If you’re not a tech geek, keeping up with the latest and greatest real estate marketing tools can be a challenge. That’s why we updated this list of the best tools available for agents and brokers in 2023. We also included links to our in-depth reviews, buyer’s guides, and how-to articles so you can get the most from each app, service, or piece of software we cover.
Click on a category below to jump to descriptions and in-depth reviews of The Close’s top picks for the best real estate marketing tools of 2023:
| Real Estate Marketing Tool Category | Best Tools |
|---|---|
| Websites | Real Geeks, AgentFire, WordPress, Placester, Luxury Presence, Sierra Interactive, Agent Image |
| Social Media Tools | , Hootsuite, Buffer, Tailwind |
| Marketing-focused CRMs | LionDesk, Market Leader |
| Graphic Design Tools | LabCoat Agents Marketing Center, Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Kapwing, Unsplash |
| Video Production Tools | Rode VideoMicro, DJI OM 5, Lumen5, Animoto, Teleprompter Pro |
| SEO Tools | Ahrefs, Semrush |
| SMS Marketing Tools | SlickText, EZ Texting |
| AI Marketing Tools | ChatGPT, Copy.ai, Addressable, Lumi AI |
Websites
Real Geeks
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Cost: $299 per month - Learning curve: Low
As one of the earliest providers of all-in-one IDX websites and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Real Geeks offers agents, teams, and brokerages a true turnkey solution for their online marketing efforts. There are way, way too many features to list here, but you will get a gorgeous IDX website optimized for lead generation, a powerful CRM, a property valuation tool, SMS texting, market reports, and—yeah, way too much to list here.
AgentFire
AgentFire provides a lot more than just pretty websites. It also offers agents a full library of lead capture tools, including calls to action (CTAs), landing pages, lead magnets, neighborhood guides, market reports, blogs, and more. It even offers training with coaching legend Tom Ferry.
DIY WordPress Website
- Cost: Free to $5,000 and up
- Learning curve: High
If you’re a bit more tech-savvy and want to get your hands dirty, then you might want to try your hand at building a WordPress website to show off your brand online. While WordPress is easy to use compared to building a site from scratch, the learning curve for non-tech-savvy agents is significant. You’ll also need to pay to add features like IDX listings, which come standard with most real estate websites. Finally, while designing it yourself may be free, you will need to pay for hosting (starting at around $5 per month) and domain registration costs (starting at $10 per year for low-demand URLs).
Related Articles
- How to Build an IDX Real Estate Website in an Afternoon
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Placester
- Cost: Starting at $119 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
If you want a done-for-you website without the hassle of hiring a web designer, Placester is probably your best bet. Answer a few questions about your personal brand and Placester will have your website up and running in just a few hours. Even better, you get unlimited website updates. Forever.
Luxury Presence
- Cost: Starting at $500 per month
- Learning curve: Low
If you’re ready to step into sophistication, Luxury Presence provides an all-in-one solution from website design to social media and content management to SEO optimization. With gorgeous, award-winning website design and integrated marketing solutions, Luxury Presence will elevate your real estate marketing to the next level. It’s definitely on the pricier side, but you’ll get a show-stopping, high-converting IDX website optimized for lead generation that integrates with your favorite third-party platforms. Get $500 off by clicking the button below.
Sierra Interactive
- Cost: Starting at $499.95 per month
- Learning curve: Low
Looking to take your lead gen to the next level? Sierra Interactive offers stunning IDX websites that integrate with a powerful lead generation solution. They will manage your digital ad campaigns, driving traffic to a fully integrated CRM. Sierra Interactive’s powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tool then interacts with and prequalifies your leads for you. Sierra Interactive is more than a website—it’s a fully integrated marketing system.
- Cost: $5,000
- Learning curve: Low
Step up your online game with a custom website from Agent Image. If DIY isn’t your thing, let the experts at Agent Image build out a dazzling, fully-tailored look and feel to give your brand that extra lift. And don’t worry, if you’re not quite at the top level of your career, you can start small and build as you grow. Agent Image also includes a full suite of digital marketing services including SEO, social media management, and pay-per-click advertising to generate leads and keep your pipeline filled. Click the button below for 20% off.
If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to go all-in on social media this year, you could do worse than reading the latest National Association of Realtors (NAR) technology survey. They found that a whopping 46% of Realtors said they got their highest-quality leads from social media. While creativity and consistency matter most when it comes to success on social media marketing, the right tool will save you time, money, and headaches.
Coffee & Contracts
- Cost: $54 per month
- Learning curve: Low
Another Realtor-founded company, Coffee & Contracts offers agents gorgeous and trendy templates for Instagram. Founder Haley Ingram calls it “your $54-a-month marketing manager,” and we couldn’t agree more. Hiring a social media manager who keeps up with the latest trends as Haley does would easily cost you 10 times what she charges. Assuming you could even find one! Close readers get $15 off their first month using promo code THECLOSE.
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Hootsuite
- Cost: $29 to $599 per month
- Learning curve: Low
Hootsuite is the social media software that 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies trust to plan, create, and schedule their social media posts to maximize views and engagement. Hootsuite lets you store frequently used assets like images and logos so you can create and schedule social media content for multiple channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more from one app.
Buffer
- Cost: Free to $99 per month
- Learning curve: Low
Like Hootsuite, Buffer also lets agents plan, create, and schedule social media posts. They have a cool feature that allows you to add the first comment to your Instagram posts to entice your followers to engage and include more info about your post. The best part is that, unlike Hootsuite, Buffer offers a limited free version that lets you manage three social accounts and schedule up to 10 posts. Most teams will probably opt to upgrade to the Pro plan for $15 a month, though.
Tailwind
- Cost: Free to $19.98 per month
- Learning curve: Low
Spend lots of time on Pinterest or Instagram? Then an app like Tailwind is right up your alley. You can use Tailwind to not only schedule social media posts for these two platforms, but also to discover key influencers on Pinterest and trending hashtags on Instagram. Even better, Tailwind has a free limited version of the app. Of course, if you want to upgrade, Tailwind is only $9.99 per channel, per month. So if you only want to use Tailwind for Instagram, you’ll cut your bill in half.
Related Articles
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Marketing-focused CRMs
Speaking of automating relationships, a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool can do just that but on an even higher level than your phone, albeit with a less personal touch. That said, you can use it to automate text messages and schedule phone calls, so there’s a pretty good argument that your CRM is even more important than your phone for marketing. Here are two killer CRMs for individual agents and teams.
LionDesk
- Cost: $21 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
LionDesk is a lightweight, affordable, and easy-to-use CRM that has everything you need to start organizing and automating your relationships, and with transaction management thrown in for good measure. Even better, you can get set up with LionDesk starting at just $21 per month—less than half what most other CRM companies charge.
Market Leader
- Cost: $189 per user, per month
- Learning curve: Medium
When it comes to bang for your buck from a CRM with great marketing tools, Market Leader is arguably the best in town. Market Leader users get a unique lead per month commitment along with extras like beautiful agent websites, email, paid social, and even print marketing, inside their marketing center.
Related Articles
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- The 7 Best Free Real Estate CRMs for 2024
Love them or hate them, graphic design tools are a must have in every real estate agent’s marketing toolkit. The ones we picked here take the guesswork out of creating beautiful graphics for your website, social media, and print.
Canva
- Cost: Free to $30 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
Designed as a Photoshop replacement for the non-tech-savvy, Canva is perfect for agents who don’t have the time to dive into the deep end and just want to create great-looking visual assets right away. It works a lot like Photoshop—the only difference is that it doesn’t offer nearly as many features. Instead, you get thousands of predesigned templates that you can customize and make your own.
Adobe Photoshop
- Cost: $20.99 per month
- Learning curve: High
Of course, if you want to get really serious about design, then Adobe Photoshop is a no-brainer. It is, and has been, the choice of every serious graphic design professional for more than 20 years now. Facing stiff competition from the likes of LCA Marketing Center and Canva, prices have gone down dramatically. The learning curve is high, though, so Photoshop will require an investment of time and effort to pay off.
Kapwing
- Cost: Free to $20 per month
- Learning curve: Low
Have you ever wondered how we make all those hilarious memes (hey, our mothers think they’re funny) that we share on social media? The answer is a secret meme-making weapon called Kapwing. Kapwing offers tons of meme templates that you can quickly and easily customize, as you can with Canva. Kapwing also lets you make and edit videos, add subtitles, add music to videos, and more.
Unsplash
- Cost: Free
- Learning curve: Low
Venture capital-backed Unsplash is the best source for royalty-free images online. Full stop. This is where we get most of our stock photos for The Close. The only drawback is that the selection of images is limited compared to other sources. The quality is higher, though, so this should be your first choice for royalty-free photos.
If we have to explain to you why video is a crucial real estate marketing tool in 2023, you might just be living on another planet. Video is no longer a bonus—it’s increasingly the primary way your leads will interact with your brand.
Rode VideoMicro
- Cost: $59
- Learning curve: Low
This tiny little microphone will make your videos sound professional instead of crummy. Sound is even more important than image quality when it comes to video production. After all, your audience isn’t watching your videos to see what you look like. They want to hear what you have to say. If you buy anything to improve your videos, this should be it.
DJI OM 5
- Cost: $159
- Learning curve: Low
Once you have your audio sorted out, you’re going to need a tool to make sure your video is always crisp, clear, and in focus no matter what you’re shooting. The DJI OM 5 is the perfect tool for the job. The OM 5 can be used as a tripod for recording educational videos or podcasts at your desk as well as a handheld stabilizer for recording listing videos or neighborhood tours. Think of it as a professional-grade selfie stick.
Lumen5
- Cost: $149 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
Lumen5 is the easy way to make professional-looking explainer videos with text, stock video, and more. The company also offers templates for social media as well as prosumer-level tools to help you create videos that look like they came from a Hollywood studio.
Animoto
- Cost: $15 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
Animoto is a drag-and-drop video editor designed for small businesses. It’s easy to use and gets you slick, professional-looking results without the hassle. Perfect for making quick listing videos, promotional videos, or anything else you want to make that needs to look and sound great.
Teleprompter Pro
- Cost: $7.99 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
If you’re using scripts for your videos (and you should be), then an app like Teleprompter Pro will make your life much easier. It works just like the teleprompters politicians and actors use, but it’s compatible with your laptop, iPad, and even professional teleprompter machines. It takes some getting used to, but once you start using one, you’ll never go back. Instead of just winging it and having to edit out all your uhhhhs and ummms, you can just read your script like a pro.
Ahrefs
- Cost: $99 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
Over the past few years, Ahrefs has managed to wrestle the throne away from Moz and become the most accurate and most useful search engine optimization (SEO) tool on the market. It lets you take the guesswork out of deciding which articles to write by showing the keywords with the most traffic and the lowest difficulty to rank for. Don’t tell them I told you this, but you could theoretically pay for just one month and research your entire content runway for the year. If you’re more serious about SEO, then a monthly subscription makes more sense.
Semrush
- Cost: $83 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
If you want to get serious about beating the competition, then Semrush is an invaluable marketing tool. It lets you spy on the competition and figure out what keywords they’re ranking for, how much traffic they’re getting, and who is linking to them.
- Real Estate SEO: The Ultimate Guide (9 Steps to Better Ranking)
If you haven’t added text messages to your marketing tool kit yet, you might be leaving money on the table. A study by SMS Comparison found that 90% of people prefer text ads to cold calls or emails. Another study found that text messages have a whopping 98% open rate compared to just 33% for real estate emails.
SlickText
- Cost: $139 per month
- Learning curve: Low
SlickText lets agents send bulk text messages for new listings or open house details, schedule texts, add pictures, and set up opt-in text messaging lists to increase engagement automatically. If you start using SlickText to market to your clients and sphere, be ready to give your thumbs a workout.
EZ Texting
- Cost: $39 to $119 per month
- Learning curve: Low
EZ Texting lets real estate agents build SMS lists that people can subscribe to by texting a keyword to their numbers. You can also use EZ Texting to create SMS polls, drip campaigns, and more.
Since artificial intelligence (AI) technology seems to be changing faster than a new agent answers calls from unknown numbers, we knew we needed to include AI marketing tools in this update. We promise to keep you as up to date with the latest developments as humanly possible.
- Cost: Free-$20 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
The most recent version of OpenAI’s chatbot software, ChatGPT 4, might just be the most powerful real estate marketing tool ever created. Yes, it still sometimes gets the facts wrong or even makes them up. But with the right prompts, you can use it to write entire email drip sequences, property descriptions, ad copy, e-books, or pretty much anything else you’d want to write—in 30 seconds.
- Cost: Free-$36 per month
- Learning curve: Medium
As powerful as ChatGPT 4 is, when it comes to writing and optimizing copy for your website or Facebook ads, Copy.ai is a better choice. Here’s why. In order to use ChatGPT effectively, you have to know exactly what you want and how to ask for it. While that might work fine for a listing description, writing persuasive ad copy is a little trickier. Copy.ai makes it easy by allowing you to choose proven copywriting formulas like the AIDA model before it generates a response.
- Cost: $12-$80 per month (Territories)
- Learning curve: Low
One company that’s putting the power of AI to work is Addressable. When you sign up with the Addressable platform, you have the power to tell their artificial intelligence what you want it to say and who you’re targeting, then their AI will create compelling copy, and robot arms will write out the cards in ballpoint pen for you.
- Cost: $12 per month
- Learning curve: Low
Pochlyte’s Lumi AI takes the guesswork out of using AI to create engaging real estate marketing content. Instead of prompts, Lumi lets you create compelling listing descriptions, social media posts, emails, newsletters and more with just a few clicks. Even better, Lumi is designed specifically for Reators so it already knows how to create content that makes your phone ring.
Methodology: How We Chose the Best Real Estate Marketing Tools
Even though our team has more than 50 years of combined real estate experience, choosing the best marketing tools that will work for most agents was not easy. To add a degree of objectivity to our personal ratings, we looked at five key criteria:
- Utility: Does the tool solve a common marketing problem for most agents?
- Pricing: Is the tool affordable? If not, does it offer working agents a good return on investment?
- Ease of use: Can the average Realtor learn how to use the tool quickly and easily?
- Network effect: Is it popular with agents? Is there an active community that gives agents support and best practices to use the tool?
Over to You
Are you using a killer real estate agent marketing tool we forgot? Let us know in the comment section below or join the conversation on our Facebook Mastermind Group here.
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