The cost

Here is the cost breakdown to use AgentLocator as your solution for real estate lead generation for your office.

This package will give you the ability to have 11 people on the system.  1 Main CRM account + 10 additional agents.  They will each have their own login and you will be able to assign leads to each of them and they would only see the leads that they are assigned to.

How Assigning Leads to Agents Works

You can choose to assign the leads first to an ISA and then have that ISA assign leads manually to your agents.  Or, alternatively you can auto assign leads to your agents based on a round robin policy or a weighted round robin policy.  You also have the ability to specify specific price point policies.

What that really means is, let's say you have some agents who deal with multi million dollar luxury properties and you want to make sure if a lead comes in that's looking at multi million dollar homes, they can be segmented into their own round robin policy.

Or if it's a weighted round robin, you could have one agent getting 50% of the leads while the other two get 25% each.

Features Agents Have/Need to Make Lead Gen Work

What agents need to be successful with online leads is all included in this package.  With one exception.  For you to be able to send SMS messages and make calls to leads right inside of the CRM system, you will need a Twilio number.  

There is no extra cost with AgentLocator to have your own Twilio #, you will have an extra cost with Twilio.  The cost to get 1 phone number with Twilio is $1.15 CAD or about $1 USD per month.  The cost to use their SMS service is billed on a usage basis.  SMS is one of those core features that you SHOULD get for every agent.  Many times the speed to lead is important and the AgentLocator platform gives you the ability to create automated SMS/Email qualification campaigns to help qualify the leads so you should get it.

The cost of SMS messages is really inexpensive as well.  As an average, if you were to generate about 100 leads per month between the agents you should spend about $15/mo in SMS costs with Twilio.

Automated listings, tracking of what's happening who's opening looking at listings, how many photos they are looking at, everything is built in to make sure you have the information you need to stay in the know about what their wants/desires are.

Mobile app both CRM & Home searching app, fully integrated into the whole experience so that it's seamless to the agent and the leads.  Everything the leads do on the home searching mobile app is also tracked and you can see it all in the CRM both on Mobile CRM & Web CRM.

Our lead buckets make it easy for you to create lead qualification pools.

We've even created a step by step 7 hour guide about converting online leads that you can have each of your agents go through.  The training guide is completely free, we've received some raving reviews about our training guide from experts that have been in the online lead generation field for years.

The days of buying leads from Zillow and Realtor are come to an end.  When you really think about it, it makes sense.  They can make a lot more money from getting a referral fee on a successful transaction then they can from selling a single lead.

So what does that mean to the agents that are currently buying leads?  Well the downside is that (at least for now) they aren't being given an opportunity to even participate in the referral program.  Having a chance to interact with about 50 top producers during a recent conference (FUBCON 2022), I had the opportunity to chat with a few of those who this has already happened to.  

One of them was from Fort Worth TX, they got an email from Realtor.com stating their lead program is coming to an end in 30 days.  That was it, no explanation other than we are pulling these zip codes.  After further inquiry by the broker he was told that they partnered up with Ops City & are now working on a referral basis only.  They are given the opportunity to go on the list to be one of those agents who would be considered as a referral partner, however, unfortunately a brokerage was already selected in their area who they are working with.

Alright, so let's unpack this a bit more.  They won't be charging a fee for the lead which is amazing, what they want is a % of the actual transaction.  They are doing a bit more work here which is qualifying the lead further and then passing a better more qualified lead to the agent.

We've seen this before with a few companies.  What you can expect is that they are going to have a baseline that they consider a make or break deal.  If you aren't able to close leads within that baseline % you are going to be kicked out of the program even if you do get a chance to be in it in the first place.

If Zillow or Realtor programs are your primary or only source of business, you really need to come to reality that will come to and end eventually.  No one knows 100% how long it will take them to pull every zip code across the country but the fact that they are able to make more money from referrals will always stand and they will eventually completely pivot to that model no matter what.

The contract you have with Zillow & Realtor does not guarantee that they won't change their business model.  Call your rep and confirm.

We all know that portal leads are much better than any other lead source, however, knowing that it's going to come to and end, you need to look for the alternative.  The #1 alternative by far is Google PPC through Google Ads.   

I got into detail breaking down why Google PPC is the way to go and how you can get started if you haven't already.

There are two huge differences between CINC and AgentLocator.

First, if you have a team and need to have reporting on those team members that are using the system, do yourself a favor and get CINC.  They have some of the best reporting available for team leads to understand how well their agents are using the system and it helps keep them accountable.

Second is the price.  The AgentLocator platform is a much more affordable system.   The AgentLocator platform costs $179/mo for the complete solution.  The CINC platform even on the single agent level starts at $500/mo.

If you are a single agent I would 100% get a demo from both of the companies and make a decision for yourself.  I have no idea why you would pick to go with CINC over AgentLocator as a single agent as you get all the features that CINC has.  Everything you will ever need for lead generation with all the bells and whistles that CINC has including a Mobile CRM app & a Home Browsing app for your leads.  

Alright, this may be a long post but I promise you, it’s going to be worth it.

Below is a list of basically every single real estate lead generation company, a description about them as well as links to Real Estate Facebook Groups where agents are discussing how good/bad they are.

So the next time you see someone post a question on a Facebook Group about what lead gen company to use.  You can just share this link with them.

One thing you MUST know about every one of these companies.

Before you start evaluating the companies there is something you have to know.

All of these lead gen companies below with the exception of portals like “Zillow” & “Realtor”, all of them get the leads from TWO sources.

You really have to understand this before you keep going so make sure you keep reading.

There are TWO main sources for leads.  First source is Search (Google, Bing, Yahoo), second source is Social (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok).

Let’s break that down a little bit.  Think about this.  When the everyday person starts thinking about buying a home.  What do they do to find homes for sale?

Some of them will immediately go to Zillow.com, some of them will go to Realtor.com, some of them will go to Google, Bing, Yahoo & start searching for a home.

There are thousands of different keywords that people use, one example is let’s say I go to Google & search for “Homes for sale in Orlando”.

Example of one of these ads:

So when someone clicks on one of those ads, we are taking that person to a website that’s designed in a way to get them to convert.  That’s usually done through blocking their ability to view all the listing details.  (Here is a video explaining this further)

So that’s on Search.  On Social it’s a bit different, with social we are not targeting people searching for a home.  This is the down side of leads from Social media websites like Facebook.  

On Social we are going to target basically everyone.  They are being targeted usually with listings or ads that show “Get a list of homes for sale in so and so”. 

It’s common for agents to say that leads that come from social media websites like Facebook are lower quality than Google.  The main reason this is the case is with Google and “Search Engines” in general.  We have people actually intending to search for homes, where on Facebook you are casting a wide net and finding anyone.

Having said that, keep in mind.  Even those Google leads.  What do we really know about them?  We just know that they searched for a home for sale.  We have no idea what stage of the buying process they are in.  We have no idea what their intentions really are.