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Overall Rating
3.7
Ylopo - Will This Real Estate Lead Generation System Work for You?
Ylopo is a combination of Facebook marketing, IDX search, AI chatbots, and integrated backend services all designed to capture and nurture people interested in buying or selling real estate.
My opinion is Ylopo is excellent for tech-savvy agents or rising stars in years 2-4 of their real estate careers. This is also a good tool for small and mid-sized teams looking to harness the power of social marketing while grooming and training teams of newer real estate professionals.
Ylopo Lead Quality
Ylopo delivers on its promise of real estate leads, delivering one of the lowest if not THE lowest cost of acquisition services in all of real estate marketing.
On a quality scale of 1 to 10, I personally would put these leads on average at a 3 with the case studies I was able to verify. These case studies say you will get one revenue-generating opportunity out of every 50-70 leads acquired.
I’m sure these numbers could be better if you had a full ISA team or text concierge service (Like Raiya) added into the tools. We will discuss these common integrations. Most of the Agents and teams I chatted with did NOT have these additional services.
I had previously written they did NOT provide a branded search experience. They absolutely do.
If you would like to learn a little more about the different types of real estate websites, please check out my blog post discussing the top 10 real estate website companies and the TYPES of websites they make. That article might help you understand the content of this review a little better. I hope you find this helpful.
Table Of Contents
- Updated Pros and Cons
- Ylopo Company Information – Who founded Ylopo, who works at Ylopo, and why this matters to their customers.
- Ylopo Explanation – How does Ylopo work?
- Ylopo Pricing – How much does this system cost.
- My closing thoughts and some thank yous
Updated Pros and Cons (2023)
Ylopo Pros
They still generate plenty of leads.
The leads aren’t the best quality because they are PPC. You may also hear this referred to as direct marketing or paid ads. On a scale of 10, I would rate the quality and heat of these leads at about 3.
It’s absolutely fair to expect a decent quantity of leads from Ylopo. However, they will require strong lead nurturing skills. In addition, they will require extra work compared to hotter leads that come from inbound marketing for example.
2. Direct Connect
Ylopo has recently tested a long-form messaging marketing funnel. The goal is to produce a system that delivers higher quality leads to their clients.
In addition to 400 clients, they also tested it with Barry Jenkins. In my opinion, Barry is one of the top 20 real estate marketers out there.
He reported a 4:1 ROI using the new Direct Connect marketing funnel as part of his efforts. Of course, Direct Connect would only account for a portion of his leads. Still, that makes me raise my eyebrows a little.
If one of the top real estate marketers only gets a 4:1 ROI, what will average agents have? The hard fact is that half of you are below average agents. You have to wonder if this is the right tool for you unless you’ve developed significant lead nurturing skills.
3. Ylopo Success Community
This is a group full of educational resources specifically for clients. To be honest, it’s flat out amazing. You’ll find information on direct marketing, master-classes on how to work leads, how to use CRMs, etc.
It’s a very strong incentive, and Ylopo definitely outperforms the competition in this area.
Ylopo Cons
Too Many Ylopo Agents Per Market
A few years ago, Ylopo had maybe 3000-4000 clients. Now I would estimate they have 7000-10000+ clients. I’ve often heard these clients complain that their market has 4-6 other agents using Ylopo. In some cases, prospects are receiving the same exact automated text message from multiple real estate agents.
Obviously, you don’t want to have your pool of potential Ylopo-generated prospects shared with other Ylopo clients. And some real estate lead generation companies (like InboundREM) are set up so that this doesn’t become problematic.
Secondly, you don’t want to look bad in front of these prospects. All three of those agents looked like a mindless copycat to those prospects. It wouldn’t be surprising if none of them got those leads.
2. Sales and Marketing Don’t Have Every Prospect’s Best Interest in Mind
Real estate lead generation tools and services tend to appeal best to very specific kinds of agents. The tools are fine-tuned because the agent’s needs are fine-tuned.
At some point along the way, Ylopo started getting comfortable marketing and selling to agents who will not benefit significantly from their service. I follow Ylopo’s marketing religiously. You can see this in the change happening in their strategies. While the product has remained essentially the same, the marketing team appeals to a broader and broader range of agents.
The wider they cast their net, the more agents they take on that simply won’t be able to take advantage of their product in a meaningful way.
On one hand, who can blame them? Sales and marketing teams exist to get more customers. On the other hand, it’s something I’ve noticed, and I feel compelled to mention it. Like all my reviews, this 2023 Ylopo review is completely transparent.
All that to say, it’s my opinion that you should be on your guard with the Ylopo sales team. Their long-term goals may not align with your long-term goals. And they may be secretive about that.
That’s not how I run my business, and you can check my sidebar reviews for plenty of proof. But unfortunately, it’s a tactic that many real estate marketing companies use.
3. Possibility of a Sell Out
While the co-founder, Juefeng Ge, has told me they have no intentions of selling the company anytime soon, that may not be the case. I’d refer you to the 5:08 mark of the video above for more details.
Ylopo Video Review
Leadership/Company Summary
Ylopo located in Santa Monica Ca was founded in 2015 by Howard Tager and Juefeng Ge (referred from here on in as “Ge”). They met at a previous real estate marketing startup Tiger Leads where Howard was CEO and Co-Founder and Ge was Vice President of Marketing and product strategy. Tiger Leads was acquired by Move Inc in 2012 for 22 million. Move Inc then sold Tiger Leads a few years later to Commissions Inc.
Currently, Ylopo has a mix of in-office and remote employees with an estimated employee count of about 50.
Sean Purtill Vice President of Business Development and Aaron Franklin head of business development along with Ge directly participated in this review by providing access to the Ylopo platform, confirming certain marketing facts (like the cost of lead acquisition across all of their clients), and providing access to the Ylopo success community. This allowed for an unparalleled view of Ylopo not only as a service but as a company.
With their second company in the real estate marketing space, Ge and Howard have put together a “Dream Team”.
Not only of internal staff but of customers that they hire to support other customers. This strong “advocate” network along with really talented team members creates a hell of a sales force for Ylopo.
If there is a con it is Ge and Howard have surrounded themselves with a really technically proficient team that at times seems to struggle with simplifying the explanation and pricing of their services.
There are also standard complaints when it comes to running a rapidly growing technology company. Broken down it’s “hard to keep up” “working from home is tough” and the occasional these guys didn’t speak my language. Customers have similar commentary.
None of this is bad. Quite the contrary, I put it into the PRO category because THIS particular real estate marketing company has proven they will re-invest into their product line, their customers, and support.
Overall Ylopo has tremendous customer and employee feedback. Normally I would cite my research but Ylopo is JUST catching marketing momentum in the last couple of years. There is not a lot published in public forums like G2, Capterra, or Google reviews. So I have one source to list. My sources are the clients themselves of which I would guess there are well over a thousand in the Ylopo success community. Ylopo does not allow reviews on their Facebook profile so my input has been gotten by reviewing individual posts of actual clients. I did not ask for and thus did not receive permission from Ylopo to publish pictures or comments from this group.
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How Does Ylopo Work?
Ylopo provides TWO websites as part of its website presence. One is a search site. The other a branded website. What follows is an example of their BRANDED website. I am also including a few links for further examples should you want to review. You can click the image to go directly to the website example.
Ylopo Branded Website Examples
- https://craftbauer.com/
- https://thembg.net/
- https://www.plgestates.com/
Ylopos Home Search Site VS. The Branded Site
Ylopo Advertising
They have a number of different ways to create compelling feature-rich advertisements. My favorite of these is “listing rocket” so that’s what I am going to be using as an example. They have access to the MLS which they have uploaded to Facebook. They take your MLS listing ID. Combine the images and text you input into the MLS as a Facebook ad. Here is a two-minute video from Barry Jenkins one of the Ylopo agent advocates I mentioned earlier. You’ll notice Ylopo has created A LOT of marketing collateral that is delivered during the prospect’s search experience. They are effectively trying to deliver the robust information dump a well-designed website would deliver within the Facebook framework. Ylopo has also gotten good at leveraging “audience type” which is the way Facebook targets and sells its advertising.
Ylopo A.I. (RAIYA)
Ylopo also has a proactive A.I. that texts your prospects. This is an add-on feature who’s objective is to keep a dialogue open with current and new prospects. I have heard much about it but I haven’t seen it in action (beyond the example video below. I have reservations about A.I. as I submit making them sound human is all but impossible. The Ylopo team has made a very good case for why there’s is the exception to that rule. I do not think Raiya would improve lead quality but it seems likely that if it works as advertised it would improve lead quantity.
Here is a link you can copy and paste https://www.ylopo.com/raiya-1 that has a two-minute explanation from Ge showing Raiya in action. He speaks fast and compares this to some other technology you might not be familiar with.
Once a lead is generated it is fed into a CRM integration. The example I will use here is Follow Up Boss. See Below.
The CRM then nurtures the lead and if you are using the Ylopo system correctly you are calling the leads as well. All of these efforts should generate an ROI situation once every 50-70 inquiries without an ISA. With an ISA I have heard reports you can drop these numbers down to one ROI situation to one every 30-40 leads generated. I have not personally verified that and the clients I am using as examples do not have an ISA service or staff member.
Ylopo Pricing
- Squarespace IDX Website
- Account set up
- Tech Plus – $295 M/O
- IDX
- Access to the Ylopo Infrastructure
- Integration with a CRM
- Homebot
- No Lead Gen
$100 for Raiya (Text AI) Per Level with a level being number of leads being worked.
Closing thoughts on Ylopo
Ylopo is a best in class Facebook advertising system. I would use Ylopo instead of subscribing to Facebook marketing education because no matter how good you get it’s unlikely you will achieve the CPL (Cost per lead) that Ylopo already has. You can easily spend $1000’s on systems that do not have the results or track record that Ylopo has. Also, the incredible support through the Ylopo success group makes LEARNING this tool far more certain than others of it’s kind. It is STILL at its core generating leads that by definition are not as high on the INTENT funnel as other methods like SEO, Zillow, or YouTube marketing. So for veteran agents more concerned about time than the lead quantity they might want to look elsewhere.
For larger teams feeding a huge pool of agents, this is a GREAT addition, you can either use this as a tool to let agents develop calling and qualifying skills OR if you are dealing with veteran agents looking to provide a large stream of reasonable leads via hot transfer (like Zillow is supposed to be doing) you could add Five Street and Agent Assistance and essentially just be sending live calls to your top agents.
If this review did not address all of your questions about Ylopo you can fill out the contact form below and I would be happy to either refer you to the right Ylopo resource OR address these questions myself.
Schedule a Meeting
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
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