re spending per month. That I love ChatGPT for. I love it for that, especially for those of you who are brand new. Now, last but not least, translating emails in text is, John, is absolutely correct. Enhance customer support. Talk to me about that for a second, and then we’re- Well, it’s not as bad as the legal thing.
But what I mean by it, folks, is that this is going to apply to chat on your website, basically This was pushed. There are some specific services aimed in the real estate industry. Got a lot of track. I do get a lot of flow by having a chat, but It’s one of my team that answers, or it’s mostly me that answers. It pops up on my computer, so you get a reply from me. When it’s automated, I know what this is going to be used for. I know how it’s going to be pitched in the real estate industry. It’s already been pitched in the way I thought it was going to be pitched. I think this is only to my view of it, is be a bit cautious about this, because the fundamental thing, just be a bit cautious. But if you’re on the road, then it could stop a client. It could get a client’s details, and so you then can bring them up. It swings aroundabouts. But I’m just a little bit reluctant in this area by the way it’s been talked about and pitched, if you know what I mean, Robert.
I do. I do. Doing chat bots for customer support. I’ve experienced more than I built. I have hated every single one with a burning passion that defies my ability to communicate it to you on this podcast. I always figure it out.
We want to keep it semi-clean, don’t we?
Oh, my God, I hate it. The second I figure out I’m speaking to a bot, big, giant companies now have your online experience, the first minute or two, all served up by chatbot. And even though it’s reasonable because they usually ask a set number of questions, I wouldn’t say I like that, too. And when I found people trying to do collaborative customer service through a chatbot, most of the time, they lost my business instantaneously, regardless of the personal cost to me. I don’t care. You’re going to put me on with an AI bot or something like that? I’m sorry. F you. I would say that for those weird humans out there, I’m not alone. I may be a little unique. I don’t think I’m the majority. I think I’m 10 to 20% of the world. Unfortunately for all of you, though, I’m the 10 to 20 % that has means, and you don’t want to piss me off if I’m your customer. So I will tell everybody listening to the show, Hey, listen, use that with an incredibly high degree of confidence. I would say use it only if you’re positively stuck, have no other choice whatsoever, and need customer service.
And it’s been pushed by… I won’t name names because I’m just the one of the Agro, but it’s been pushed. Ai, this particular area has been tried hard.
By every single major real estate marketing company out there, you don’t have to name names. They all are doing it for the most part. There are only a couple of exceptions. So you and I can remain the anachronist that we are and go; we wouldn’t do this. Everybody listening to the show, decide for yourself. But if you’re a significant broker, maybe you’ve got to consider Chat AI because you don’t have 5, $10,000 a month to do proper customer service across a huge database. Certainly, in that case, you need to look John up, Jonathan Dinwood, at Mailright. You can Google that or Robert Newman or [email protected] to get some creative ideas about your other solution. Because honest to God, you’re probably going to lose customers. But if you don’t care, if you’re doing property management as an example, property management might be an area where I would reluctantly consider this because so many renters have such time-consuming and minor questions. But you’d have to have a way for them to get to you for significant property damage considerations. But all the random stuff people ask, why wasn’t the hedge trimmed correctly?
Yeah, I think you don’t need to put a real, live human being on the phone for that. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to wrap up the show and I will say I have some high hopes for voiceover technology. I have quite a few people in my database already using voice samples to create complete and totally accurate voice translations on top of video scripts using AI-related tools. I have a client, a guy that I’m consulting with whom I have massive, huge respect for, who has talked to me about this extensively. His name is Joe Manny, USA. He’s one of, in my opinion, only in my opinion, a top 10 digital marketer in the US. Nobody’s heard of him because he’s in Tallahassee, which is a small, super-small market. He doesn’t have an outside. He has a very big reputation in a very tiny, tiny, tiny little marketplace. All sorts of people are thought leaders in real estate who are starting to use AI applications like that. Now, the one I’m most excited about that we are very close to doing is a complete and total representation on video.
You can already do deep fakes. The only reason that I’m not talking about them yet is that they’re a little too time-consuming to produce properly for real estate. If you’re doing a montage where you’re going to get 2 million views and use a famous person, that all makes sense based on the result. If you’re trying to do it, I want to take you, John, out of a video, but I want to produce a video for your site, thing, but it’s for a little real estate market, it still hasn’t quite caught up to us. That’s But we’re not that far away. We’re close. And the minute that we get there, instead of worrying about plagiarizing every other human on the planet, what I’m super excited about is being able to take all of my clients who don’t want to get on film and being able to use this to potentially at least put their feet in the water as it relates to leveraging video correctly. What you had to say, you got super excited.
Well, I’m just thinking, can it be horrendous for a virtualized video version of me, Robert?
I use you as the foil to my comments.
Can you imagine it? It’s like a weapon against Russians. You could use it as a virtual weapon, could you?
Don’t get me even started. I’ll start singing, sing to you. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we will wrap the show-up. I think we’ve said a lot of good stuff. And there are a few other areas that I’ll have to research a little bit deeper before I say them live on a podcast format. Ai is very high on my list. Just a matter of fact, I’m going to get off this show, do an AI video for Inbound REN, and talk about ChatGPT. For those of you who are maybe my followers that listen to the show, go to the YouTube channel. You’ll see something coming from me on that. YouTube channel, you can just Google Inbound REN on YouTube. You can Google Inbound RM to find out how to reach me. You can also contact [email protected]. If you’d like to email me, feel free to contact me. Just go to my website. You’ll find all the info about me and everything else you didn’t need to know right there. John, take it away, sir.
Yeah, and if you have any questions, we’re trying to answer them live. To join us, go to the Melright YouTube channel or the MailRight Facebook page. And like I say, we do this show religiously every Thursday at around 2:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. We love you to join us. Do you have any questions for Robert or myself? Like I said, we’re answering during the show. Back over to you, Rob.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining the MailRight show today as we talk about we start to dig into these AI subjects. We’re going to tackle another show next week where we’ll talk… What did we decide? And it’s going to be how we can properly apply… What was the subject?
It will come to me. I can’t remember it at the present moment.
We’re great, aren’t we, guys? We came up with it super hot. He’ll look at the video notes and develop the subject matter. But next week, we’ll also probably be talking about the proper application of AI.
Using AI in SEO in a more concentrated focus.
There you go how you could do it. Click through. Cta is a great place to start. Metadata is a great place to start. Tiny, specific things where ChatGPT is, I’m literally taking from hundreds of possible examples and mixing it up slightly, which is the simpler stuff it does, and it does very well. I’m excited to get into how you can use it, where it is efficient and can be used for SEO. The answer to these questions is often yes, but only in particular tasks. All right. Thank you so much, everyone. John, turn us off.
The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
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https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Discover the top Real Estate Website themes on ThemeForest for 2024. Elevate your online presence with these stunning designs today.
Explore the top Real Estate Website ThemeForest themes for 2024 in our latest video. From sleek and modern designs to user-friendly features, these themes are perfect for showcasing properties in the digital age. Stay ahead of the competition by choosing the best theme for your real estate website. Watch our video now to discover the future of online property marketing!
#1 – Houzez – Real Estate WordPress Theme
https://themeforest.net/item/houzez-real-estate-wordpress-theme/15752549
Prices $69
Has 35.000 Active Customers
#2 – Residence Real Estate WordPress Theme
https://themeforest.net/item/wp-residence-real-estate-wordpress-theme/7896392
Prices $69
Has HubSpot Integration
#3 – Quarter
https://themeforest.net/item/quarter-real-estate-wordpress-theme/38621793
Price $39
#3 – Realestate7
Prices $129 | IDX plugin $79
#4 – HomePress
https://themeforest.net/item/homepress-real-estate-wordpress-theme/23980909
Prices $59
Integrates With IDX Broker and iHomefinder
#5 – Estatik
——- ——— ——— ——–
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. Today is episode number 429, and we’re continuing with a somewhat similar topic to our last one: do-it-yourself website builders. Now, we’re moving on to a review of Theme Forest and other online real estate do-it-yourself theme builders. We’re basically going to continue our conversation and review some of the places and themes from which you can get a do-it-yourself product. Do you agree with my description there, John?
I do. I do a little bit.
Today. We’re going to talk about some of the best real estate themes from Themeforce. This is a subject we’ve never covered before. It’s highly specific for some DIY-wise. We’re covering this subject because if there was ever going to be a time, now I was going to be it. Many people will be looking to cut budgets and bunker up while still trying to maintain the idea of owning their own website. This is your path to do that. John is one of the best guys to discuss this, so I’m incredibly excited to get into it. Before we do, though, John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce your sofa to the handful of people who might be tuning in for the first time?
I hope they are. I hope we’re getting some more listeners. I think we’re doing reasonably well. I’m the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. We build websites on WordPress, provide themes, and then offer semi-customized and full-customized options, plus a platform, a CRM, and a load of other digital tools that can help you get leads. Back over to you, Robert.
My name is Robert Newman. I am the founder of Inbound R-E-M, which is another real estate marketing company. We are actually a real estate marketing We focus on content and SEO, but we consider ourselves a marketing company first and a real estate website development company second. That makes us very different from most of the other companies out there. Anyway, if you want to learn more about us or what we do, just go to inboundrem. Com. It’s all over my cap. It’s in the background. You can see plenty of places. You can learn so many good things on our website. Without any further ado, let’s get drilled right into this really meaty, exciting topic for those who are looking to do it yourself. Number one on our list to talk about is a WordPress theme that I believe, if I say this correctly, is pronounced Houses, but with Zs, H-O-U-Z-E-Z. Is that right?
Well, I was hoping you could have put me correctly, but that was my assumption as well.
Okay, so for those of you who think we’re going to do something here, John, if John gives me the authority as my co-host, I would like to share the screen and look at this theme. Are you okay with that?
Yeah, sure.
Okay, so I’m going to share my screen. I’m going to go over here. Go here. There we go. All right. $69. Talk to us about this theme. It’s got 2,200 reviews, mostly five-star. Why don’t you let us know what your impressions are, John?
Yeah, it looks pretty good. I think what I’m going to say applies to most of the solutions. There are a couple here, one of which is not Theme Forest, that came to my radar. It’s supposed to have about 35 active customers, 35,000 active that bought this theme, and it’s $69. But I think you got to understand what you’re getting involved with. And as long as you know what you’re getting involved with, you’re going to be happy. If you don’t, I think you could be a little bit unhappy. And what do I mean by that? What they’re offering for $69 is quite unique because they’ve got a lot of different looks, and it’s a good value proposition. And they use Elementor as the page builder. That gives you a certain degree of flexibility. But the other factor is you’re going to need good hosting. You need to go with something like WPEngine, Kinster, LiquidWeb, Converseio, or something like that. Don’t go GoDaddy or Bluehost, because this is a theme, and it needs really good resources. And as long as you have those resources, you’re going to be reasonably happy. The other thing I would say that applies to all these is You’re getting fantastic value.
The tricky bit is, yes, you can customize them to a certain degree, but don’t go over the board with it because that leads down a warren, and you’re going to get… Don’t utilize the layouts they’re providing and do a bit of custom, changing images and moving things from the left to the right. But if you decide you’re going to start… It does provide some IDX integration with IDX plugins, but this is where things people make the mistake. If you’re going to… I don’t remember with this particular theme, which if they offer a list of IDX plugins that they reckon they work with, some of the others they do. But don’t go over bored with the IDX integration. This is a good starter idea, or if you don’t want a load of customization, you’re satisfied, you’re going to do some minor modification. And as long as you accept that and don’t spend ages trying to knock stuff around, you’re going to be happy, and I think it provides pretty good value. What do you reckon, Robert?
I mean, I agree. I do agree. We looked at an example, everybody saw me clicking around. Ben Stevens opted to use this theme, and then what he did is he had a design company, Unplug the Theme. Okay, and why would you do that? Because there are a lot of things that happen in website design that people don’t understand happen intuitively. A great example is that one of the places the web development team got in there and probably customized it is this little thing right here, this thing in the middle. The digital market of the year, the client testimonials. It’s not necessarily true that this theme is going to have this as the layout. As a matter of fact, they say on the store websites designed by our customers. So in those cases, you’re talking about, so here’s one in the US that’s relevant to us, rianmelcher. Com. And so what he did is he figured out how to take the house’s theme and plug in a video into the background, probably using Elementor, as you already said, to do this. And then he created this whole entire site. And in terms of $69 for a theme, hell, yeah, I like that.
That’s a great price. If you can unpack it and design it, if you have any skills whatsoever working with WordPress, then it’s a hell of a price. But if you don’t have skills, you’re going to spend that money on assistance to unpack this thing and customize most of these things.
Yeah, you’re so right. It’s difficult to explain, folks. If you can… It’s known when to stop. Accepting that this is a bridgehead, this is a way to get a reasonably good website up and running for $69 plus your hosting. And if you want IDX, we’ll start doing a lot of customization. I think you want to hire somebody like Robert or come to MailRight or whoever you choose and find out the options. I wouldn’t recommend that if you have budget, that you don’t find what the options are rather than going down, which can turn out, I’m not saying about this particular theme, but can, with these theme forest themes, can turn into a little bit of a nightmare if you push it too far? Based on my experience, Robert.
I used to build out other people’s themes, and we created our own. I went through this whole experience where you think when you’re looking at this, you look at the pages that are being designed and being offered a listing metacomposer, a property details page, a half map page, and you think to yourself, this should do the trick. Then you discover there are 10, 15, 20 other pages that are maybe small pages, contact forms I can go on, little pages you don’t realize you need. And by the time you get into those pages, you start to understand no matter what, you probably have to hire assistance unless you are a reasonably skilled online person, which I thought I was and I couldn’t do it. Full stop. I thought I was reasonably skilled and discovered that I could not get what I wanted to do with these themes. I ended up having to hire people to roll out of… Or let me rephrase, I could do it, but what took me 16 hours would take somebody else 30 minutes.
True story. I think also with page pages coming online, the situation has got a little bit But also the sophistication of what… What happens, folks, is you choose one of these, and then you see about three or four other people’s websites, somebody in your office or somebody in your region. And it’s a semi-complete different look, and you try and modify this look to match the look of something else, or there’s one particular theme in look in this theme because they provide a load of different layouts. And you get one that looks semi, but not really. And then you go down the warren where you’re trying to customize it all to look like this one that you really like. I can tell you, folks, don’t do it. You’re going to waste a ton of time. Listen to Uncle Jonathan, don’t save yourself a load of money in that, bro. Don’t go there. You’re better off hiring somebody or hiring an agency. I don’t care who it is if you want that, rather than thinking you’re going to customize something like this.
Another tricky thing that is still tricky because it’s tough to cover the subject adequately in a short little thing, but the House mentions briefly, Oh, hey, the best way to set these websites up is to integrate MLS data. Here’s the list of MLSs that we support, from what I can see here, about 50. There’s 800 MLSs in the US. Eight hundred. Fifty are covered, 5%. Not all the big ones are covered here. I can tell you already they’re missing one of the main MLSs out of Houston. So you got to, which is massive. That is a gigantic, Oh, it’s not included.
I noticed that. They don’t really talk about using IDX plugin solution which some of the others, they’re doing direct, and you’re totally right. Don’t do that, folks. Don’t go there because… Yeah, except what it is and accept it’s good value, and it’s a good start, but control your enthusiasm. Shall we go on to the next one, Rob?
Sure. Number two, residents, real estate, WordPress theme. So, John, talk to us a little bit about this one, please. I’m going to put it up on the screen for those of you who are following along.
I think it’s very similar to Hosez, whatever it’s called. One thing, it’s around the same price. I think it’s one of them. I don’t know how many downloads they’ve got, but I think it’s one of the more popular ones. So it’s probably in the tens of thousands. I quite like the look of some of their layouts. The interesting thing is a bit… When you read the… I did have a read of their documentation and that, they hammer away… This is They’re hammer away. They’re quite proud of their integration with HubSpot, Robert. I don’t quite get that because if you’re… But the truth is, folks, is that there’s a lot… This is another bit of advice here, folks. You’re better off going to Melright or going to Robert or going to some agency that specializes in real estate rather than going to a regional digital marketing agency. Because I know for a fact, because I used to work with the second largest digital agency as their web developer in Northern Nevada. And they know about online marketing, but they don’t know anything about the real estate industry. And if they get a real estate client, they actually buy one of the these themes, and then they get somebody like me to customize it, and they have a front person that works with the client, and you have to talk to your colleague, and you hammer away at it.
But they actually utilize these themes, and I worked on a couple of these projects, and you hate it as a developer working with one of these themes and hammering So be aware of that because you can be charged a lot of money and you don’t really know what you’re getting. And so I think the HubSpot thing is geared at a regional agency that has a HubSpot account that’s actually running campaigns, and they’re not this up for somebody that’s approached them. Is that make sense, Rob?
Relatively so. For those people listening to the show, HubSpot is another CRM option. It integrates incredibly well with WordPress, which is why this theme would hammer away at the idea that it integrates. It’s not very useful for most real estate agents because in general, unless you’re using your CRM to do emails and things like that, it’s probably killing a mouse with a bazooka. For a very small set of tech-forward real estate agents, a WordPress-themed combo with HubSpot, which is exactly what I use, is going to be incredibly efficient. It’s just a big learning curve for most people, not all, just most. If you’re thinking, Oh, I know tech, I know CRMs, then this might be exciting for you. In terms of what John said as a general God, do I agree? The last thing in the world that I wanted to do, John, was build my own theme for Inbound R. E. M. That’s the truth. I didn’t want to do it at all. It was so much work and so much money. We spent over two years building and revising our theme, and I wouldn’t even be able to tell you how much money I spent keeping my developer employed full-time, basically working at The problem was that every single time we came across something that we felt like we needed to do to do well for SEO, we discovered that we had to custom develop it into the theme, like threading IDX broker search results into the theme so that we can get some pages read with property data on it automatically so our clients didn’t have to automatically upload properties.
It’s probably one of the first biggest things that we did. None of these themes allow for that, and none of the themes allow you to break into the code the right way to integrate that idea into the theme. And that’s just the biggest thing. But we’re talking all sorts of things, like how does mobile work, how does responsive work? The answer is for a novice, for a basic person, they work just fine. But if you were ever an advanced person spending, let’s say you did call me to hire me, now that’s a $20,000 decision. Do you put 20 grand on top of a theme like this? Not in my opinion.
That’s the whole point I was making. If you go to a regional professional marketing agency and you’re prepared to spend 20,000, there’s a lot of them that are going to be utilizing these themes. I know for a fact.
And that would be problematic to everybody that’s listening to the show. You’d be much better served if you find yourself in that position to call John or I, or if you happen to know anybody, other experts that specialize in real estate, by all means call them. But John and I are probably the best bet, especially if you’re listening to our show.
Do you think I’m right in saying that? Because I’m basing it. It was about eight, nine years ago when I gave up working for your job. I think so, yeah. I think probably the same thing still applies now, don’t you think so?
Yeah, because to customize and develop a theme from scratch, if you call an agency, you’re talking like 20 grand. Other than that, we’re all regurgitating either off our own our own themes or somebody else’s, for sure, you know how much time and energy it takes to develop one of these things. It’s a pain in the ass. Not only do you have to design the pages, everybody, you have to design the code, the hooks that are going to integrate into real estate-specific functionality. Like MLS and IDX data is the easiest to point at, but there’s lots of other ancillary features that you might look at, such as calendars, weather widgets, all sorts of other things that you might try to integrate. Do you want to build a property module? That’s a big one. The list goes on and on. But anyway,.
You just got to know what you’re getting involved for $69 like the other one. It provides a lot. But just understand what you should use, utilize it for, in my opinion. Yeah, on to the next one. Shall we go?
Well, before we go, before we do that, we’re going to go to break really quick. Ladies and gentlemen, listen, do us a favor, bookmark this, share this, go to the MailRight YouTube channel, wherever you find this content. Give it a thumbs up, a thumbs, a like, if it’s on a Facebook page, same there. Have any questions for us? Please drop those questions on the Facebook page. Or you can… John, if somebody wanted to email you, how would they do that? You can email John directly.
Yeah, sure. Go to jonathan, Jonathan@mail-right. Com.
Honestly, everybody listening to the show If you have very specific single install questions about WordPress or WordPress questions in general, I, honest to God, feel like John is the better resource between the two of us. If you have SEO questions, you’d want to reach out to robert@inboundrem. Com. I feel like I’m one of the better resources that you could talk to about that stuff. If you have a blend of questions, pick either one of us. Probably can each do as equally of a good job getting into the other person’s expertise. We’re going to go to break. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the MailRight Show. It’s episode number 429. We’re doing a deep dive on a couple of places that you can buy, do it yourself, The best places, best real estate websites from Theme Forest and other online recourses is the exact title of this show. We’re going to dive right into it with number three on the list, which is And I’m going to pull it up for those of you who are viewing this. I’m pulling it up on a screen share. So, John, go ahead, jump in.
Quarter. Yeah, I got quarter..
Yeah, it’s not that many, but it’s $39. But like you say, 83 sales on Theme Forest isn’t a lot. It looks okay to me, but I think it depends if the looks they’re providing, because like I said in the first half, it’s all right If you’ve played around with WordPress, you think you can get one of these themes set up. They do provide a lot of these themes with one click, and it will put dummy content up. They have elements that make getting the website up and running a lot easier. And you do have to change the copy that they provide. You’d be highly recommended to do it. A lot of it’s Latin. And then they also suck in other free plugins, get the whole thing set up for you. And if you’ve played around with WordPress before, I think you can stand a good chance of getting up and running. If you’re a complete beginner, I think it’s going to be a learning curve. And if you think you’re not interested in any of this, I wouldn’t bother because you’re going to get frustrated. But it does depend who you are. But like I say, like you pointed out, it’s not bad, but they haven’t got many downloads, have they?
No, they haven’t got many downloads. I personally would look at that with… I would examine my options very carefully is how I would treat that. We’ve got quite a few. As usual, we salted through some comments earlier in the show. For those of you just joining us after the break, you really need to listen to what we said about number one because we really had a lot of comments that are going to absolutely we apply to every single one of these themes on the list. But let’s jump into the next one. It’s Real Estate 7. I’m pulling it up on the screen for those of you who are following along. John, why don’t you share your thoughts about this one?
Yeah, I didn’t get this from It was a dream for us, but I got it off a few websites, and I watched some videos that have been done in the past six, seven months about recommendations. And one of the recommendations was this. And it’s a mixed bag, really, because it’s a bit like… They’re often a bit like Mel Wright, but Mel, I pitched. It took me a couple of years to work out what I was doing with Mel Wright, probably a little bit longer than that. But it’s a WordPress competitor to real geeks, really, with a bit of Agent Fire thrown into the mixture as well. So that’s our two main competitors, because we can do nice-looking websites, and we offer a lot of the functionality that real geeks provides. This is a competitor to Melright, but I don’t think it offers all the stuff that we offer, because they offer their own IDX plugin for $79, and they offer to… You can buy a one-time license for $59, but then they offer a subscription which is $129 per year. I’m not too sure what you’re getting for that. I think you’re getting more designs where If you just buy the ’59, you just get the designs that they’re offering that particular purchase.
That ‘129 doesn’t include the hosting. But then they’re offering this ‘IDX’ plugin for ’79. I would be cautious about that because I think building an effective IDX plugin is a bloody lot of work. I’ve never used it, so I can’t comment on it. What do you reckon, Robert?
I recommend… Like with most of these services and themes, here’s what I really think. Most of you, almost 90, 78% of you will need some help to make money, an ROI off any of this. If all you’re trying to do is teach… Here’s who I think has just got the sweet spot. Let’s say you’re a younger tech-savvy agent who has some money to spend, but not much, and you’re trying to save money, but also prepare for a bright future in your real estate career. Getting to know WordPress and building a WordPress site and investing this money in this time, strikes me as an incredibly savvy investment because most likely you’re going to find either a partner like me or John, or you’re going to figure out how to do it yourself. But one way or the other, you’re going to make a very good decision to learn WordPress. This is as good of a start as any. I do not like the CRM extension’s bottle for $399 a year. I’d be hesitant to spend the CTIDX Pro Plus for $79 a month. The real estate seven WordPress theme at $129 a year with the reviews I briefly read It seems to be a good deal.
I don’t like all of the add-ons unless, of course, you’re really knowledgeable about what you want and what you need and you think this is going to suit you. I doubt it’s going to, is my opinion. But CMS messaging, you can get it from $1.99 yearly. All of this stuff that they’re adding in or throwing in so casually, you can just easily integrate with HubSpot for $50 a month, and they’re charging you per year. So right off the top, without even looking too deep into this, I think that if you’re just sticking with the theme, you’re going to be well-served. They’re also saying it’s SEO friendly. That is a particular pet peeve of mine, John, is that people who, because it’s a keyword, because they know people are asking, they’re like, It’s SEO friendly. What the fuck does that mean?
I don’t even know. It’s a political statement. It means Everything means nothing.
It looks to mean with what they’ve got over here, like, Oh, we’re going to show listings on the site, which means that you might get a small boost in your local. And that is true. Negligible. Every single person that has a real estate website If the listing is on, it is going to get the same boost. So is it really going to do you much of anything? No. But hey, it’s SEO friendly. I don’t know. Don’t like that language, but whatever. They’ve got to put it. I think they’re required. Let’s move on, though, because we’ve got a few more to cover and a little bit of time to do it. Home press number 4 is on your list, and I’m once again pulling it up and sharing it.
Yeah, very similar price to the first two, 59 I don’t know how many downloads, because I think this is a theme for us as well. So I don’t know how many download. But they do talk about IDX plugins, and the two they talk about-3,541. Yeah, it’s not bad, is it? No. It’s not 30,000, but it’s respectable, isn’t it? They do talk in their blurb about integrating with IDX plugins, IDX Broker and i Home Finder. They’re the two that we only work with. We prefer IDX Broker, but I have got a couple of sites where they wanted to keep utilizing what they had, which was i Home Finder, and it’s okay. And they do talk about it, where the first two, they don’t actually talk about it. And then you got, or the first three, and then you got this Reer State 7, where they’re providing their own IDX plugin, which I know nothing about. And the layouts, they don’t look bad, do they? I don’t think.
No, they look okay. Again, I think that when you find something that looks good to your eye in any of these designs, you’re probably going to be doing well.
Yeah, the other problem, unless you’re this young type agent, people look at these setups, which you can automatically input, and you’ve got no decent photography of yourself. You’ve got no decent photography of your team. Your logo is crap, and you’re not prepared to spend even $500 or you can’t on a decent logo. I think that’s improved because there are AI and other low-cost logo producers that can produce a reasonable logo. It won’t have the eye and the consultancy of somebody that actually knows what they’re doing. But you get a lot of agents that will… Or you’re just better off just using text if you can’t, but just don’t get your nephew that reckons he can knock something up for you because it will look awful. And they also haven’t got the photography, or the photography is really crap because you know and I know to hire… You can hire a photography student or somebody that’s on a course. There’s ways of reducing the cost. But if you’re in If the stuff you’re importing to customize it is rubbish, the outcome will not match these examples that they’re giving you because… And you can, but there’s ways around it.
You can use the livestock photography as well. There’s AI-generated photography. There’s a lot more choices. But that’s the other problem. A lot of people, they Because they haven’t got the budget or they just don’t understand, when they start adapting it, putting their own photos up, blah, blah, blah, it ends up looking messy, if you know what I mean, Robert.
Yeah. Here’s some thoughts. So far, guys, the place I’ve been most impressed by was the real estate seven theme that pulled us off the site because the reviews were a little bit easier to access. They We said a lot more important things in the brief time I read them, such as immediate response. When you are using one of these themes, I think it’s important to point out that you’re almost always going to have questions. Either one, there’s a lot of tutorials and documentation that’s provided. Envato, which is too big to be super custom, may or may not have the proper support for your specific theme available, videos. Getting a hold of somebody specifically might be a little tough. Making Real Estate 7, so far, my favorite of all these things, not because I have an opinion about the theme, the design, the pictures, or any of the things you’ve really talked about, but because there were a couple of reviews where people said that they got a hold of Richard, the guy who designed the theme, in minutes, and there was more than one review that said that. That could be important, but it just depends on you.
It’s to the images and everything, of course, you’re correct. This is your Baylywick. Do I have a lot of opinions? It’s too custom. I would go client to client, make recommendations about images. Images can be a major SEO signal. What John says, really, I cannot emphasize enough in terms of marketing a good picture, just like everybody, I think, instinctively knows, a good picture can be worth a lot of money to your business. On your website, on your properties page, on your listing page, if you take the time or hire a good partner, it could really pay you back. There is some very small work that you need to do to make that investment payoff, though, that falls directly into the SEO bucket. For that, go to my website and look up optimizing images, and you’ll get all the answers for free. All right, number 5 on the list, esthetic. I love that name, Static. You once again pulled this off a separate website, correct?
Yeah, it was one of the recommendations of the research I did. Do you want to get it out? Do you want to get it out?
I dropped in. It dropped out.
Oh, dear. Well, I quite like this one as well. Hold on.
Let me delete some of these options so I can find it easier in terms of tabs.
Yeah, I quite liked it. I’m getting it up on my end. Yeah, a lot of layouts. The Layouts looked a little bit dated, a little bit, but they got maps and other things. It’s just that the themes looked They’re… Yeah, it just looked a little bit dated look. A lot of white space, but I think it’s It’s designed for somebody that can customize it a bit, so they left it a bit bare-bone, if you know what I mean. I think they got reviews, It’s like- Another one being built with Elementor, which I find to be a positive.
We use Elementor. It’s not that it’s the only tool out there, but it is a good one. There are others, Bricks, others that I’ve read about, but I like I’m a mentor, personally.
Yeah, there’s nothing… I’m not one of these Elementor heaters. I’m not at all. They actually got a free site, a small site, and then they got a pro for 89, and then they got 649. I think that’s 12 months, one site. I don’t know exactly what you’re getting for that.
Mostly it’s a RETs integration.
Yeah. They got this those rats. You want to explain quickly what that is?
Well, it’s an older standard that is… All right. It used to mean that there was a It was the type of real estate website data that was being fed out into the world at large, that if you could read that data, it was absolutely going to give you the ability to have more of your property data be recognized as original and on the page of the website. Essentially. So Rets feed was originally, but it’s not being supported universally anymore.
And then you got this other one, Rets go Web API, which is the more up to date version, isn’t it?
Yes, it is. I’ll read you what it says on the page. The Reso Web API is the modern way to transport data in the real estate industry. Transport data, okay? That That just means that we want to give data to the website. This reso oftentimes goes to the MLS. To do it directly to your site means that you would be using the same data transfer technology that your actual MLS is using. There are rare cases in which this makes sense. I don’t think that building it out with a theme provider would ever make sense, but they could easily sell it to you in such a way that it’s going to sound like it makes sense. Because you could take IDX data and make a stab at making that data look proprietary to your website. Now, that’s actually trickier than it sounds in my experience, John.
Just a bit.
Right.
That was a little bit of English sarcasm.
It’s easy to sell and incredibly difficult to deliver. I love what the website looks.
Do not go down that route by buying this, Phoebe. If you’re going Don’t go down that route; hire Robert or come to Melright or go somewhere else that knows what they’re talking about. Do not go down that route. Accept these solutions for what… There is a sweet point for a particular type of person, which can give you a lot of value. If you’re not the person that Robert described, or you expect too much, there’s a difference in you taking a theme and just customizing it a little bit. There’s a difference between that and semi-full customization. What does that mean? That is taking a framework or a theme and then an agreed number of pages or elements you customize, that’s semi-customised. Then there’s full customization: you consult the client, and it’s a white screen, and you give them whatever they want. That’s fully customized. Just understand these are good value options if you’re the right person at the right moment, because it’s best to utilize one of these rather than what the brokerage will provide. But understand the limits. If you know the limits, you will be a happy bunny.
If you don’t, this could turn into a very frustrating experience.
We’re running out of time. Well, we’re 39 minutes into this. We have one more name on the list. I would typically add some stuff I’m not going to anymore. Let’s go to number 6, WP Rinsals, the last one on your list, John, and I’m going to pull it up.
Oh, it’s not there.
Yeah, okay.
We won’t talk about that one because I made a mistake, maybe. So shall we wrap? I think we’ve gone on in 40 minutes. Can you wrap it up, Robert?
Yeah, absolutely. So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I understand, and I think that John does as well. Doing it yourself is somewhat complicated. It inherently involves learning. You’ll have to look at some people, probably not John or me; neither of us produces long-form, tutorial-based content about unpacking and creating a real estate website. You may need to watch a few of those videos to make this a doable thing for you to even do it. The only advantage to all of this is you really could, with a little bit of learning and time, unpack a reasonably high-quality fee for under $100 and get a website live on WordPress. org, and then maybe $8 a month. Theoretically, you could do the whole thing for $250. It would probably be like 100 or $200 of your time, but you could do it for a very low outlay of capital. That’s who this is aimed at. Anything further, I strongly recommend that you probably reach out to John first, me second, If you have a sub interest in SEO, maybe me second. Just the idea of doing this in general. John’s the guy who’s been doing this for years.
Like he already said, he’s been contracted by local agencies. He’s got another WordPress-based company that he does for learning management systems, so he has a vast degree of experience and years of experience now in real estate specifically. With that wind-up, John, if somebody did want to reach out to you, how would you like them to do it?
I’ll just go to the Mail-Right.com website, and you can book a chat with me there. Back to you, Rob.
I’ve built about 200 high-end real estate SEO projects, so a real estate website, and then we focus on SEO. They’re obviously not doing it yourself. There’s a reasonable price tag attached to it. You can find out all that information on inboundrem.com if you’re curious. If you want to, you can email me directly at robert@inboundrem. com. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. We appreciate it. There’s nothing more important than trying to be helpful. If we can do that better, you can email me or call John or either email John. Thank you so much for tuning in. John, take us offline.
We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Discover the top WordPress page builders for real estate websites in 2024. Transform your online property showcase with ease and style.
Are you ready to take your real estate website to the next level in 2024? Uncover the most powerful WordPress page builders tailored to showcase properties effectively. Learn how these cutting-edge tools can enhance user experience and boost engagement on your site. Dive into our video now and start building a standout online platform for your listings!
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. Today’s episode is number 428. Is that right, John? Yeah. Okay. Today, we will discuss the best WordPress do-it-yourself builders to build your real estate website in 2024. It’s a fantastic subject. It plays so profoundly to my partner’s expertise. I’m incredibly excited about what I hope all of you will be excited about because I know I will learn from John today, and I’m super duper into it because this is not my expertise. I have some knowledge, but nothing compared to John. So, John, without any further ado, for those people who may not know your qualifications on this subject or who you are in general, why don’t you go ahead and do an introduction?
Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail-Right.com, and we build fantastic WordPress websites. We also provide a CRM landing page text and email lead generative platform all in one bundle. Over to you, Robert.
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to We’re going to look at John’s notes. For those of you who are new to the show, John does the production on the show, and I act as an industry influencer host. Now, I’ve been doing this for 16 years. John is slightly newer into it. But John has been a WordPress entrepreneur for a long time and has built quite a few websites. He has another company that creates learning management systems on WordPress. He has a podcast that is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly popular called WP-Tonic, which is about WordPress, essentially. Is that correct?
Yeah, it’s aimed at the WordPress professional and SaaS bootstrapper.
Okay, so definitely. And John’s guest list, some of the people that John has had the chance to meet and talk about on this other show, have literally made my mouth drool. It’s just a male writer, specifically for real estate professionals, whereas WP-Tonic has slightly brought our audience. So having said all that, just getting into this, I’ve never even heard of the first person that you put on here. And you also took the time to put in the notes, Gutenberg-based page builders. So before we get into that, will you please do us all a favor, myself included, and explain what Gutenberg is?
Yeah. About six years ago, six to seven years ago, WordPress ran it. Matt Manweg, who’s the joint founder, has a commercial company called Automatic. They have managed to get quite a large investment. I think it’s around $900 million into Automatic. But WordPress is a strange hybrid where it’s open source, but it also has a lot of reliance on this company called Automatic. And Matt Manweg said that WordPress has to move forward. They developed this internal page website builder, which is called Gutenberg, which has been an ongoing project. Based on this core technology called Gutenberg and blocks, blocks are like sections that you can drag off. Based on this technology, third-party plugins build on this Gutenberg technology. And why you should care is that it’s much quicker than many of the other solutions out there. And I think Rob would confirm this, that one of the major… It’s only one thing, but it’s a significant thing that Google looks for is a very speedy website. So if you’re looking to build something that’s your real estate website, and you’re looking for something that is based on core WordPress, and that’s also speedy, looking at a Gutenberg-based solution probably might be a good idea.
Yeah, I agree. So, ladies and gentlemen, I also build on WordPress and create a real estate website like John, but I use WordPress as my base platform. I’m just not as familiar with the… I have a developer team that I work with, and I focus on SEO. So yes, speed is important, things like that. Page builders are essential, but here’s how I view for their importance. It’s ease of use. It’s like the CRM conversation. Websites and CRMs are only as good as the people and their ability to use them. I use page builder plugins that build on top of Gutenberg. I know that sounds confusing, But it just makes everything easier. The easier that something gets, but unfortunately, some of these paid builders, like the one I use, Elementor, slow the site down a little bit. So you lose some of the speed but gain ease of use. One way or the other, though, Gutenberg is of many, many different decisions that Matt has made. Gutenberg is another good one. Execution with so many things in tech is another question, in my opinion. It’s not that he isn’t doing the right thing, it’s just how he’s executing it.
It’s a little bit shaky, in my opinion, just my opinion. John’s much… Again, I got to keep in mind, this is definitely somebody else’s expertise. Let’s talk about the number one. Again, for those guys who are listening to the show, we’re doing a show that we’ve never done before. If you want to go ahead and build your own website, these are some On WordPress, these are some people that you might consider. Number one on the list, put there by John, is CadenceWP. I don’t even know who these guys are. John, why don’t you tell us a little bit about them?
Yeah, Cadence. It’s owned by a hosting company, actually. Cadence started off with a very talented developer called Ben, and he lives in Montana with his family. And he built a very large theme-based business. And he got into Gutenberg early and built this framework, this theme, based on Gutenberg technology, and he built a really fantastic business. Then he was offered to come to Liquid Web. Liquid Web is quite a large hosting company. It’s actually probably larger than WP engine, actually. He sold his business, but he’s the head of Cadence, and he’s the head developer. I know Ben, he’s very talented, and he’s built on Gutenberg technology, and it’s a FAB framework. One of the attractive things is it comes with a very large library of predesign templates. I think they do have one or two that are designed for real estate agents. I would have to confirm that. In the near future, we’re going to be offering about six to a dozen themes that have been specifically designed for real estate. Sure. That is based on Cadence technology at Mailright. We’re in the process of developing them and testing them. But you probably could take one of their general themes and and adapt it.
And as long as you weren’t attempting to do a lot of customization with the IDX feed, as Robert utilizes and recommends, so does Melright, we recommend IDX Broker. And as long as you’re not attempting to customize what IDX Broker produces, or you’re going to have to hire somebody to help you do that. I think you could produce a really nice website, even if you weren’t utilizing a directly designed starter theme, which is the wording that Cadence utilizes. And it’s going to be very unreasonably good quality hosting. It’s going to be super quick. So I like it. Beautiful.
I know nothing about them, so I’m not going to say anything. I love all the history. I’m a big fan of it. So thanks for sharing what the background of Cadence is. I will say this just to add a thought. For those of you who are on the show or listening to the show, in my experience only, and once again, John, you can jump in if you have a definitively different opinion, but I think that Even though there is a tremendous amount of advertising that says that just anybody can build a DIY WordPress site. I’ve built plenty myself. I’ve never found that just anybody can do it. I’ve usually found it to be a big learning process, no matter how simple it was to unpack the theme, no matter… I never found it to be… It’s not a novice’s game. There should be some in my opinion, because without it, there’s all sorts of questions that come up. You got to upload it to a hosting place. I built a site on WordPress, the hosting environment, wordpress. Org. That was a whole learning experience for me, John. I didn’t know that you need to do any of that.
When you unpack the theme and then discover that there’s all the stuff inside the theme, and then you get introduced to the idea of plugins. I’m like, What’s a plugin? What’s a bloody slug? Wordpress has created all this language around their specific website build that’s actually not standard. They’re making it industry standard, but if you don’t know it already, I found it to be a huge amount of learning, even to do the Unplug It, Do It Yourself product. Do you disagree or do you agree, or are you just so deep in the trenches, you just have no idea what I’m talking about?
Oh, everything you’ve stated. I think utilizing a modern framework like Cadence or one or two of the others we’re going to talk about. And there’s non-Gutenberg WordPress-based. You’ve mentioned one, Elemator. I’m going to discuss that. I actually think Apart from the hosting side, I think utilizing something like Cadence or one of the other solutions isn’t really that much more difficult than utilizing Wix or Squarespace, who are SaaS competitors, software as a service competitors. Really? But no, I don’t honestly think utilizing one of these is a lot more difficult apart from setting it up and getting the hosting side of it. Okay. Besides setting it up. Pardon?
I said besides setting it up. That’s a huge disclaimer.
Well, a lot the hosting, the specialized WordPress hosting, have a one-click install, and then you just upload the theme. I can tell you for a fact that certain elements of Squarespace, certain elements of Wix aren’t as easy as their advertising makes out, because we regularly get people that utilize these platforms and they decide to go to WordPress. In some ways, I think it swings and roundabouts, Robert.
Okay. I’ll keep saying it, you’re definitely the expert in this space. I I can only speak from some limited experience, and then what am I going to say?
If you’re going to be really challenged to get something up on Squarespace, or you’re going to be really challenged to get something up on Wix, your You’re definitely going to be a bit more challenged with WordPress, but utilizing Cadence or one of the others is, I’m comparing what it was like five or six years ago, and it’s definitely moved on and easier easier to do than it was five or six years ago. But like I say, if you’re going to be challenged with something like Squarespace or Wix, you’re definitely going to be a little bit more challenged getting it up with WordPress.
Okay. I’m going to say, and our challenge as host, ladies and gentlemen, is that I’ve got an ever-increasing number of people that are calling me, John, I’m thrilled to say, after I’ve seen years of doing this, that more and more of them have some technical knowledge. But the amount of calls that I’ve taken from inside the real estate space where somebody even struggles to check their email is like, there are way more than I think many other industries, way more. And so when you’re like, Oh, it shouldn’t be… And you’re not really saying it that way, but it’s like, Yeah, for some people, just the idea… I the word content management system, and they go, What are you talking about?
Yeah, but beggers can’t be choosers. If you haven’t got the budget to hire something like Melright or hire Robert or hire, you’re really tight. But you know you need to get, and you haven’t got the money to spend a load of money in IDX customization, but you need to get something up because you know it will be beneficial, but it’s got to look really decent These are cost-effective solutions. Like I say, beggers can’t be choosers. If you haven’t got the budget and you feel there’s a need to get your own website, this is one of the more cost-effective ways where you can get IDX also if you want to pay for it. But obviously, I think hiring a professional, hiring Robert, or you to look at the Melright platform, which is all based on WordPress technology, is a really good idea. But there’s a market for the DIY, isn’t it?
There really is. Let’s put a pin in it. We’re going to come back. John is going to continue to share some of his brilliant thoughts with everybody. When we come back from break, we’ve got three more recommendations on our list for you. John is going to walk you through them and list the pros and cons as it relates to some of these other platforms. We got a lot of great content. If By the way, if you are in the position that John just said, you’re really tight using his language, listen, this is the show for you because you don’t have a lot of options. You don’t have a lot of content producers like us trying to explain to you what you’re really really beginning low cost budget options are. We’re super excited to get into it. Stay tuned. Three, two, one. All right, welcome back to episode number 428. John has really decided to be of service to the world at large today, and he’s sharing his years and years and years worth of WordPress knowledge. And he’s running through some of the do it yourself builders that are very low cost, how to put up WordPress, and he’s doing a review on them.
This is strictly for those of you who might be at the beginning of your career, low budget, not yet in a place where you can recommend using a vendor of any kind, this would be a place you can go to, theoretically, number one, get a website up. And Number two, this is the one thing I agree with strongly. Why would somebody do this? In my opinion, it’s about you train and condition yourself to use a good content management system. Because later on, you can always hire a guy like, John might be the first person you consider, and then maybe a while later, you might consider me. Because we’re just doing different types of products. We’re both using WordPress, though. We’re both using this platform. If you’re already used to it, it is actually going to be easier easier and easier and easier to hire other people in the WordPress world to work with you. You’re going to find it simple. John, without any further ado, that you’ve got a remaining three people to talk about. What’s number two on the list?
I’m going to go through all three of the Gutenberg, and then you can remark, and it hopefully gives us enough time to go through the non-Gutenberg quickly. So quick, Spectra. Spectra is a bit cadence. Specter is owned by a company called ASTRA. Astra are big in Alimator and Gutenberg. They provide… It’s very similar to Cadence. There are some differences, but I’m not going to go into them now, but they’re very similar. Cadence has about 700,000 active users, and I think Specter has about 400,000 active users. They both provide free and paid. I would look at the paid version. I personally think Cadence is a little bit better than Specter, but there are people that would say Specter is better than Cadence. They’re both quality companies. I think probably Specter, especially Ashtra, do have a few more themes, starter themes that are aimed at real estate agents. On to the next one, Generate Blocks. I know the developer, it’s a privately-owned company, smaller than the first two, but he’s been in the WordPress space and running this company for a number of years. It really appeals to the more professional web designer because they don’t provide a lot of starter themes, but the code it produces and the speed it produces, the basic way you build or edit a website is going to be similar to Cadence and Spectra, but they don’t offer a lot of starter themes.
But if you look at the code, it’s super quality and it’s super quick. And he’s adding, I think it’s just come out. He’s come out with a more class. This is web development talk, a class-based system that makes it more appealing to the professional developer and makes it even more quick and powerful. And the last one is max blocks. These people were big in the divi world and still are, and it’s one of the solutions that’s non-Gutenberg that we’re going to talk about. And they’ve produced and they’ve put a ton of work. And it’s the total opposite of Generate Blocks because they got, even with the free products, and the paid product is very reasonably priced. They offer… They’ve got about 300, 400 template starter themes in their library. I don’t know if any of them are specifically designed for real estate, but they’ve got an enormous library and they’re gaining market share. They’re nothing like Spectra or Cadence, but they are because they’re offering so much for free and even in the pro version, even a lot more. Like I say, they’ve got hundreds and hundreds of well-designed starter themes. That offer quality, that’s quite amazing.
Because of their background in divvy in all those years, even though they’re a small team, I don’t think you’re going on much of a gamble. They’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money to get where they’re going. They’re the Gutenberg solutions that I would recommend. Shall we go on to… You got a comment before we go on to the non-Gutenberg page builders?
No, I mean, I could make some, but no, we got a lot more to cover, a little amount of time. Let’s get into it.
So the non-Gutenberg, these are plugins that you installed that are not based on this Gutenberg core WordPress technology. And the big daddy, the big guerrilla is Alimator. Alimator really Elemator. Elemator, yeah. Elemator. They really dominate. They were one of the first that really got into the page, the non-code, drag and drop page builder. The one before them that had a large market share and still has is Divi. But Elemator really took off because It was the first in the market. Now, until recently, the problem with Alimentor was that the code quality wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t fantastic. It produced a lot of additional code to produce this drag and drop environment, which they were one of the first to develop. You overcome it, but you can overcome it by just provide them really good hosting, like WP engine or my other business, we provide hosting that WP tonic. We instill support Elementor, and we offer it. But we’ve got more Gutenberg. And also recently, they changed their core technology to something called flex box. And they’ve done this to reduce the amount of code necessary to produce a certain page or website layout, and that offers the prospect of it being quicker.
But I think they’re running almost, I think it’s 10 to 14 million websites that are active users of the product. There’s quite a few millions upon millions of people utilizing it. I think as long as you got good quality hosting, that’s probably going to cost you between $20 to $40 a month. You’re going to get around some of the performance problems that Elementor can produce. Got any response to that?
We use Elementor on our installs. We swear by it. It’s a fantastic tool. There’s a thousand things you can do with it if you have the agency model. The saving of a lot of design elements inside Elementor, so it’s all drag and drop, allows us to create a specific experience for our customers that relates to real estate, different search bars, different design elements, which we actually do leverage all the time. It allows us to do a fairly advanced semi-custom site in incredibly reasonable amount of time, lowering the cost and lowering the cost of acquisition for a fairly customized website with an actual set of designers and marketing people behind it. A drag and in this whole world that we’re living in right now, John, it eliminates the perceived value of UX and UI specialists. What I like about Elementor is it can take a UI guy like myself. I don’t have a lot of technical skill sets as they would normally be related, but I am creative and I’m very good at user interface. Obviously, that’s an SEO skill set, which most people don’t understand. It’s not so much like it’s something pretty It’s ease of use.
Is it natural? Does it navigate well? Do you want to click on it? Things like that. That’s all user interface. And so Elementor gives me so many options for user interface. I can go through my palette of 10 design options for a homepage, like 10 search boxes as an example. But if I don’t want to use the 10, we can always have the designer design another one and put it in Elementor, or a client can point out an element that they like on somebody else’s site. We can decide whether or not we want to keep it as a permanent addition to our design tool kit inside Elementor. Theoretically, our clients can use the same design kit at any time, basically allowing us to be a a version of a square for our own clients, but yet at the same time be a bespoke agency. I love Elementor. That’s the bottom line. Let’s go on to the next one. Number 6, Divi.
Divi was on the market before Elementor. Still extremely popular. The owner and the team behind Divi are some of the best marketers that I know in the WordPress space. Their SEO, their ability, their content they produce, the video they produce, they really know. These are online marketing animals, as I’m concerned. The owner really knows his target audience. A lot of DIY people still love Divi, and there’s a lot of graphic designers that still love Divi. The basic technology does not produce fantastic code. You need quality hosting if you’re going to run a Divi website, in my opinion, but it’s got a fanatical law following, and it’s got a lot of themes that it provides. There’s a lot of third-party themes. They are attempting to move to Gutenberg technology. They have been saying that they’re going to be doing this for almost three years. They have got it in beta, but they haven’t managed to release it to the public. Yet. People are wondering if they ever are going to be able to, but we have to see. The next one is Bricks. Bricks has become the darling of the website freelancer WordPress agency who doesn’t like Animator.
It’s I wouldn’t recommend it for a DIY individual unless they want… It’s a real hobby being mucking around with websites, but it’s enormously powerful. It has a drag and drop. It gives you total control. The code it produces is some of the best that I’ve ever seen produced by a page builder. When I became a web developer, you had to hand code things, and the standard of code it produces is very similar to somebody. If you looked at the code of somebody that had built a website that knew what they were doing. Very clean code, It’s a powerful builder. Like I say, for the freelancer, for the web agency who don’t like Alimator, but there’s loads of agencies like Rob, the one that Robert owns, and there’s loads of agencies that just love Alimator, and I’m agnostic about it because I think they all have their strengths and weaknesses. And lastly, we’re going to talk, and maybe next week we’ll delve in this a bit more detail, is there’s a whole world that’s controlled by this company called Theme Forest. Now, Theme Forest is just a website, a marketplace, where third-party theme developers offer themes, plugins, all sorts.
It’s based in Australia. It’s one of the most popular and profitable WordPress properties. I think it’s a publicly limited It’s a company in Australia, I think. And there’s thousands upon thousands of themes and plugins, and there’s a lot of work, a lot of themes, aimed at the real estate agent who wants to get something up themselves, or a WordPress freelancer, or a lower-level agency at a lower price, tend to utilize these themes. Now, there’s strengths and weaknesses. Next week, I’ll be going through maybe half a dozen of the most popular Theme Forest themes. But you got to be aware what you’re getting into because there are some amazing quality solutions on Theme Forest, but there’s also a lot of trash on Theme Forest. And you could make a real big mistake by choosing the wrong solution on Theme Forest. But a lot of people in the WordPress professional area, really rubbish Theme Forest. I think I’m more realistic about it. I think it has its place. I personally wouldn’t go there, but I understand why a lot of people that on a small budget and they just want… The other thing is a lot of these bigger theme, these starter themes on Theme Forest, they have IDX integration.
It will work with a specific IDX plugin. You just got to know what you’re getting involved in, really. What do you reckon, Rob?
Well, I agree with all that. I actually I have more input about Themeforce than I do most of the subjects that you’ve covered. Don’t know most of these companies. I actually just sent brick builders over to the lead developer on my team so that he can comment on it. I like Powerful. I like the way it’s laid out. I can also tell you in the 10 seconds that I was on the site that it cannot possibly be your most adoptable DIY because there’s language on here that I struggle with, and I know what I’m talking about.
You’re talking about bricks, are you?
Yes.
Oh, yeah, bricks. It’s aimed at the freelancer.
Okay, so it’s not really a DIY.
Well, there are some DIY-ers that It’s aimed at the very knowledgeable…
I would say that this is aimed at the small business owner with the technical background. Diy, to me, in this case, would be somebody somebody who’s already a proficient digital entrepreneur and is looking for a better than average tool that they can use and is not scared of a technical product. Then maybe Bricks would be the one you look at because I haven’t heard of it.
They’ve been very aggressive on AppSumma. Appsumma is an online discounter, folks, and a lot of freelancers and web agencies spend They’re the king of the lifetime deal, AppSumma, and bricks to get traction have been very aggressive with their lifetime deals, Robert. They increased it. I bought it because it was such an attractive price, and I know the developer team behind it, Thomas. It’s based in Germany, and they’ve got a lot of experience in the WordPress space. I know he’s invested half a million dollars in de-verbing this, so they’re serious. They’ve been very aggressive with their lifetime deals, and that’s why it’s Freelancers and smaller web agencies love their lifetime deals, Robert. That’s how they’ve really got traction because they’ve been offering these lifetime deals.
It’s It’s got a lot of very relevant people giving testimonials on it, which I look at every single time I check somebody new out. And Bricks has the right pedigree in terms of who’s saying what about it, including John, by the way, first person, right pedigree. Then there would be other people with right pedigree. You do your own research. John and I are like, I don’t know about John, but I’m going to give the disclaimer. It’s like investment. Listen, we are talking about these people. We’re not really giving you advice. Make the decision that is Well, we are giving you some advice. We’re giving you input. Make your own decisions. These are all big decisions. Who you build your website on, it could be a many years relationship with this company. Theme Forest is something that I use for a while. And honestly, John, while I had to use it because I was getting started from me in a garage and one personal assistant, and that was it, it caused me a lot of problems using Theme Forest.
You got to know what you’re getting involved with. So if you’re up for it, maybe we look at some of the most popular real estate themes in the Theme Forest because I think-But I think-Yeah, go on. Hold on.
From Theme Forest, I went to Agent Evolution, the company IDX broker bought, the theme builder. I went to Agent Evolution, which is a particular theme builder. That caused me a lot of problems. You know why it kept causing me problems, everybody? Everything that John is saying that I know is almost incomprehensible to all of you; how a website is built is based very heavily on the code and how it’s built. Some load, oftentimes, things that look fine to you are not built in a way that the search engine is like or that they digest quickly or take a while. John’s referencing it in terms of web code load. But theme builders put many extraneous things in there because they’re trying to build a one-size-fits-all tool. That’s the way my developer explained it to me. I’m not professing to know this. I’m telling everybody I spend a lot of money on my guy who then tells me, Well, Robert, what they did is they put in 50 different solutions into the code, but you only need one. There are things like that that you cannot see. Anyway, John, I appreciate you sharing your expertise with us on this subject.
It’s amazing. Thank you so much for taking your time and your energy. Thank you for putting the subject together because I don’t know we’ve ever done this in four years. I think you and I have been working together on this show. Incredible, incredible. I learned a lot, and I’m still learning a lot. I’ve got everybody pulled up. I’m going to look at them when we get there.
To finish off, I think if you’re going to go down this route, I would look at the first two or an LMA tour. I would either look at the LMA tour or look at the first two, Gutenberg, Cadence, or Spectra. But I think you should stand a chance and get something up.
I’m going to sign off. If anybody would like to reach out and get more of my thoughts, I don’t have a lot of DIY thoughts on my website. I don’t talk about it much. This is a new subject. I’m going to say this. It probably sounds like I’m pooh-poohing it. I’m not. I’m not. John was 100% correct. If you’re a beginning agent and you are just getting up… I don’t know that I agree that WordPress is as easy as Square or Wix, but there’s a much deeper… John, you get to say your bit when I’m done because I know you may disagree, and that’s fine. But listen, I will say this. There is long-term thinking that goes with WordPress, which is way better than any other platform. You can build websites you own on WordPress. You can find guys like me and John who’ve done a lot with the tool and customized it. We’re probably going to give you, some of us, John and I both, are going to provide you with a lifetime license to the thing, which means you get to use it, vanadium, and you can control it way more than you can’t square Wix.
There is way more value in that if you’re interested in independence and ownership. There is way more value than that if you’re interested in SEO. All those long-term ideas work best with WordPress. That means that learning WordPress, which is a content management system at the heart of it, is the way to go with a long-term independent thinker. This means that if you wanted a baby step, let’s say you’re listening to the show and can’t afford me, you can’t even afford John, and that’s a perfectly reasonable situation. Well, then, what could you do that would still advance your career and maybe make your long-term thinking have some merit? This is it. This is a significant first step, in my opinion. That’s how I’m going to sign off. Do you want to get into it? Let’s look at a do-it-yourself builder for a couple hundred dollars a year and a minimal hosting fee. You’ll learn a lot in the process. Maybe you’ll succeed, perhaps you won’t, but the knowledge can’t be taken away from you. And you can leverage that many, many times in your real estate career, many times.
Robert@inboundrem. Com, if you’d like to reach me, John, I will turn it over to you, let you sign off, and tell people how to contact you.
Yeah, sure. I agree with everything you just said. So the best way to get it is to go to the mail-right. You can book a chat with me on the Com website. It’s right in the top navigation. We can have a quick chat and see and maybe have the opportunity to show you what Mailright does. Back over to you, Rob.
Okay. So guys, listen, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you go to John doesn’t know this, but I’ve been getting more feedback that people have been finding me on. I’ve gotten two leads in the last 30 days from people who actually saw me on the MailRight YouTube channel and then looked me up. Sometimes happening there, John. I don’t know what it is. I haven’t checked it out myself in a while, but I will say that for those of you looking at this particular show, reach out to John. If you’re a DIY or have questions, you’re trying to establish a relationship with somebody who’s in the real I’m the SEO guy. Not that John doesn’t have his skills, but this is my breath for 16 years. John has been in the DIY space, the WordPress space, for a long time, and is acknowledged by many people who know what they’re talking about as a thought leader in this category. So, reach out to him and ask your questions 100 %. I can’t say it enough. That’s what I got.
Well, we’ll go now, folks. We’ll see you next week.
All right, we’ll say no, sorry.
Bye. Bye.
Gutenberg Based Page Builders
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#4 – MaxBlocks
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#6 – Divi
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#7 – Bricks
Prices | Starter $79 yearly | Business $149 yearly | Unlimited $249
We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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2024 comparison: BoomTown vs CINC Pro – Unbiased review helps you choose the best real estate software.
Get ready for an in-depth comparison between two real estate software giants: BoomTown and CINC. In this honest review for 2024, we dissect both platforms’ features, pricing, and user experience to help you make an informed decision. You can take advantage of this comprehensive analysis that will help you choose the right tool for your real estate business.
#1 – Who is BoomTown vs CINC best aim At?
#2 – What are the key differences between these two CRM platforms?
#3 – What are these two platforms’ key strengths and weaknesses?
#4 – Regarding the functionality price matrix, which offers the best value?
#5 – What are the particular peculiarities of each platform?
#6 – Generally, what agents or brokers would get the best value from either platform?
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. John and I are excited to introduce you to episode 427 of the Mail-Right Show. Today, if you are a real estate system fan, we will be talking about sync in Boomtown. These systems aren’t going to be wildly searched right now because we’re in the middle of one of the most significant upheavals the real estate industry has ever seen. However, that will soon pass, and everybody will be coming back and circling back around for the newest, latest information on these systems. That’s what we intend to give you today: the information you will need to make a great decision about your next real estate system. We’re going to look at sync and boom town before we do. I would love it, John, if you could go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience.
Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail-right. com. We’re CRM, a lead-generative platform. We also provide fantastic-looking websites through WordPress. I’m back over to you, Robert.
Beautiful. All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we will get into sync in Boomtown. Before we do that, I want to let everybody know that while there are a lot of reviews, and we’re going to do a verbal overview today, we’re not going to look at the system; I do have two reviews up in which I got user licenses for each of these systems. I get a lot of questions, Sean, about the age of these reviews because I only update them sometimes. The reason is simple. These companies need to update their platform in meaningful ways for years and years at a time. My updates and reviews regarding what the system looks like are still 95% accurate, maybe even 97 or 98%. Can you hear it? John and I will download an informational download with our thoughts and opinions about how these systems are positioned today. John has gone ahead as he always does, done an incredible job, prepared a deep list, and The first question, which I think is brilliant, is, who is Boomtown versus sync best named at? I’m going to let you open up with your thoughts about that.
Well, personally, watching your reviews, I have actually not with Boomtown, but we actually had a couple of people helping us use sync. I have yet to get first-hand knowledge of Boomtown, only my research. I do have first-hand knowledge of sync, which is a really powerful system, ridiculously complicated. You needed a load of training—one of the persons we were working with kept complaining about the bits we supplied. I thought, You must be kidding. You have to spend almost 30 hours training with this bloody sink, and they also charge for it. I think I’m correct. They charge for the training. To utilize their enormously complicated system. And I believe Boomtown isn’t too far behind. So I think it’s really power users’ industry individual agents with a reasonably large power team or a brokerage. I really can’t; apart from those two examples, I can’t really see why somebody would use either to be quite truthful. But in those two examples I’ve given, I think their other problem, and I’ll be interested in your thoughts, is KVCORE, because the one that spent an enormous amount of money on trains with SINC.
About six months later, he went to KVCORE and moved there. I think KVCORE can run similar numbers as these. I don’t think it’s as good as either of these, but you might have a totally different opinion, so I’ll be interested in that. I go over to you, Robert.
As the years have passed, SINC has been less about a real estate lead generation system and more about a total back-end automation system. Currently, they’ve got banking integrations that are unique to them. They’ve got property management integrations. They’ve got mortgage integrations and HOA integrations, which are basically CRMs for each of those individual services. They’re far less about being a real estate lead generation system. They’re also far less about being a real estate lead generation system as it relates to everybody else, like everybody else in the industry. And they’ve got a different profile that they use for this called Sync Systems, which is connected to their real estate products. So they started with real estate products, developed all these tools in the back end to service real estate, and then spun it off into another website and another set of services. They are focusing all of their development and innovation time on integrations that don’t relate directly to the average real estate agent or even the average real estate agent. They’re going to be global. If I could best put it, they had the same idea Ben Kinney did with Place, except for their years ahead in making the nuts and bolts.
Now, Ben Kinney has all the excitement, John, and he’s raised a billion dollars for the place. But Sync has the actual tools. I only realized how much or how deep they had gone into this once I did some research for the show and realized that they’ve been doing sideways development for a while. We all know Syncpro as their lead generation system. That’s what you and I are talking about right now, synchro. Syncpro is different from some of the other stuff they’ve been doing. Syncpro has yet to update at all, like in the last few years. Syncpro is a minimal version of these tools that connects to an elementary real estate website, and it doesn’t necessarily… I’m looking through it here for updates. Here’s what I do, ladies and gentlemen, and I’ve said this, and I’ve done this, and John, I’ve done this in countless reviews. I go to the website and see what they’ve been discussing. Are they updating their customers? Are they updating their internal or external customers at all? I look for updates because if you were updating your system as you do with Mailright and had a big audience already, a big group, everything, wouldn’t you take the time to tell everybody how awesome you were doing if you were updating?
Well, their main problem, if you’re talking about sync, is their website offerings because they’re painful, as I’m concerned, even compared to KV. ‘ I think KVCore has done more than what they’ve done. That’s saying something. I’m a bit sassy today. I’ve done another podcast, and I was a bit sassy on that, so I feel pumped up. I’ve had too much coffee, Rob. It could be evil, my comments so that I might get some emails instead of Rob. So there we go. But I need help seeing, apart from the website, what much more they can do. But what they’re doing is what you laid out. They’re doing more on the integration if you’re the most prominent broker and you wanted a Swiss army knife for your back-end stuff. That’s what they’re concentrating on, aren’t they?
Yeah, definitely. And you know what? As with most of my competitors, let me say, everybody, for the sake of this article, I went in and started to read the sync blog, and they’ve definitely increased their presence there. Since they actively advertise against me at InboundREM, I feel like they’re paying attention to what I’m saying. They’re doing many things where they’re doing real estate lead value index, and that’s basically where they indicate, Hey, a dollar spent in leads is supposed to be 13% commission. I am curious to know if that metric is theirs or if they’re pulling average lead value, but I can tell you it’s a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of percentages, and I do not know a single agent making any of these numbers. I need to find out what they’re talking about. I don’t have anybody that’s pulling in a 13 to 1 ROI on PPC right now. I need to find out where they’re getting their data from. But if any of you are listening to this show, just as a quick aside, and you are getting better than 13 to 1 off a PPC budget using any lead system whatsoever, let us know.
Drop us a comment because I’d love to be proven wrong. I would love to be wrong.
So let’s go on to the next one then because we’re almost nine minutes in. So what’s the difference between the two? What’s any really fundamental differences between the two CRMs, Rob?
Oh, tons. Sync is an all-in-one, and it’s super complex. If you have got super complicated back-end payment structures that connect into your front-end sales process, so essentially very large teams with very complex financial arrangements, like many, many affiliate partners, mortgage brokers that partner with you, many people that write loans for you, many people that refer business to you. Sync is one of the hands down. If you can comb through it and create a CTO-type expert and get all the training, and You are right, they oftentimes charge for their trainings. If you can do all of that, then sync is a hands-down choice. Now, Boomtown is a simplified lead generation platform built for teams of salespeople that are small to medium size that are hunters. Everybody can see my reviews, including you, John, where I really drill deep down into that and lay a foundation for why I say that, those two things. Why is it that I feel that those two systems are built that way and who they’re built for. What do you think, though? You’ve watched my reviews, and you’ve done so probably more recently than I dropped them than I have. So what do you think these two key differences are?
Well, number one, Boomtown is built on WordPress, but multi-site. I think that is still the case. Better-looking website than sync, but that’s not saying too much, is it? I think if you’re an individual agent, a reasonably large team underneath you or a broker, and you’re on the mentality to look at all the data and look at where all the leads are coming from and spend their hours and then actually have Excel or a database, and you’re keeping track, and you’re keeping track and you’re keeping track of all hours, blah, blah, blah. It’s probably worth it. If you’re in the hunter mode and you’re up for it, but I think there’s only a small… It’s sizable because still a sizable niche. But I think you got to have the mindset and the knowledge and the resources to make either. But if you’re in the lead generative mindset, you’re going to go with Boomtown, aren’t you?
Yeah. And speaking of Boomtown versus sync, it’s small, medium teams versus large teams with complex back-end scenarios. That’s sync. Ease of use is what I’d say the difference between Boomtown and sync is. If I had to put it down to one sentence for number two, ease of use. Boomtown is easier by far. Actually, everybody’s easier than sync.
Yeah. So let’s go to number three before we go for our break. What are the two platforms as key strengths and weaknesses, Rob? One or two before we go for a break.
Sure. I mean, if I was looking for a sophisticated back-end system that was already developed, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would be taking a strong look at sync, comparing the hundred or so features that has in the back end of the platform and seeing if they met my needs. That’s a strength. The weakness is doing that comparison, doing a dive into sync, it’s going to be expensive and time consuming. That’s the weakness for them. Boomtown is easier to use by far, way overpriced for what you’re getting. I don’t know if that’s a weakness, but they have been so out Outvalued inside the CRM world. I’ve got no words for it. They used to be bleeding edge. For a long time, they were bleeding edge, John. Then they become like they have a slightly better-looking website. They’ve got a little bit more thought and passion put into their products. No doubt about it. They’ve got a better-looking IDX, which they built. There are a lot of strengths with it that they’ve got, but they haven’t really changed all that much in over eight years, and it shows. That’s what I got.
I think with Zinc, I’m not sure. I think they might got bought out by these people, but- Fidelity National Mortgage, yeah, they did. No, I was talking about Boston Logic. I think they’re trying to I think they’re trying to build a competitor to Boston Logic. Boston Logic built custom solutions for large brokerages. That was their bag. But I think Boston Logic either bought somebody. Did they bought Boomtown? I think they might have bought Boomtown. I’m not sure. I’m getting confused, Robert, but it happens often, doesn’t it, Robert?
Property-based and Boston Logic partnered up to build website/real-estate lead gen system. That was in 2018 that they made that announcement. I still haven’t actually seen the final product. I don’t know. I have no idea if they did that. I know they announced it. I don’t think that BostonLogic got bought by anybody because they were raising money six, seven years ago for all private equity money. Now, whether or not that’s remained the same, who knows? I don’t know. I do not know.
I just felt they were going… Because I knew, before we go for a break, I knew the owner’s son of Dickinson’s, which is, I think, the largest independent brokerage in Northern Nevada, and they were looking for a solution. I was having a chat with him, and they went with Boston Logic. But they had 500, 600 agents. So he was looking for a whole Swiss army. That’s why I I think I’ll be totally wrong. Shall we go for a break, Rob?
Let’s do it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re doing a deep dive today. So if there’s any place that you find this, share it with your other real estate friends, share it in your real estate groups, and that would be the way you’d thank me and John, and leaving us comments. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 427 of The Mailright Show. Today, we’re talking about Boomtown versus sync. We’re doing an honest review for 2024 because John and I are notorious for being dishonest. All right. Number four, regarding the functionality price matrix? Which is the best value? Now, do you want to take a stab at this? Or do you want me to just like, You know I’ve got a lot to say on all of this stuff.
Well, I suppose I think I shouldn’t do this because trying to work out what’s going on in Rob’s mind is not really possible, really. But I presume if you’re looking for… If you’re that size of brokerages, and you’re really looking for a real back-end. And I find it… I know this is a bit of a sweeping statement, really, but I offer a certain type of medium regional brokerage. They have somebody who’s their marketing guru, their analytical guru, and they tend to go with Google paid average, and they track everything They got somebody on board. They’re also looking for a Swiss army knife for all the backends. I think they probably look at sync. But I think if you’re a smaller team and you’re still using They tend not to go, which is the wrong attitude, because they should combine it with content, what you specialize in. But I just find that it’s a mindset. They should combine both, but they tend to go with the paid thing. But if they’re more hunter, as you say, they’re probably going to go… They’ll be better off with Boomtown, aren’t they?
Yeah, in terms of price matrix, ladies and gentlemen, when Boomtown was doing some exciting collaborations with Craigslist, and they had some innovative advertising strategies that connected directly into the back of the platform. And now they’ve lost most of the races. Chime is just as easy to use from a platform perspective. They’re not nearly as valuable from the website perspective. But since Boomtown made the decision a long time ago to go with multi-sites, there’s actually not… While the actual site performs better for Boomtown than it does for a company like Chime, you don’t end up seeing the value out of building on WordPress because you don’t own it. You don’t have control of it, you don’t own it. And Boomtown will take your iteration of that website and do something else with it when you leave, maybe repurpose it, which is great for them and horrible for you, the end user, who spent all the money building up the domain authority and value, because that’s what you’re doing when you advertise to a URL consistently. In terms of the best value for your money right now in 2024, I absolutely would probably say sync, because the complicated, really specific things the sync system can do.
I don’t know that… I mean, Boomtown has never been very friendly on the integration side, and that is more and more what the modern millennium is becoming about, and Boomtown is terrible. All of that sync is better, and they’ve got a lot of custom development. I just think that for them… But they’re both wildly overpriced, just for the record. That’s what I have to say.
Let’s go on to number five, because you know these… You’ve done an enormous deep dive. Are there any particular peculiarities that apply to individual or each platform that you think people should know I think that back in the days in which…
I think it was Alan was in charge of Boomtown. There was a vast difference between sync and Boomtown. They both have incredibly strong management companies. There’s a dual CEO thing going on over at SINC, or there was when I last researched it. And Greer Allen, who is one of the more charismatic, personable, really dedicated CEOs, was the founder and owner of Boomtown. Alan Greer went out, the only money he ever raised was to buy a big building in the middle of the city that they’re in and bring all of his team members together to create a better working atmosphere. That dedication, the fact that they focused on high touch, Boomtown was very It’s very ahead of its time in certain regards, and still is. You still get a high touch onboarding process with a dedicated team. I honestly think that the strength of each of these teams would be in the people, not the platform. The platform technology on both sides is antiquated at this point. You can sit here and go, we would need to do a show on each one of these things. I would need to deep dive it for you and explain what What does all those systems do better for each one of these performance metrics, why AI is changing the game, what you could expect, where you should go.
If for no other reason than keeping this simple, Chime offers many of Boomtown’s same functionality for half the price. By the way, I’m not recommending Chime.
I think one thing I think you’ve touched on in your videos, and I we’ve touched upon it, is I don’t know what… I think it applies to sync as well. But Boomtown, if you want to take your data out and put it in another platform, they won’t make it easy, or basically, they’ll say no. Am I right about that statement? And I think it’s something 100%.
It’s terrible. It’s terrible. The customer service policies at Boomtown are 10 years old, and they could have been better to start with, and they’re awful in today’s marketplace. Terrible. Sync is better, but they still need some friendly customer service policies on the front end. Both of these companies have pivoted to the current revolution that’s happening, which is like influencer style marketing, where, honestly, most people who are their customers are looking for answers online. They’re finding them from third parties because boom, down, and Sync have yet to bother to build a robust content library about using their platform. They’re both locked in the dark ages. Let’s keep all the details of our systems private where anybody can find them. Whereas, of course, they can see it. They have to search harder, and then it won’t be you. It’s not going to be inside your control. It is crazy to me how neither one of these companies has embraced video to the level that they should from an informational standpoint. You want your users who are coming to you in your channel to figure out all the answers.
They both have channels. They’re just not what they should be, in my opinion. That ease of use, that knowledge that you and I talk about incessantly is my touchstone for everybody, which is pretty simple. Do you have the ability to make your products and services understandable and usable by other people? What are you doing if the answer is no or not very quickly?
But I’ll say that the only thing that comes to mind is that it’s not a criticism: In the middle to higher-level power team or brokerage, you got Chime, you got Sync, you got Boomtown. Are any of these higher-level systems reasonably easy to use anyway? I don’t think there is, is there?
By the way, kvCore is the system that has become the easiest to use and has the most of this available from its user base.
All right, yeah. You’re right about that. I see where you’re coming from.
That’s what I’m talking about. If I want to know how to use kvCore, that’s why kvCore is dominating the landscape, my friend. In my opinion, they’ve got so many user-based videos, so many incredible videos from so many different real estate, practicing real estate agents that say, This is the way I’m using the system and making money at it. So there’s a guy on SE Team Leader, there’s one video nine months ago on sync that’s talking about sync is starting to slowly but surely build some video library. They’ve got some videos coming out. Only a few. Five days ago, sync University, real estate training, sync shorts, who knows? Sink CEO on NAR settlement. Somebody said something from Sync on the NAR settlement 30 days ago. I’m going to have to watch it. Like, wow, somebody got online and said something. That’s pretty impressive. I mean, never mind. Considering how big of a company they are, my audience is almost as big as NAR. I mean, and good God, I think they got bought for what, $125 million? I don’t know what the number is, but it was ridiculous. I know that.
It is like a crazy big company with very little focus on its users in terms of how people try to get and use information online. Boomtown is guilty of the same.
So, just to finish off, can you give one persona for each product? To finish off the podcast, Rob, give an ideal persona of who would get the best from each platform.
Sure. Multifocused real estate teams with complicated back-end systems. Real estate companies that focus on property management, sales, lease, rehab, and construction. The sink is a hands-down winner for you. Hands-down. They’re who you should look at. I could only recommend this. You’re doing a multifaceted real estate business of intermittent size, or you own a very large one. There’s a great example. For those people who are listening to the show right now, go out and look at Tarvin Realtors in New Jersey. It’s a multi-focused, multi-generational real estate company, and each kid in the company has taken on a new real estate vertical, so they do everything in their part of New Jersey. I mean, everything. They do buying, selling, rehabbing, or at least they did when I last looked. And they do commercial, they do property management, they do everything. That would be who might look at sync. That’s the target customer profile for which this would still be a hands-down winner. Boomtown. The persona or Boomtown is still a leader in the small to mid-size team space. And for the customer’s persona, this is a little bit more complicated to explain, but I think that small to mid-size real estate brokerages without a competent CMO or CTO on staff, which is most of the teams out there.
They need a tech person. They don’t have anybody that’s doing that for them. So when that is all the case, that’s when the customer service and the help, the outreach, the management that Boomtown does on the client-facing side, that’s when that money becomes justifiable. That’s when I am wrong about justifying the cost of the system. When you want to leverage that in-person training, you get assigned an account rep, or at least you did. Then, all the reports I got from Boomtown clients said that those training and one-to-one interactions were always precious. So, almost a universal five-star rating, which is why I say that’s where probably Boomtown shines. But who needs that specifically, John? That’s a little harder to answer.
You’re going to sit down again.
Oh, sure. Sorry. I’m so sorry. I started pacing.
You did? He was getting excited there; no, I’m so sorry.
I forgot that you were doing the screen thing. I’m so sorry.
I think I was getting where he was getting fed up looking at my phone.
I was pacing. I forgot we were doing that.
He was pacing. I think it’s been an excellent show. We’re not gone too over. And I think we… So, to finish off, well, I think your answer number six is a good finishing point. So, back over to you, Rob. I think we will finish it.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for doing our updated review on these systems. If anybody wants to update my knowledge, I am always up for that. You can reach out to me at robert@inboundrem. Com. You can also go to my website, inboundrem. com Use any of my contact forms and say that you’d like to update my knowledge about sync or Boomtown. If you’re using these systems, if you’ve used them recently, or disagree with anything I said, I am always open to having another conversation about the platform. Over to you, John.
Yeah, and if you’re looking to have a nice-looking website on WordPress, we’re using Gutenberg, and we have a lovely platform for lead generation as part of our lovely WordPress website. So if that’s interesting, go over to Mail-Right. com and book a chat with me or Adam. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. Well, that’s it, ladies and gentlemen. The show is wrapped up. John and I are so grateful for your ears, eyes, and everything in between. Have a great day.
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Get the Inside Scoop on Sierra Interactive 2024 – Pros & Cons Revealed
Discover the comprehensive breakdown of Sierra Interactive in 2024 with our Pros & Cons Review video. Dive deep into the platform’s latest features, strengths, and potential drawbacks to help you make an informed decision for your real estate business. Don’t miss out on this valuable insight – click the link below to watch the full video now.
#1 – Quick Introduction of What Sierra Interactive is And Does
Sierra Interactive sets itself apart by excelling in SEO lead generation, a service not commonly offered by others, in addition to providing PPC and social lead generation. Furthermore, they offer retargeting and remarking through Facebook and Google PPC to ensure no leads are overlooked.
With a rich array of features, Sierra Interactive promises a comprehensive experience that we will explore further to assess its reputation. We will also identify the ideal audience for their services, so stick around for more insights.
#2 – Sierra Interactive Main Features
-a- SEO
Although a website may initially seem unremarkable, it is important to note that it is optimized for SEO, providing valuable leads at no cost. This optimization allows you to rank for your desired keywords effectively. Additionally, the websites are designed to be fully responsive and load quickly on all devices such as tablets and laptops. The fast loading speed also contributes to enhancing SEO performance.
-b – Marketing Automation System
When implemented effectively, marketing automation is a crucial aspect for any company as it significantly reduces time consumption. Sierra Interactive’s automation process involves selecting desired triggers (such as updated lead status), providing supplementary information, assigning tasks to leads, and allowing them to manage the rest.
-c- Combined Ad Campaigns
Sierra Interactives excels in PPC management services through their impactful Google and Facebook advertisements. They take charge of crafting your Google Ads, while giving you the power to decide on visitor registration. What stood out to me was the provision of daily performance reports after 4-6 weeks of campaign launch, allowing you to assess the effectiveness of this strategy.
#3 – Sierra Interactive Pricing
Core Package
Essential Bundle: Priced at $499.95 per month, this package includes access for 5 users and 1 MLS IDX Connection. It offers 1,500 SMS texts and 100 MMS texts, along with 1500 dialer minutes, 250 ringless voicemails, 10k minutes of recorded storage, as well as standard onboarding and support services.
Growth Package
Expansion Bundle: Priced from $699.95 per month, catering to a team of 5 users with 1 MLS IDX Connection included. This package comprises 15,000 SMS texts, 5,000 MMS texts, 500 ringless voicemails, 35k minutes of recorded storage, personalized onboarding assistance, premium support services, quarterly consultations with a dedicated customer success manager, and privileged access to their specialized assets.
12-month agreement
No setup fees
Any additional users are sold in blocks of 5 users at $100 a month for both core and growth packages
For over 45 users you can get custom pricing
Each additional MLS IDX Connection is $25 extra per month for both packages
In comparison to some competitors they are on the pricey side, but not the most expensive option, so it’s something to take into consideration.
#4 – Sierra Interactive Alternatives?
Real Geeks
Chime
Elope
Mail-Right
#5
Major Pros?
Major Cons?
#6 – Final Thoughts
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right Show. Today’s episode is number 426, and we are going to update our review. John and I share interactive. We’re going to do a pros and cons for 2024 and hopefully give everybody who listens and watches our show a little bit of new or updated information on what is arguably one of the top providers of real estate websites and CRMs. But before we dive into this very meaty topic, John, I would love it if you would do me a favor and introduce yourself.
Oh, thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail Right.com. We’re a CRM lead generation platform built on WordPress, and we provide some great websites as well. Back over to you, Rob.
Cool. And I am the founder of Inbound REM, which anybody watching the show can see on my hat in the background. We are an inbound marketing company that focuses on real estate. We do things like real estate website development, SEO consulting, consulting, and providing services directly to real estate agents and brokers. All right, here we go. So we’re going to talk about Sierra Interactive, which is a choice that John made. And I’m kind of curious. John, we haven’t talked about these guys in a while. You haven’t taught. We haven’t mentioned them. There was no rumbling. Why did you choose them? What was the inspiration?
Inspiration? Um, I think I’m just doing a review of the competition. Um, and I think we have spoken about them before, but it was quite a while ago, so I just thought it might be a good topic, a good time to have another chat about it.
Um, fair enough. All right, so without any further ado, what we’ve got up first here, why don’t you go ahead and do the introduction about what Sara Interactive is and what it does?
Yeah. You know, it’s a competitor to Mail-Right, but there are different flavors to these systems and they’re aimed at different buckets of users. And Rob did a detailed review of this about three years ago. It’s amazing where the time goes, isn’t it, Rob? And he did a bit of a deep dive. I’ve done a smaller review and I think that was, might be two years ago. So I think it’s got some strengths and it’s an experienced team behind it. The guy that set it up, lives about 3 hours away from where I live. He lives in Mammoth Lakes which is about a three-and-a-half-hour drive where I live. I think one of the, and I think you pointed it out in your review, I think if you’re really into, if you’ve got a team above five, a power team, 510 20 people, and you want something that’s customized and you want to know where all the leads are coming from, and you want to spend all that time because you got, I think you said in your review you’ve got a budget of 200 or 300,000.
You do need to know where the leads are coming from. And I think that’s all great stuff, Rob, but I think the problem with wherein this is only my perspective, my view is one of the problems with Siri interactive is the competition. The competition is Follow Up Boss. And if you’re in that team space where you have an advertising budget of 200 to 300,000, in my opinion, you’d be better off going with Follow-Up-Boss. But the only problem with that is it doesn’t provide the website. And secondly, recently they got bought up by Zillow. And I wouldn’t want to share my data, which is my opinion, again, I wouldn’t want to share my data with Zillow. But obviously, Follow Up Boss would push back and say that they’ve made it clear that the data isn’t been shared with the owner of the company. Um, but me personally, I’ve got to be very careful how I word this, don’t I, Rob? But in my opinion, my opinion, I wouldn’t be very happy with that. But that’s my opinion, Robert.
Sure. So my opinion.
Yes, it’s got to be your opinion, Rob.
Yeah. My opinion is that that, um, interactive for a very long time. So the guy that founded it, a guy by the name of Ben, was a very seasoned developer who was already doing work for real estate agents independently. And he ran across the same problem that I did with inbound REM. When you’re out there trying to do this work for agents who are almost exclusively asking you the same questions, we want to be able to get leads. We want to have a CRM, we want it all connected to our website, and the list goes on and on. But the questions have been the same for guys like him and guys like me for, like, almost 2030 years. Like, it’s crazy how consistent it’s been. Just give us one tool that connects to everything. And Ben was already building those kinds of tools as a consultant, and he had the idea of creating a, like, a server-based, fast real estate website that he could sell en masse using templates but his whole, like, a long time ago, John, and it’s all down now, so everybody just has to take me at my word.
A long time ago, Ben used to blog, used to have a couple of thoughts that he published publicly. He’s just kind of said, hey, I’m just going where the wind is taking me, and building a solution to the questions that I keep getting asked. And then of course he did it. And real estate webmasters, which at the time were dominant in the industry, weren’t treating their customers very well. And BIM created a competitive product that eventually started to outshine real estate webmasters. This created a very big following that left real estate webmasters to migrate over to Sierra Interactive over about a five or ten-year period. And Sierra Interactive became one of the top real estate website builders that had a CRM connected to it. They still have the incredible acknowledgment that the number r1 estate website, by traffic, by exposure, by everything, is built on a Sierra interactive platform. That is Ruby Home, which was built on that platform by one of the very few experienced content marketers who got, who decided, that Sierra Interactive was going to be the website he built on. And then he even went so far as to blog about it.
So when, when you Google Sierra Interactive, the review from Tony, who owns rubyahome.com, is still there. It’s like number three in the results when you google Sierra Interactive. All that being said, Sierra Interactive has started to see a lot of bleeds. Ben has now sold the company. Nobody knows who he sold it to.
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Yeah, there’s no announcement. He just sold it, was gone. Who knows? Who knows what’s happening with it, John? And if I’m just going to save everybody the time and the energy, I’m going to say right now, right here in this format, the biggest con that I have about Sierra Interactive right now is nobody knows who bloody owns the company and nobody knows what their plans are for it. I only know that I, and I think I said this to you once, maybe a long time ago, like, it kind of felt like Ben was getting exhausted running this company from start to, like, he withdrew out of the public light, stopped logging, stopped talking about everything, stopped. I couldn’t find anything on him. Seemed to not want his name out there, like associated with Sierra Interactive, which is bizarre considering the fact that it’s one of the top real estate marketing companies around. So just. Real interesting guy. So that’s that. I mean, that’s the ten foot high what they do, ostensibly, is provide a CRM and they build a real estate website and they provide leads and they do and can do that very well.
What needs to happen, though, and I just want to say this before we get into the overall here interactive thing, I think that Ben sold the company because he knows that the whole platform needs to be rebuilt because they have not kept up with the mobile revolution. They’re falling behind in any numbers of areas that it relates to technology. And while they still build a solid feature and they’re still acknowledged as one of the leaders, somebody’s got to come in with a lot of new enthusiasm and keep this platform. Like, you can’t do multimedia content on their, on the content management system that he built was interactive. That used to not be a big problem. Tony has still built a leading website on it. But you basically have to be a genius content creator in order to get the kind of results that Tony has gotten. Like, just, that’s just the truth, because you can’t do video. You can’t. You can do a limited number of images. The CMS show and the leads that you get from this kind of website are diminishing in quality and have been diminishing quality for a long, long time.
So it is. The future is here. And Sierra Interactive, as it stands, is not as prepared as you would have thought a company with this kind of pedigree would be. So let’s jump into this, though. What are they doing? Well, let’s talk about number two on your list, because they are definitely a leader in this category and I want to talk about it. Sierra Interactive main features. The very first thing that you list on here, John, is SEO. So why don’t you talk about that for a second and answer the question, why did you list this first and all the features?
I just looked at all the other blog content and I drawed up a list following what other people were saying about it. Basically, when it comes to the SEO, I think, as you said in your own review, it’s in the detail, isn’t it? I think compared to some other platforms, it is very good. And I think in the hands, the website example that you utilized in your intro, the person that that was working with Siri Interactive was a very experienced inbound marketer. And that website, yes, it’s built on Sara Interactive, but it’s been enormously customized. So it is. And it isn’t. And what I mean by that, yes, it’s using Sierra interactive technology, the backbone. Is it what you normally get? No, it isn’t. And it’s the same with the SEO because there’s, there’s the technical setting up of a website and that will get you so far depending on who you are up against, but it won’t generate traffic. And without traffic you can’t convert. And the only thing that will get traffic is if Google thinks the content on that website gives more information, is more useful to its target audience than the competitors that you’re up against.
And that that’s a much more sophisticated. And then a checklist of it does meta tags. You can put it has this feature, it’s that feature. It’s all good stuff, but, and it has its place. But without hiring somebody like you or educating yourself and prepared to put the effort in, it really doesn’t, in my opinion, again, it doesn’t really mean much.
Robert, I don’t disagree with any single point. I think that I would say that I’ve got a few, a few additions to add I want the audience to understand before I jump into my editions because it’s definitely going to be a longer than a minute and we would normally go to break in a minute. But instead what I’m going to do is I’m going to push the break to right now. And then when you come back from break, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going dive into my thoughts about Sara interactive as an SEO platform. We’ll be right back. Stay tuned. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 426. I think it is. John didn’t. Okay, we’re talking about an updated review for Sierra Interactive. The last time I updated him three years ago.
You tell me off, Robert, I’ll be the naughty boy audience. He’s turning me off.
Just being honest. John, stop, okay. I can’t. He can’t stop giggling. So the updated SEO review would be this in terms of, so there are two types of SEO that you can do inside, like real estate, you can do search mechanisms. That is what Sierra interactive focuses on. They do a lot of search filters, neighborhoods, city names, things like that. And then they provide a very fast, very good, very responsive way to propel properties into those search results. And it is still a solid way to rank in the search engines if you do ancillary SEO work such as domain authority, building content writing like blogging off the site, things like that, all of which Tony has done in proliferation. The guy that owns Ruby home. If I had to try to put a number to it, I think that Tony has provided himself with about half a million dollars worth of SEO work on his site. Okay, just so everybody understands what John was saying, because it’s very true. What, what Tony has done is he’s taken a very rudimentary backbone along with an incredibly detailed skillset and done something with it. And some of what Sierra interactive does do plays well into what Tony has done.
Adding searches into his blog, interlinking on the site, which works very fast and very well. These are all SEO strategies and Tony has leveraged them to the hilt. The platform is being used about as good as you’re ever going to see it anywhere on Tony’s site. Would the average person have any of these skill sets? Heck no. Would even some of the people that you’re consulting with be able to leverage the platform in the way that Tony has leveraged it? No. Even though theoretically they understand what they’re supposed to do? No, they wouldn’t. Would anybody have the level of creativity and insight that Tony took in order to build a site? No. I’ve taken some ideas from him. His research was so good and he was so intuitive about how people would respond to the individual pages. In other words, looking at his site is like watching the babe swing a bat. Like you don’t understand what you’re looking at or Michael Jordan take a jump shot. But it’s one in a million. It’s one in a million is what you’re looking at. And so could anybody do what they’ve done? Would they even want to try?
I don’t know about that anymore. Unless Sierra interactive makes some big changes. Like if they updated their platform and allowed for multimedia. Allowed for some. Because a lot of SEO these days, John is interaction with the site. Tony’s so good at creating content that he inspires his users to use the site despite itself. You want interactive content and infographics and accordion menus and many other things in addition to clickable search features. You need to give people options. You need to give people video. You need to give people many different options. While some of that might be possible with Sierra Interactive, it’s not intuitive and it’s not easy. And I’m not even sure that all, like, I’m not sure what the process is to include video, but I don’t see a lot of it on any site, which makes me think that it’s probably not easy. But I don’t know that for sure. Now, I’m going to jump into number two here and I’m going to take the lead on this one just because I’m in a flow marketing automation system now. Marketing automation, which is, could be a lot of different things. But Sierra Interactive still does shine in certain categories.
Marketing automation in general, as it compares to like Ylopo or somebody like that, they’re behind the eight ball. But in comparison to every other provider that’s out there, Sierra Interactive still is ahead of the field in terms of automation.
Well, apart from mailrite, because I think the mail right system is better than this.
You can, you can elaborate, you know the mailrite system better than I do, so I’ll let you elaborate on that during your portion of marketing automation. I am unfamiliar, so I will, I can only speak to what I know for sure. What I know for sure is that in terms of automation, things like where CR Interactive has shown, and I still think that they probably shine a lot, is they have an intuitive system for adding agents to your CRM and then getting those agents to hunt inside the platform. Like look at users that have looked at 500 properties, for instance on the platform and then call or text them in an automated way, all from the actual inside the guts of the system. I have never with my system, anybody system that I know of even using follow up boss. If you have this very rarefied salesforce as part of your team, Sara Interactive still stands alone in terms of how intuitive is for a sales hunter to leverage that system. Now if you are like most agents or teams and you don’t have hunters peeling through the traffic of the site or you haven’t given them access, or I can go on and on, this doesn’t matter what I’m saying.
And then automation, such as automated text messages, things like that, they actually are not ahead of the curve. They’re a little bit behind the curve in terms of what you could find. Like they’re about equivalent to real geeks. Like you’re probably going to point out you might be ahead of them in terms of that specific type of automation there.
No, I say, I take back what I said because I see where you’re coming from now. And I, I took it as optimization, the actual interface ux design about how somebody who isn’t as experienced as yourself, they could set up the campaigns. And we did spend a fair bit of time and it’s a pretty robust and reasonably easy. It does need us to show a person a couple of times, but if they’ve got any ability at all, they should be able to do it. But I know, in all fairness, I think you did point this out in your video, the hunter bit, but I forgot that bit. So I see exactly where you’re coming.
From and it’s a rare salesperson type. But the handful of guys that I know or have spoken to some of them many years ago, like there’s a young team that I’ve, I’ve heard rumors of but I haven’t talked to them directly, but I’ve, I know people who’ve worked with them. The keen brothers, who is one of the top sarah interactive sites. And apparently these brothers are hunters. All three of them. There’s three brothers. And apparently they leverage this system to like a massively successful high degree. Nothing I could sell them is ever going to work better than what they’re already doing. If they’re already used to going through their appealing through traffic, they’ve already know what good traffic looks like. Who is most likely.
Yeah. The mail rights system is not aimed for those type of people. If you want that we help you integrate it with follow up boss.
There you go. So that’s, and in terms of automation as it’s being understood by the market, AI, truly true automation, things like that is here interactive anywhere even remotely in that category. No, they’re not.
Well, the mail. Right. System is. But I actually, I actually think, and this is my honest opinion, Rob, that, and I’m a big user of AI actually. I can see it if you’ve got an enormous amount of volume. But I also, and this is just my opinion, Rob, I think other players are over emphasizing the effective effectiveness of elite drip campaign using AI to some extent. But that’s just my opinion. I’m not saying it. I might be wrong.
So I think, I think, John, we need to do a few shows in AI this year. I do, because I agree with you. I think the AI for the most part, the tools I’ve tested seems to be a race to the bottom. I’ve not yet found anything highly customized or, and even what people call AI like y Lopo is, is very extensive exhaustive behavioral tuning as I understand it.
Yeah. And I think you, I think you, you really rate the owners and one particular owner, you really rate them as a marketer, SEO expert. So they probably do provide a lot of value there. But I just also think, but I’ve got to be very careful because they can get very upset very quickly. I just think in my, mostly over.
What I say, John, not you.
I don’t want any, I don’t want any aggro in my opinion. It’s overplayed a bit in my opinion. I think that’s, I think we’re going to rename the show in my opinion.
Yes. So anyway, let’s hand it over to you and let you have your full response about marketing automation system and how you really view SiErra interactive and maybe how you view share interactive versus mailrite.
Well, I didn’t know where you’re going to take it, but I think the point you made was, on reflection totally correct. But I, because I’m just looking at in a different way because you also mentioned this, because I did look at your video a couple of times and I really went through the whole hour that you spent. And to give you honest feedback, I think because I am guilty of it, you really went all over the place. But it’s totally understandable because you were dealing with a really big review and you, when you spend an hour plus you are gonna go all over the place, right? So that’s not been disparaging, I’ve just been honest with you. But, and you did point out in your video you got the hunter bit. And like the Melwright system isn’t aimed at those hunter types. It’s a combination of bold leads with real geeks. That’s where I’ve kind of positioned mailwright. One interesting question is, in your own mind, because you’ve got a lot of experience in this area, you’re probably one of the most experienced individuals the industry. How do you, how do you compare it to real geeks?
What are the strengths? Because we say we’ve got enough of 510 minutes and you probably want to clear off, then I think this would be useful to our listeners. If you don’t think it is, we can just go on. But how do you compare it? Because I think a lot of the people that are listening to this, that might be on the market, they’re going to be looking at either male, right, Sierra Interactive and real geeks, aren’t they? So where do you position seeriact if we were real geeks?
Well, Sierra Interactive is an interesting, is an interesting position still to this very day, inside the real estate industry as a CRM, I found it to be better by far than, let’s say a KVcore. Okay. I found it to be more robust with more options built in, more intuitive integrations for additional outside tools. I always use happy grasshopper as one because it’s an unusual marketing service that only integrates into two common platforms, that is follow up boss and Sierra Interactive. And there’s others too. There’s calling systems that they integrate very naturally into. If you’re doing high volume calling now, what that means to those lay people that are listening to this review is that teams are inordinately especially large teams don’t have a ton of great choices. No offense to anybody. I am not a great choice because I leverage follow up boss. Can follow up boss, take extraordinarily big teams and do well with them? Yes, it can. It just requires a big onboarding process. Sara interactive would require the same thing. It’s complicated. That’s why it took an hour for me to do the review. Real geeks took me about 25 minutes, if I remember correctly.
It’s a much simpler platform. Small teams and agents would gravitate towards mail, right? Or real geeks or something like that because it’s easier to onboard. And I’m going to say the same thing about mail, right. That I’ve said about myself. I’ve always felt, John, that real estate agents or business owners in general fall into kind of a couple different camps. Some people always want to kind of do a McDonald’s or Taco Bell experience with their marketing. They want to know a lot of other people are going there. They’re going to get a reasonably priced meal at a reasonable level of quality, and they’re happy with that. And they’re happy with the fact that they know that a lot of other people are using the system with some kind of track record. Right. And then you have another kind of person that is going to be like, well, I really want to go to a restaurant that where I’m going to walk through the door and the owner is still going to be there and, or at least they’re going to be in the business at some point during that day. And I know that they’re still individually making sure that the meals are served are of high quality and that the people are having a good dining experience.
And you’re probably going to get all of that for the same or less in terms of price as you would at these days, like a taco Bell or something like that. And that’s how I kind of compare inbound Rem and mailrite. You want to still know that the company that you’re dealing with is in the hands of the person that founded it, that you’re going to have an experience that is going to be directly impacted by the person who founded the company. You’re probably going to want to call a John or me, depending on what you’re looking for, as opposed to one of these other companies. If you call real geeks, the owner, the founder is long gone. Who knows who you’re going to get? Hopefully a very good, qualified, experienced salesperson. But are you going to get somebody with a particular level of insight or involvement? No, I virtually guarantee it. I built too many of these sales teams to think otherwise. So would you get a personal experience with mailrite? Absolutely. You’d be able to talk to John directly or, or his partner, but one way or the other, somebody who has direct controlling interest in the company.
And while that doesn’t impact the actual thing the systems do, I think that it’s really a massive factor when it comes to who do you want to use? Because do you want to use somebody that. All right, let’s just say that John doesn’t have as robust of a system right now as real geeks because he hasn’t spent $10 million building it and he doesn’t have 10,000 clients. But let’s say there’s a challenge for you. The client, like something specific to your business, the area you work in, you call real geeks. You’re going to be lucky for your request, even gets a support ticket. Whereas if you call John, you’re going to get a very direct response. I’m not saying that John is going to step into every single thing that anybody ever brings him, but you’re going to get a response from the owner and it’s possible that a solution will be presented to you. It’s possible that for your specific little teeny tiny business, with your little. Forgive me for saying this, but you’re probably little in comparison to many other people, small marketing budget, you might get a response from the owner or manager of the business.
It just depends for everybody listening to the show about, you know better than John and I ever will how you’re wired to receive service.
Yeah, thank you for those kind words, but which one? If you’re looking at realist, exclude me, all right. Because obviously you’re the joint presenter of this podcast.
Sure.
So it’s a difficult situation to some extent, but let’s have a look at real. So who do you think real geeks is best for and who do you think Sarah Interactive is best for?
Real Geeks is best for like an agent on a budget. Like an agent on a budget. Probably just getting used to using a real estate website as a tool. They’re hardcore setup time dealing with a number of different vendors. They’re pretty difficult to work with in terms of overall setup, but they’re also very inexpensive in comparison to almost everybody else. And you get a lot for the money that you spend. So I would say to an agent who has some digital marketing chops and the ability to read technical manuals and work well with them real geeks is the solution. Chime, which is next on your list, is exactly the opposite. It is a beautiful dashboard, easy to use, overpriced for what they do. They don’t actually do anything new or anything unusual. They’ve got a number of bleeding edge things that they talk about. But the agents I’ve spoken to so far have said that those things don’t implement well into their overall kit. So I would say that chime is good for small teams or people that are tired of Kvcore but have already used a mass adoption platform. I would say that chime is something to look at.
I hesitate. They make a good looking website that functions fairly well and I like them for that. So much of it is automated that you’re not going to get very good SEO results. You’re up against a lot of other people using chime. So very soon your neighbor, your uncle, the guy down the street, they’re all going to have chime sites. So you have to be very cautious, in my opinion, if you adopt into chime. I don’t know. A lope can’t respond to that platform and I haven’t become the expert that I should have from mailrite. But I will say this, I would say that mail, right, is a better solution than real geeks for sure, especially if you’re looking for a personal touch.
And can I ask one question? Do you know what’s happened to bold leads?
Yeah, they got absorbed by a company that basically mothballed them. They got absorbed by a CRM. I remember that. Not brevity. I got somebody bought them and absorbed them into the platform and they just basically nobody ever talks about them anymore.
So that’s what Melroy is. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of aimed at real geeks and Sierra interactive, probably more real geeks with a, with a strong flavor, bold leads added because I.
Property base.
Property base model and we use Facebook. You know, I had to back off. I was thinking, oh, well, because what happened to Facebook with Apple? But they’ve used AI and they’ve roared back. So it has a high emphasis with a bit of Google local thrown in if you want it. But Facebook, has good landing pages, good drip, good email, decent CRM, and good integration with IDX broker. That’s what we offer. And in the next three to four months we’re going to integrate it a lot with Gutenberg and offer some great website solutions. But I’ll be talking about that in the coming months when we get around to it.
So just a quick aside for everybody, property base was originally. Well, property bases have been buying up, partnering with a lot of other ancillary technology companies, and then absorbing them into what was originally a CRM, that’s what property base is. And what my understanding, John, without any kind of deep knowledge, so please nobody, if somebody’s going to email, it’s your opinion. If somebody is going to email, John, just like inflame him for something I said, which has happened I think once or twice now you just understand. I don’t know for sure, but here’s what I’ve observed and, what you need.
To say it’s your opinion.
My opinion is that the property base absorbed the technology for bold leads, built the same functionality into their CRM and that’s it. They are now just basically a CRM that has lead generation capabilities, that uses the framework that bold leads built. That’s what it was. And whether or not they kept how much of it they kept, one or the other of us would have to do a demo and look at what they’ve got to even begin to answer that. And so, yeah, I don’t know. Anyway, and then they did the same thing with Lone Wolf, which was an IDX provider. So now they’ve got IDX solutions on their websites, but that was being powered by Lone Wolf. So they absorbed an IDX provider and they absorbed like a lead generation provider and built them as spokes on a wheel into a CRM.
They sound like the bog for the enterprise, don’t they?
Yeah, I mean, they find a technology company that seems to be ancillary, like compatible with theirs and then they buy them. Huzzah. Right. So anyway, ladies and gentlemen, this has been a very deep dive. We’ve gone 37 minutes into this. Sierra Interactive is not an easy solution to talk about because it is so robust, and has 50 integrations on the backend. Some of the bigger teams in the US use them there. Some many, many, many websites still get very strong SEO results based on the way that their search filters work. Many teams have massive budgets that are built on Sierra Interactive. And so when you’re looking at a Sierra interactive site, you have to keep in mind that some of the people who spend the most money in the digital space still use these websites. There almost is no comparison. They’re more comparable. Sierra Interactive is actually on the backend, more comparable to a sync and boomtown. Maybe, maybe. But really the two people that have built robust CRMs that do things like connect into mortgage brokers and try to manage little elements of the transaction process, connect into dot loop and the list goes on and on.
That’s C interactive.
And see where I would just to finish off because we’re going to end this. Because if you’re looking, and this is my opinion, my opinion folks if you’re looking at KV core or Sara interactive, I would go with Sara interactive every day. But the thing is, a lot of people get KVcore. In my opinion, the reason why they use it is they get it from their broker and they get it at a very high discount. So then they think, but in my opinion, if you shouldn’t use a system because you’re getting it from a broker at a very high discount, you should use a system that’s the best fit for you at that moment. And a lot of people use KV ore and they would disagree with me. They say we’re getting fantastic results. I think I, if I was that type of individual, I would use Sierra Interactive.
I don’t disagree with anything you said. There’s one thing that’s hard to argue with because I’ve had this conversation with some of the biggest brokers in the country. KVcore, when you start talking about thousands of agents, gives a much better per-seat price than Sierra Interactive ever will. Additionally, at the highest level, when you’re dealing with a salesforce of five or 10,000 or more, you’re thinking to yourself, how do I train five or 10,000 people to use a CRM? And the answer is you probably don’t. Full stop. You try, but your salespeople won’t show up, they won’t absorb. You’re dealing with a very difficult audience to get adoption done. And when in considering all those factors, KV core becomes the de facto solution at $25 ahead for huge brokers.
Yeah, I think that was very insightful. Thanks for that.
Yeah, so, and, but having said that, I agree with everything you said. Small medium-sized teams, people with more control, great teachers, smaller, more enclosed environments, or incredibly strong digital teachers, all would be better served probably using Sierra interactive as their tool. But, and this is the last little thing to everybody listening to the show, John and I said this ad nauseam, CRMs are only as good as your ability to use them. And still the easiest adoption CRM that’s still on the marketplace is follow-up boss. So if you’re just looking for a tool that people can or will learn and it’s inherent inside the platform, in other words, you don’t need to be a digital trainer, you don’t need to have a coo. You don’t have to need to have a CTO or CMO teaching your people how to use it. It can just be learned by the person. It is still follow-up, boss. That’s it in my opinion.
This is my opinion show, folks.
Right? We’re going to rename it, it’s going to be the, in our opinion, real estate show. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, thank you so much for listening to the Mail-Right show. God, we appreciate you tuning into us today. Can’t even begin to tell you how excited we are to hear, to have your earballs. Listen to us, John. If you wanted people to reach out to you, how would you have them do that?
To get my opinions, all you have to do is go to the bell hyphen, write.com, and you can book a demo with me or Adam and we walk through the system. You have any questions, anything, we’re there to help you out. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to reach me directly. Robert@InboundREM is a way to email me, if you would like to just learn a lot more about us before you message anybody or get a whole bunch of knowledge, including, by the way, what you should be doing with all this nar stuff, go to inboundrem.com, comma, look at my service page, about page. Check out my YouTube channel. I’ve been far more active this year than in any year in recent memory because this is a very pivotal time for real estate. So I’ll talk to everybody soon, or see you soon, or you’ll hear me soon. Thank you for tuning into the show today. We appreciate it.
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