Real estate lead generation services offer lead generation websites, ad management, and integrated CRMs. We looked at the most popular options and rising stars and decided to review Real Geeks, Zurple, and BoomTown. These companies covered the range for Realtors in terms of lead generation and CRM features. Read on for our comparison and review of these three options, as well as our top recommendations.
Best Real Estate Lead Generation Service: Real Geeks
Real Geeks is our top pick because they offer full feature buyer and seller lead generation websites with excellent customization options. They are also the least expensive option for teams with large ad budgets.
| Buyer Lead Generation Tools Learn More |
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| Seller Lead Generation Tools Learn More | Home valuation lead capture website + market report capture pages | Home valuation lead capture website | Home valuation lead capture website in Grow and Advance plans only |
| Price for Website and CRM Learn More |
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| Lead Generation (Pay-Per-Click) Pricing (if you want the companies to advertise your websites) Learn More |
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| 15% of Marketing budget ($250 minimum spend, $750 minimum spend for AdWords and Social) |
| Lead Capture Tools Learn More | Popup w/ lead capture form | Popup w/ lead capture form | Popup w/ lead capture form |
| CRM Capability and Lead Nurturing Learn More |
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| Integrations Learn More | Zillow, Trulia | Zillow, Trulia | Zillow, Trulia, RPR, Mojo Dialer, BombBomb |
| Customer Support Learn More | Email and phone 8 am CST - 11 pm CST, 7 days a week | Email and phone 7 am PST - 4 pm CST, 7 days a week | Email and phone 8 am EST - 8 pm EST, 7 days a week |
| www.RealGeeks.com | www.Zurple.com | www.BoomTown.com |
Real Geeks
Zurple
BoomTownTeams with large PPC budgets
Pricing:
Starting at $199 per month for 1-2 agents
Key Features:
IDX website, buyer & seller lead generation, CRM
Automated lead nurturing
Pricing:
Starting at $349 per month for 1-2 agents
Key Features:
IDX website, buyer lead generation, automated lead nurturing
Customization & Fully featured CRM
Pricing:
Starting at $750 per month for 1-3 agents
Key Features:
IDX website, buyer & seller lead generation, CRM
Best Real Estate Lead Generation Service: Real Geeks
While it was a very close call, we chose Real Geeks as the best overall lead generation service for three primary reasons.
1. The Most Cost Effective Option for Teams with Large PPC Budgets
For teams of five agents or more with pay-per-click ad budgets over $1500, Real Geeks offers similar services and features as its competitors for a lot less money. Here’s how pricing would break down for a five person team with a $1500 marketing spend on the three platforms:
| Website and CRM cost | Monthly PPC budget | Monthly PPC management fee | Total cost | Monthly cost per agent (for five person team) | |
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| Real Geeks | $274 | $1500 | $550 (fixed fee) | $2324 | $464.80 |
| Zurple | $999 | $1500 | $300 (20% of $1500 spend) | $2799 | $559.80 |
| BoomTown | $1500 | $1500 | $225 (15% of $1500 spend) | $3225 | $645 |
While some might argue that a $1500 marketing budget might be a bit extravagant, you need to remember that in some markets, sales prices and competition make advertising on Google a very expensive proposition. Also, supplying five agents with leads can get expensive even in areas with lower than average costs for Google advertising.
2. Customizable Website
Like Zurple and BoomTown, Real Geeks offers buyer lead generation by creating a home search website for you. They also offer seller lead generation through home valuation websites. The area where Real Geeks websites really shine is customization ability. With Real Geeks, you can customize the look and feel of your website to match your brand. It also has multiple editable pages, including a blog.
Customization options like these mean you can (and should) be able to get your Real Geeks site as your main real estate website. If you’re starting up a new team or boutique brokerage, this can save you a significant amount of money over building or paying a monthly fee for your primary website, in addition to paying for your lead generation website.
While Real Geeks websites probably aren’t going to win any design awards, they’re clean, fast, and designed for a great user experience which will lead to more conversions. Remember that beautiful design does not always equal higher conversion rates.
3. Good Lead Nurturing Features
Real Geeks CRM allows agents to track, segment, and follow up with leads with some pretty powerful features. As with their websites, they also offer customization options that let you tailor follow up and outreach to fit your workflow and brand.
One of the coolest features of Real Geeks CRM is their mass texting, which the other two companies do not offer. Through your Real Geeks dashboard, you can engage multiple leads with text messages at the same time, with templated messages for easy and lightning quick responses. Every text conversation opens in a separate panel (like a Gchat window) which means you can mass text leads and carry on multiple conversations at once.
The only real downside to Real Geeks is that their pricing won’t work for everyone. For example, if you’re an individual agent or broker, the flat fee for lead generation every month might be prohibitively expensive.
4. Seller Lead Generation via Property Valuation Tool
Another great feature that Real Geeks offers is their optional home valuation landing pages to generate seller leads. Here’s how it works: Leads come to the landing page via PPC or organic search, enter their contact information to see how much their home is worth, and are then entered into your CRM and signed up for automated market report drip emails. Even better, Real Geeks will handle the advertising of your home valuation page on Facebook or Google. All you need to do is sit back and collect your leads.
Best Lead Generation Service for Solo Agents, Small Teams, and Lead Nurturing: Zurple
For an individual or teams of 3 agents or less, Zurple is the most affordable option. If you’re an individual agent or small team who already has a great website and wants automated lead nurturing, Zurple is your best bet in terms of functionality and price.
Zurple engages leads with automatic emails and texts in response to 25 separate behaviors. For example, if a lead favorites a property or visits the same property multiple times, different emails will be triggered. This feature is unique to Zurple.
Agents are sent an alert if a lead exhibits behavior that indicates they are serious buyers rather than just casual browsers. This means that you can have dozens or even hundreds of leads being nurtured automatically by Zurple at the same time. You can step in and take over for warmer leads and keep colder leads on the automated lead nurturing program until they’re ready to buy.
Zurple’s automated lead nurturing is a pretty amazing feature that not only frees agents from busy work, but actually engages and nurtures leads on their behalf much like an inbound sales agent or virtual assistant would.
Besides coming in at a higher price point than Real Geeks for larger teams, the only real drawback to Zurple’s platform is that their websites and automated emails offer very limited options for customization. You can add a logo to the website and your email signature to emails so they sound like they’re coming from you, but other than that, you can’t customize the emails at all.
Best Lead Generation Service for Customization & CRM: BoomTown
As more and more agents and teams start using lead generation services, standing out from the crowd will become more difficult, but BoomTown makes this easy with superior customization ability. While Real Geeks has great customization options, BoomTown takes customization a bit further. At their Grow and Advance tiers, BoomTown offers multiple templates, widgets, and a blog for customization.
Another great custom feature is BoomTown’s individual agent subpages. This means each agent on a team can send clients to a personally branded BoomTown page.
In another nod to customization, BoomTown offers an amazing sharing library. The library has dozens of email drip campaigns designed and written by other BoomTown users. Best of all, all campaigns are graded by open rates, so you can be sure the one you use will make a big impact on your leads. You can also design your own drip campaign using BoomTown’s sophisticated drip campaign rules.
At the Grow and Advance tiers, BoomTown’s CRM is second to none. Billed as a “predictive CRM,” it allows you to not only segment leads and design drip campaigns, but to offer leads something of actual value: homes that are a great fit for their needs. BoomTown’s advanced fit score algorithm will assign properties a number score from 1-100 that determines how good of a “fit” they are for a given lead. They also offer what they call a visual hot sheet that shows new listings, price changes, or other changes tailored to each lead’s criteria.
While they offer more customization features than Real Geeks or Zurple, and have a CRM that’s more advanced, BoomTown is also significantly more expensive than either competitor. That said, BoomTown’s pricing will be on par with Real Geeks for some teams. For example, a team of three agents with a $750 marketing budget will shell out $$1499 for Real Geeks and $1612 for BoomTown. Just keep in mind that 3 users would be limited to BoomTown’s Launch tier, which offers less functionality than either Grow or Advance.
How Real Estate Lead Generation Websites Work
While they all offer slightly different features and services, all lead generation services use the same basic methods to generate leads for you. Here’s what you get when you sign up:
- Lead generation websites for buyers and sellers – For buyer lead generation, you will get a home search website that buyers can use to search MLS listings. For seller lead generation, you will get a home valuation website (“What’s my property worth?”).
- PPC advertising management – In order to drive traffic to your lead generation website(s), lead generation services manage your PPC (pay per click) advertising for you. You set your marketing budget, and then they charge you a monthly fee to manage your PPC advertising campaigns on Google, Facebook, and other social media sites.
- Lead capture – Once a buyer or seller starts using your lead generation site, they are encouraged to offer their contact information to sign up for listing updates or a thorough home valuation.
- CRM – Once they’ve captured a lead’s contact information, they are automatically imported into a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager), where you can organize them by different criteria (e.g. seller or buyer lead, price point, cold leads vs warm leads, etc.).
- Lead nurturing – For leads that provide their contact information, lead generation services offer email and text autoresponders and automated drip campaigns to help nurture your leads until they are ready to buy or sell.
Next, we’re going to tell you how Real Geeks, Zurple, and BoomTown stack up on all of these features.
In-Depth Review: Zurple vs. Real Geeks vs. BoomTown
Buyer Lead Generation Tools
In order to entice homebuyers, lead generation services should offer a home search experience that buyers can’t get from Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Redfin, or any of the dozen or more home search portals online today. After all, all sites are essentially pulling content from the same MLS data.
Al three companies will create an IDX-enabled property search website for you that pulls MLS listings in your area. They offer buyers a cleaner, faster, and less complicated way to search for homes. Instead of overwhelming buyers with data and charts, they focus on what most buyers really want to see: big, beautiful, easy to access listing pictures.
All three companies handle lead capture via simple pop ups that encourage users to input their contact information in order to continue browsing properties. Once they submit their contact info, they get signed up for listing updates.
Real Geeks offers agents fully featured customizable websites that can be used as their main site. While home search is still the primary focus here, they also offer blogs, testimonial pages, chat agents, videos, and pretty much anything else you could want from an IDX enabled real estate website.
The main benefit to having a site with more content is that you can build traffic to the site with traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, like blogging. That means that Real Geeks sites have the potential to rank organically (i.e. show up in Google search results) which means that at some point you may be able to forgo paying for PPC marketing entirely and then you don’t need to pay for another website.
At only $199 a month for up to 9 agents, this makes a Real Geeks site comparable with many popular IDX website providers like EasyAgentPro, or Placester. The main difference is that you’re not just getting a website. You’re also getting buyer search and home valuation pages optimized for conversion, and a great CRM for lead nurturing.
If you’d like to check out an example Real Geeks site, click here.
Zurple websites are fast loading, cleanly designed, and offer home buyers a great search experience. The only sticking point with Zurple sites is that they are not as customizable as Real Geeks’ or BoomTown’s sites. Personally, I think that personalization can help build trust for home buyers.
That said, Zurple offers one pretty amazing feature that the other two don’t: multiple home search websites. When you sign on with Zurple at their lowest tier, you’re only getting one site. When you upgrade to more expensive plans as your team grows, you get multiple lead generation websites. That means your lead generation sites can all target different (and more specific) keywords, which can mean more leads.
Does having more lead generation sites automatically equal a better mousetrap? Considering how quickly Zurple is growing, I wouldn’t doubt it. The only drawback is the lack of customization options, and the relatively steep price scaling as you add team members.
For pure aesthetics, my personal opinion is that Zurple offers the nicest looking sites right off the shelf. If you’re not big on customizing your own site, or already have a great personal or team site and just want straight lead generation, then Zurple is probably your best bet.
For an example Zurple site, click here.
BoomTown takes Real Geeks’ concept of offering a fully featured and customizable site one step further. They offer multiple templates on their Grow and Advance plans, which means your BoomTown site can be easily customized to match your brand.
Like Real Geeks, you could theoretically use a BoomTown site as your main site. The only drawback here is pricing. For teams of three or more you need to sign up for their Grow tier, which is a rather substantial $1500 per month just for the website and CRM.
One great feature that BoomTown offers that others don’t is subdomains for each agent. This means that every agent will have their own site to send to prospective clients as well as generate leads.
To check out an example BoomTown website, click here.
Seller Lead Generation Tools
Generating seller leads should be included in any good lead generation service. Luckily, all three companies offer home valuation webpages in order to generate seller leads. Interested sellers can use these sites to find out how much their home is worth.
Real Geeks offers home valuation pages as well as market reports to generate seller leads. The home valuation pages are clean, fast loading, and well designed. To see an example of a Real Geeks home valuation page, click here.
Zurple offers home valuation pages that are clean, fast loading, and well designed.
BoomTown offers home valuation pages that are clean, fast loading, and well designed. For an example of a BoomTown home valuation page click here.
Price for Website and CRM
Having your own IDX enabled website (a website that automatically pulls listings from the MLS) is fast becoming a must-have for realtors. You can build your own or use a turnkey option from a lead generation service for a monthly fee. While it’s true you’ll essentially be “renting” the website instead of owning it, there are some very big benefits with picking an off the shelf option that has been designed to convert leads instead of just look nice.
As far as CRMs go, there are dozens of options on the market ranging from $12 a month for something like Insightly to $80 per month for REthink. The cost of supplementing or replacing your current CRM by using a real estate lead generation service should be factored into your decision here.
If you’re looking for more information on choosing the right real estate CRM, check out our in-depth buyer’s guide comparing Top Producer, Contactually, and REthink here.
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Lead Generation (Pay-Per-Click) Pricing
Once the lead generation services create your website for you, you can pay an additional charge for them to market the website for you. They will do this with PPC (“Pay Per Click”) advertising on Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms. For many non-tech savvy Realtors, getting a great ROI from PPC advertising might as well be wizardry. Even digital marketers struggle getting consistent returns from PPC marketing. This means having a pro design and manage your ads that generate buyer and seller leads can actually save you money in the long run.
Each service charges a PPC fee on top of your marketing budget. For example, Real Geeks charges $550 per month on top of your marketing budget, and the other two charge a percentage of your marketing budget. You will spend marketing dollars every time someone clicks on your ad (that’s why it is called “Pay Per Click”). The most economical option for you really depends on the size of your marketing budget and the price that the lead gen service is charging for the website and PPC work. Here’s an example of how to add up your total cost:
| Website and CRM cost | Monthly PPC budget | Monthly PPC management fee | Total cost | Monthly cost per agent (for five person team) | |
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| Real Geeks | $274 | $1500 | $550 (fixed fee) | $2324 | $464.80 |
| Zurple | $999 | $1500 | $300 (20% of $1500 spend) | $2799 | $559.80 |
| BoomTown | $1500 | $1500 | $225 (15% of $1500 spend) | $3225 | $645 |
Lead Capture Tools
After creating buyer and seller lead generation websites for you, all three services will capture the contact information of site visitors using pop up lead capture forms. Once your lead enters their information, they also are automatically added to your CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). In the CRM, you can organize and track leads and determine which leads to follow up with. More to come on the CRM below.
Real Geeks uses a popup lead capture form to capture leads. Users are allowed to run a search, view several properties, and scroll through the results before the popup is triggered. The popup encourages leads to sign up for email alerts for listings that match their search criteria. Along with the popup, Real Geeks also offers lead capture through simple forms where visitors can book showings.
Here’s an example of a lead capture popup from Real Geeks:
Zurple also captures leads with a popup as well as simple lead capture forms that allow visitors to book a showing. Here’s what Zurple’s lead capture popup looks like:
BoomTown also uses lead capture popups. The main difference is that BoomTown’s popup is much simpler than Real Geeks’. Having the ability to sign up with Facebook is a nice touch. Along with the popup, BoomTown also offers simple lead capture forms that allow visitors to book showings.
CRM Capability and Automated Lead Nurturing
Generating leads from PPC campaigns is great, but all three services take the next step and also offer great CRM and lead nurturing features. A Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) allows you to organize your leads so you know which ones to reach out to and which ones can wait. The CRMs offered by all three companies should be powerful enough for most teams to replace whatever CRM they’re already using, but we felt BoomTown offered the best combination of features.
Lead nurturing helps keep cold leads engaged until they are ready to buy or sell. Automated lead nurturing let’s you keep leads engaged automatically, via email or text, either based on behavioral actions your leads take on your site or simply at predetermined intervals.
Zurple has the most advanced automated lead nurturing of the three companies we looked at. They were the only company to offer automated lead nurturing triggered by 26 behavioral actions leads take on the websites. While their automated lead nurturing emails are great, and designed for conversion, individual emails are not customizable beyond adding your personal signature. For better or worse, many agents will want to tweak the messages sent on their behalf.
The other 2 companies offer autoresponders and drip campaigns, but these are only emails or texts sent at predetermined intervals. They are only triggered by a lead signing up for the site.
Real Geeks has a fully featured CRM that offers round robin lead assignment (new leads are assigned to an agent based on the order you set. E.g. First lead goes to agent A, second lead goes to agent B, third lead goes to agent C, etc.). You can also assign certain types of leads to certain agents. For example, you may want leads with budgets over a certain price point to be assigned to your top producer.
While Real Geeks may not have the sophisticated automatic lead nurturing feature that Zurple has, agents do get alerts whenever leads make certain actions on the site. For example, if a lead favorited a property, the assigned agent is notified and can follow up with prewritten emails or texts.
Once a lead is captured by Real Geeks, you have great options for segmentation and email/text outreach. There are email drip campaigns that you can set up in the CRM as well as automated text responders. Even better, you can carry on text conversations with multiple leads at once in different chat windows right from the CRM. Prewritten texting scripts make follow up a breeze.
Zurple has the most advanced automated lead nurturing of the three companies we looked at. Zurple’s CRM with a unique feature called Conversations. Conversations allows you set your lead up on an automatic lead nurturing plan that sends different emails to your leads depending on any of 25 different behaviors they take on the site.
For example, if a lead favorites a property or returns to one property multiple times, different emails will be sent to the lead. All Zurple emails have been A/B tested to produce the most engagement from your leads.
Agents or brokers can monitor these conversations and step in whenever they feel a personal touch is necessary. They can then opt to put the lead back on the automated nurturing plan, or take them off the plan and start working with them via traditional methods.
Another great lead nurturing feature Zurple are automated text autoresponders. When your lead signs up for the site, the system can send them a text message instead of an email.
BoomTown CRM is a bit more advanced than Real Geeks and Zurple. With BoomTown, once a lead is in the system, they pull in social media accounts like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. While this might not be very useful for colder leads, once they are further down the funnel, it can make personalized nurturing much easier. For example, you might find out your lead is a fan of your favorite sports team. You could then theoretically send an email that mentions football. “Watching the big game tonight? Check out these new listings first.”
If you don’t already have a lead nurturing plan, then BoomTown has you covered with their library of prewritten email drip campaigns, email autoresponders, and texts. All were written by BoomTown users and are actually scored by open rate and response rate.
Even better, BoomTown allows you to match properties to leads and vice versa. When new listings come in, they are given a “fit score” of 1-100, which tells you how well they fit each lead’s criteria. You can then send out new properties quickly and easily.
They also have a visual hotsheet that highlights new listings that might work for your lead’s criteria. Unlike traditional hotsheets, BoomTown’s visual hotsheet includes pictures of every listing.
Lead assignment is also done with a round robin system with the ability to assign certain types of leads to certain agents.
Integrations
All three lead generation services offer integration with Zillow and Trulia. This means that you can automatically import your leads from these sites and nurture them from the CRMs the platforms provide.
Customer Support
Since lead generation service is expensive, you’re going to want great customer service. Here’s how the three companies stacked up. Note that this is simply regular customer service and doesn’t cover onboarding or strategy calls.
| Customer Service Options | Timing | |
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 | Phone and email | 8am CST to 11pm CST, 7 days a week |
 | Phone and email | 7am PST to 4pm PST, 7 days a week |
 | Phone and email | 8am EST to 8am EST, 7 days a week |
All Options for Real Estate Lead Generation Services
| offers a nice compromise between affordability, customization options, and CRM/lead nurturing features. It’s our top pick for small businesses. |
| As far as automated lead nurturing goes, Zurple is still by far the best lead generation software on the market. If you want a truly turnkey lead generation system and don’t like to tinker, then Zurple is your best bet. |
| Boomtown has a very powerful CRM that can easily eclipse any real estate specific CRM on the market. They also have amazing customization options for those of us who want to get our hands dirty. |
 | At just $99/month for an IDX website and CRM, Market Leader is one of the most affordable real estate lead gen services. Unlike the other companies who let you set your own budget for pay per click (PPC) campaigns, Market Leader charges you a flat rate per lead: $20 – $30 depending on the market. |
 | Like the other services, there’s an IDX search tool for buyers to browse for homes. You can also customize the website and do things like add blog posts to help boost your pagerank. They even give you a unique chat box that’s operated 18 hours a day, 7 days a week by Inside Real Estate staff, so customers can chat for help directly on your website without pestering you. |
 | TigerLead is a bit more expensive than the other services. When I inquired, I was quoted at $1,500/month. This included all pay-per-click fees. One difference, however, is that TigerLead gives you a set number of leads per month (for me it was 50, or $30 each). |
 | Flipt offers PPC management services for Realtors starting at just $99 per month plus ad spend. Services include free landing pages, automated text and email follow ups and more. |
The Bottom Line
Before choosing a real estate lead generation website, it’s important to figure out your budget and see which service is worth it for you or your team. In most circumstances, that will be Real Geeks. But if the price difference is minimal, I would go with BoomTown if you want more customization options or Zurple if you want more websites and more powerful automated lead nurturing.
Elijah James Logan
There is definately a lot to know about this issue.
I like all of the points you made.
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Magnis Plus
“I enjoyed reading your sites and comments which giving a best knowledge as per my requirement.Real Estate Marketing Software Program Tool for Real Estate Agents
Best Real Estate Lead Generation Tips for Your Website. Fully engage your real estate market on social media in 2018.Top lead generation site which improves the lead generations in the real estate markets,this software is much suitable for Agents,customers,which gives the best performance and very friendly software.”
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Hey Magnis,
Thanks for your thoughts on this. Crowsourcing reviews is super important and something that doesn’t happen often enough in real estate.
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Mr. Luke M. Whalen
This was very informative, I appreciate it.
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Hey Luke,
Glad you found the article helpful and thanks for stopping by.
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Scott
I’m deciding between Commissions Inc & Real Geeks. What are the main differences besides cost? Any help or insight would be cool.
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Hey Scott,
I would check online and make a spreadsheet comparing the two products. Also, it couldn’t hurt to set up a call with a sales rep to see if they have any special offers.
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Leon
Real Geeks also integrates with BombBomb for video emails & has several other great features not listed in the reviews. If you don’t want to use the POC through Real Geeks you can manage your own or pull leads into the system from other sources for lead generation. One other feature that’s nice is that the individual agent pages places cookies on visitors who log in so that when they return (even to the main site page) it pulls them to the agents page they signed up on the site giving that agent alerts. Very inexpensive system for a small office or team.
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Hey Leon,
Thanks for your comment, we genuinely appreciate actual users of the software we review to hear their insights. The difficulty with writing these review articles is that they would be 1,000 pages long if we discussed every single feature and perk of the individual systems. They’re simply too complex these days to write about every single feature, though we try to get our readers as much information as humanly possible. Using cookies to track visitors and present them to the same agent is yet another reason we chose Real Geeks as the best real estate lead generation website. That said, we’re actually working on our own WordPress based solution which we will be launching in the coming months. Stay tuned!
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Joe Janus
Emile,
Can you send me information on your wordpress solution? I’ve been looking at IDXcentral as well.
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We have an in-depth buyer’s guide comparing the top three IDX providers coming out in the next few weeks. We also have a new and updated step-by-step guide to building an IDX website with WordPress. Stay tuned!
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Luke
Where is this article? I’m interested in the WordPress solutions you mentioned. I haven’t found anything that’s as hiqh quality as some of the best non-owned IDX website solutions that also lets you own your website and data. All seem to be rented sites that you would lose all SEO juice over if you ever cancelled with them.
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Hey Luke, we have two articles that might interest you. The first is a walkthrough to creating an IDX site with WordPress: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/wordpress-real-estate-website-idx/ and the second is a buyer’s guide comparing some popular IDX provider options. https://fitsmallbusiness.com/best-wordpress-idx-providers/
Hope that helps.
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