🏆 Top Affordable Real Estate Website Company
This 2023 Real Geeks review includes everything real estate professionals need to know.
It has in-depth video reviews, pros/cons, which realtors should and shouldn’t consider becoming a client, and Real Geeks pricing. It also discusses the Real Geeks CRM, Real Geeks websites, and the Real Leads PPC campaign platform.
If you’re considering this all-in-one solution for your real estate business, we’ll help you make a highly informed decision.
Many real estate professionals are familiar with the Real Geeks platform as an affordable option for beginner real estate agents.
While there are plenty of Real Geeks reviews out there, we provide the most in-depth review, especially in the video content.
Quick Review
Overall Rating
3.2
The Real Geeks platform is an affordable solution that can be effective for new agents dedicated to lead nurturing. In the long run, clients will pay for Real Geek’s affordability in other ways. I detail these downsides in the pros and cons below.
Be aware that the $299/month is only for the licensing fee. In other words, you pay about $3600/year to lease your website from Real Geeks, who retains control of your data and content.
You must pay an additional $1000-$2000+ per month for paid advertising campaigns if you want to generate leads through Real Geeks. These leads will rarely be high quality.
Real Geeks is best for inexperienced but hungry real estate professionals. Consider this company if you cannot afford higher quality systems, but you’re willing to make up for that with grinding.
Agents with 3+ years of experience have plenty of better options. Spending more upfront comes with plenty of benefits, such as generating superior leads, stronger short-term and long-term ROIs, increased flexibility and functionality, more intuitive software, and less headaches.
2023 Real Geeks Update (Pros, Cons, CRM)
The Real Geeks review above focuses on the Real Geeks CRM and the pros/cons of Real Geeks websites, marketing tools, and content management system.
What Does Real Geeks Offer
Real Geeks builds simple template IDX websites for real estate agents and brokers. IDX websites include MLS listings and often focus on Pay-Per-Click marketing to generate leads.
IDX websites are different from custom websites, which are often built purely with branding in mind. They make the most sense for luxury real estate brokerages.
IDX real estate websites also differ from SEO & Content Marketing lead generation websites. These sites leverage the power of inbound marketing to bring clients to you without having to continually pay for leads. These evergreen strategies take longer to build, but have much better long-term ROI.
Real Geeks also includes a basic CRM, which you use to manage and contact leads captured by the website and PPC marketing. As you might expect, the Real Geeks CRM has limited integrations and functionality.
While Real Geeks websites can enjoy moderate success in acquiring leads, they are often mediocre quality at best. That’s where the grinding comes into play. Real estate professionals will have to do significantly more work to warm up and convert leads.
Real Geeks Cons
No Real Geeks review is complete without the worst cons and disadvantages. We’ve been as transparent as possible.
1. Lead Quality
Many real estate website companies rely on Pay-Per-Click campaigns to drive leads. Obviously you need to continually pay for these campaigns each month for a steady lead funnel. That’s opposed to SEO and content marketing websites, where website content can drive leads for years.
But the main issue with PPC campaigns is lead quality. These leads require significant work to nurture all the way to a commission. In the past, Real Geeks countered this difficulty by producing excellent tools and content to help their customers.
Unfortunately, the quality of their resources has declined since the company changed hands. While there’s still a strong backlog of resources, the world of real estate lead generation changes rapidly.
It seems clear to me that this situation will cause Real Geeks to become a less and less effective solution.
2. New Leadership
In 2019, Fidelity National Financial acquired Real Geeks. Jeff Manson, the founder of Real Geeks who brought a lot of excellent leadership and expertise, fully exited the company by 2020.
As a result, the quality of the platform has decreased. New and existing users can likely expect this trend to continue.
3. Unaligned with Customer Needs
This drawback is one of the biggest cons that came out of the change of leadership. Fortunately, we live in an economy where companies that align their business model with their client needs can really succeed.
Unfortunately, some companies like Facebook, find ways to grow their bottom line that ignore their customer experience. In my opinion, Real Geeks is on this trend.
Important Sidebar: Among real estate lead generation website companies, there is a negative trend that has been the status quo for a long time. I’m talking about the policy of locking clients into contracts where they do not own the very website they paid to build. Instead they lease their website. All of the content and data belongs to the company, not the agent or brokerage. It keeps clients locked into services that do not perform well because the cost of breaking the contract is so high.
4. Minimal Product Improvements
As I mention in the video, I combed through the last 3 years of Real Geeks product updates. The vast majority are very minor improvements and bug fixes.
The text takes up plenty of space on the page, leading you to believe they are continually reinventing their services to keep pace with the market.
However, the fact is that major improvements to real estate technology products are expensive. It’s clear to me that Real Geeks has not invested much into powerful changes that keep their clients at the forefront of their competition.
The last 5 years have brought major changes to real estate lead generation. That includes revolutions in mobile use, video marketing, and content marketing. In all of these crucial areas, Real Geeks is falling behind. Real Geeks video marketing content is a small exception to the rule.
5. Difficult Setup
Especially for agents and brokerages with less experience in real estate technology, this can be frustrating. When you sign up for Real Geeks, you get a huge PDF full of tasks you need to complete to begin the process.
Real Geeks Pros
No Real Geeks review is complete without the best pros and benefits. While this section is short, the affordability is a strong enough selling point for many agents.
1. Affordability
The biggest advantage of Real Geeks is the affordability. Now that’s different from cost-effectiveness. But in terms of pure affordability, Real Geeks has the market pretty much cornered.
Other decent inexpensive service includes Placester and Easy Agent Pro. You can read our 2023 Placester review and our Real Geeks vs. Easy Agent Pro review.
2. Transparent Product Updates
Real Geeks deserves a big thumbs up for this great benefit. Unlike many other companies, they publish all of their product changes on their website. I believe these changes are mostly just responses to service complaints from clients, but still it’s nice.
Who Should Consider Real Geeks
As mentioned, Real Geeks is a strong option for inexperienced agents with limited budgets. However, it’s essential that you are willing to grind to convert leads.
There are good resources to help you learn the system and lead nurturing in general.
Other decent inexpensive service includes Placester and Easy Agent Pro. You can read our 2023 Placester review and our Real Geeks vs. Easy Agent Pro review.
Who Shouldn’t Consider Real Geeks
I strongly recommend you consider better alternatives if you have any of the following:
- 3+ years of experience
- A marketing budget of $30,000+/year
- A team of 3+ people
If you need a custom branded website, read our Agent Image review and check out Luxury Presence and Dakno on our 10 Best Real Estate Website Builders article.
If you need a SEO or Content Marketing lead generation website, consider InboundREM.
If you want a more robust PPC lead generation website, read our BoomTown review.
Real Geeks Pricing
You can visit the Real Geeks pricing page, but it only tells you the $299/month cost of leasing your website. That’s the price for 1-2 users. Each additional user costs $25/month.
There’s also a low startup fee of $250 with a one-year contract. However, it will cost $500 to cancel the contract early. Upon cancellation, you will have no rights to the data or content from your Real Geeks website.
It’s important to know that these costs do not include lead generation. Real Geeks drives leads through Google and Facebook PPC. As you might guess, Pay-Per-Click leads tend to be lower quality.
In order to drive these leads, real estate agents need to sign up for a Real Geeks PPC campaign, which costs an additional $1000-$2000+ per month.
As mentioned, the Real Geeks pricing is the main selling point for many real estate agents.
Client Reviews
Positive Testimonials
I searched through dozens of Real Geeks reviews, and I think this is the most helpful testimonial.
I will say that many of the highly positive testimonials actually seem more excited to have simply discovered the power of digital lead generation and a CRM. It’s not so much that they are praising Real Geeks as they are real estate technology.
That said, I think Real Geeks has earned its positive reviews. It’s a strong option for a specific demographic.
Negative Testimonials
I’m opting not to include a real negative testimonial here. While they certainly exist, I found most of them to be rants, not objective and calm discussions of the platform’s cons.
The complaints center around these issues:
- Difficult to setup and learn the CRM
- Poor quality leads
- Unexpected fees
- Unresponsive and unhelpful Real Geeks customer support
On the last point, I’d like to note that the majority of customers find the customer support quite helpful.
Example Websites
Real Geeks websites are typically one of two template sites, which we’ve shown below. It is possible to hire outside developers to customize the site to some degree.
Real Geeks Websites (Example 1)
Real Geeks Websites (Example 2)
Real Geeks CRM
The Real Geeks CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool) is not top in class, but obviously it’s much cheaper than the alternatives.
For comparison, you pay these prices per month for other CRMs:
- BoomTown is $800-$1500
- kvCORE is $500
- CINC is $1000
- Ylopo is $600
While these options have more integrations and tools for real estate professionals, they come at a significantly higher cost.
I will say that many real estate agents find that they actually don’t need or even want too many bells and whistles in a real estate CRM. There’s no point in paying for more real estate CRM than you need.
Real Geeks tools include an automated email drip campaign and automated SMS texting.
In my opinion, unpersonalized SMS texting is not the best method for nuturing leads. Much of the market is getting annoyed by this form of real estate marketing.
Overall, as a customer relationship management tool goes, the Real Geeks CRM is perfectly fine for the price point.
Real Leads
Real Leads is the name of the Google and Facebook PPC Management platform from Real Geeks.
Their website calls Real Leads a “complete real estate lead generation platform”. That’s true in the sense that they provide a website, managed PPC campaigns, and the Real Geeks CRM to manage those leads.
While Real Leads can provide your real estate business with a steady stream of buyer/seller leads, many of them are destined to go nowhere.
The website also calls Real Leads a “highly efficient and effective marketing solution for generating home buyer/seller leads.”
Here I have to raise my brow a bit. I would say Real Geeks is a moderately efficient and “effective-enough” lead generation tool.
A Note About SEO
Our friend Brian Adams at Hooquest has mentioned in his Real Geeks review that they provide surprisingly good SEO results for the cost.
He references how the above website HomeSalesSanDiego.com ranks for some powerful local keywords. And he’s right, as you can see below.
However, I want to correct this misconception. The website generates a couple hundred visits each month, but it has little to do with the SEO-friendliness of the website build.
If you look closer, you’ll see that the only difficult keyword is “San Diego Home Sales”. This search query has a Keyword Difficulty of 54. It’s no coincidence that this is the exact language of the URL. All the other captured keywords are very easy to rank for.
What’s happening is the website gets a huge boost from Google for all keywords with an exact or very near match to the URL. It has everything to do with choosing an SEO-smart URL and nothing to do with the SEO power of the Real Geeks build.
That said, if you choose to buy a Real Geeks website, make sure you get a URL that will rank for important local real estate keywords. It will absolutely help your ROI and generate better leads than the PPC campaigns. But know that will only be true for 1-2 keywords.
Outside of that, do not expect much SEO success from the Real Geeks platform.
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Conclusion
We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the Real Geeks platform, tools, and CRM. Real Geeks is a market leader for their price point when it comes to lead generation tools through Google Pay Per Click and Facebook Marketing Solutions.
If you found our Real Geeks review helpful, please leave a comment. If you need more information about the Real Geeks CRM or marketing tools, feel free to ask!
We welcome any kind of feedback from all real estate agents.
How InboundREM Can Help
We provide real estate businesses with websites focused on SEO and content marketing.
The absolute best methods for generating strong leads and the best long-term ROI include SEO-focused content marketing, video marketing, and sponsored Google My Business profiles.
We’re in the business of setting up clients with lead generation machines that snowball. It can take a bit longer to get the ball rolling, but these methods also set you up for sustainable and even explosive success.
Another huge benefit is that our clients OWN their websites, which is extremely rare among real estate website builders.
You retain control of your website data and content, even if you cancel the contract. You don’t have to start from scratch if you switch providers.
We never nickel-and-dime our clients, and there are no hidden fees. Apart from my belief that client-first policies are the best way to do business, it’s also just the kind of service I want to provide.
If you’re interested in a deeply transparent conversation about your needs and how IREM might be an excellent fit, schedule a free consultation below.
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Let’s chat about how an SEO-focused website that YOU OWN, Google Business Profile Campaigns, or Custom Email Campaigns can generate high-quality leads and exceptional long-term ROI. If my services aren’t the best move for you, I’ll gladly point you in the right direction
1 Comment
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