Tool Review. Lead Gen/Dispo Software
Hi everyone.
I did a long review of some of the tools I used in a general real estate chat. It may be more useful here:
$10k/month budget is where we started. now, we're at 17k/month. Home base is Appleton/SE Wisconsin including Milwaukee. and Green Bay to the north.
Here's what we found on everything we touched.
MOTIVATED SELLERS
. Started at sub-20% contact rates
. They switched strategy and it got worse. Failed MLS sellers who wouldn't budge on price, plus people who denied filling out forms
. Always pulled 1-2 real sellers per month
. Closed 77% of leads we considered SQOs (Sales Qualified Opportunities) when we called within 5 minutes
. A lot of in-between people doing their own renos chasing top dollar. Not much financial pain in the pool.
. Great customer service. Pretty fair on disputes.
LEADZOLO
. Switched here after Motivated Sellers
. Rough start, then contact rate and lead quality got solid
. About 80% connect rate
. Closing 1 in 10
. Zero "High Motivation Milwaukee" leads (their Google Search product). Every lead came from Meta.
. They charge $450 for a Milwaukee search lead they never deliver
. Their Meta leads are enriched web forms. Seller fills out a contact form, they skiptrace it, you get extra contact data. You can do the same thing on BatchLeads for under a nickel.
. They removed transparency and lumped everything into one product per region.
BATCHLEADS
. Skiptracing for less than $0.05 per record
. Retail comping with pictures and property details
. We use it for list pulling, comps, and skip
INVESTORBASE
. $249/month
. Finds cash buyers within 1-5 miles who closed in the last 2 years
. Full deal history per buyer
. Enough info to open a call, text, or email
. Export to spreadsheet, push into your outreach tool
. Retail comping tool is rough. Picture access and property details lag way behind BatchLeads.
SMRTPHONE
. Native Podio integration. Call, text, record, all inside Podio.
. Friendly customer support
. Call quality gets shaky at times
INSTANTLY
. Strong deliverability
. Pre-warmed email accounts available. Lets you build a full cold email foundation from scratch.
. Run cash buyer lists, build sequences, deploy AI agents
. Subsequences fork the path based on opens. Openers get the detailed version. Non-openers get a clickbait subject line.
Cost:
. Emails/domains: $5-15 upfront, $5/month
. Subscription: $70-200 depending on tier
. We're on Hypergrowth at around 100/ month. mostly for the gold, so we can verify our lists from Batchleads and Investorbase.
Hope this helps someone when deciding on tools. We opened Motivated Sellers back up and it's doing better than right after their switch to 'pre-qualified' Either service can get you a deal, and the off-market/direct factor opens up the spread quite a bit. Our average spread on wholesales is 24k. Add in Novations and wholetails, and we're closer to 40k average, so the math works for us.
Google Ads
We also run our own Google PPC. I can't really rate Google Ads, but we do have the best campaign overall in Eastern Wisconsin, and a few other markets now. We are running 40% click to conversion, which is where the big savings comes in. Just like Meta, it takes a while to start seeing the savings.
You gotta find converting keywords that a lot of the other investors aren't using. We use Semrush, so that helps us a lot in terms of knowing where to fish, which is basically how many searches people are doing in each area.
Find the parts of the lake where the fish are biting and there's not a lot of other boats. We've been with Motivated Sellers a long time, and have added two more Acquisition guys, so we need close to 250 leads per month now.