r/RealEstateTechnology

Hey guys, I am looking into new software options to handle my social media automation and could use some feedback from agents who actually use it.

I am specifically looking at Back At You's SocialBAY program because I need something that takes my MLS data and runs hands-free listing campaigns on autopilot.
For those who use it long-term:

Does the automation actually look natural, or does it feel cookie-cutter?

Do you manually tweak the captions for every new house, or do you just let it run?

I want to make sure it's worth the investment before I switch over. Thanks!

I got a stack of leads from zillow and my own site that im supposed to be calling and texting every day. Id like to use a real estate lead follow up software instead of hiring a VA

I have mixed feelings about it as part of me feels like automating the follow up is gonna sound robotic and blow the lead before it even gets warm. But i also know for a fact leads are dying in my CRM rn because Im too slow getting back to people

I’m curious what experienced agents think about this.

When you get a new listing, you already have Zillow / Realtor / MLS, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.

But when a serious buyer asks for the property details, it often ends up being:

“Here’s the listing link.”

I’ve always wondered if there’s a better middle ground.

Not a full website.

Not another complicated CRM.

Just a really good property page for that one listing — photos, video tour, floor plan, location, highlights, agent info, and a clear way for the buyer to contact you.

I’m actually building this right now with Showflo because I wanted to see if agents would use something like this.

But before I add more features, I’d rather ask people who actually sell real estate:

Would you use a dedicated page for each listing, or is it just unnecessary extra work?

And for those already doing this:

What do you wish those listing pages did better?

Genuinely looking for criticism here. “This is useless because ___” is just as useful to me as “I’d use this.”

Been thinking more about why owner-facing reporting still mostly ships as static PDFs instead of live dashboards, and the answer isn't laziness, it's that a live view would often be showing numbers that haven't actually settled yet.

Invoices get coded at month-close. Accruals get booked at close. A maintenance ticket might be done but not yet billed. A real-time dashboard exposes all of that mid-month mess, which isn't a fresher version of the truth, it's genuinely incomplete. The PDF isn't really a report format, it's a commitment point: the operator saying "as of this date, I stand behind these numbers."

The actual product problem isn't real-time vs. static, it's showing the difference between settled and in-flight data without making the owner feel like they're watching something unfinished. Almost nothing does that well right now.

Anyone found a platform that actually handles that distinction cleanly, or is a static PDF still the most honest answer until someone solves it properly?

So I'm getting started in real estate development and I'm honestly a bit lost with the data side of things. I tried using AI to pull comps and market numbers and caught it making stuff up more than once, which freaked me out a little bc that's not something I want to be wrong about, especially for proof of funds.

Anyone know a tool or source that's actually trustworthy? Ideally free?!

After years of dealing with inconsistent MLS formats and manual mapping logic, it's genuinely encouraging to see broader adoption of RESO's standardized data structures picking up pace. Boards that were dragging their feet are starting to migrate, and integrations that used to take weeks of custom mapping are getting noticeably faster to build.

It's easy to focus on what's still broken in real estate tech, but this one's worth acknowledging: an industry known for fragmented, region-specific data infrastructure is actually converging toward something more unified. That's not a small shift for anyone building tools that touch multiple markets.

Feels like one of those quiet wins that doesn't get much attention because it's infrastructure, not a flashy feature, but it's genuinely making cross-market tools easier to build than they were even a year ago.

Software solutions and automations have existed for years, but a lot of business owners are only becoming aware of them now because they hear about AI every day and feel behind.

It's annoying the amount of "AI Agencies" piling up in the space; most have no real experience and will try to sell you slop (second brain, lead automation...) they have no business doing.

I can guarantee you that most are just prompting claude and praying for the best; they know nothing about systems architecture or code.

But some are good marketers or have the connections, and most times that's all it takes. I've seen shitty vibe-coded websites go for $10k because the owner didn't know better.

As a senior dev I've worked on proptech projects; the vast majority of solutions don't even need AI. But they won't tell you this; their business model relies on you believing it's the only way.

Now, I'm curious what AI has changed for people in the real estate industry. I don't know what the day-to-day is for someone non-technical. And what's the overall value perception like.

Did you care about software/automation before AI hype? any real value, or just FOMO.

Does anyone have experience marketing on Homes(.com)? How does the cost and return on investment compare to other platforms? Does it actually help generate incremental leads and win new listings, or is it less valuable to get leads on your own listings and to market homes already on the MLS?

Thanks for any perspectives!

I work in Mexico, marketing side plus I build software for developers here.

Started with a problem a client had. Big developer, solid company, kept saying he had around 3000 brokers selling his projects. But almost no sales were coming from them. So we asked the obvious question, where does the number 3000 come from? Are they registered somewhere? Do you communicate with them? Do they ever ask you anything?

Turns out it’s just a number in his deck that he repeats in meetings. The actual basis for it: they’re all in the WhatsApp groups and everyone has the Drive link. So we replaced the Drive folder with a platform to actually track broker activity. Three months in: 200 brokers. Not 3000.

We assumed it was a one off, maybe nobody had ever measured it properly. Then we did the same thing with another developer and with a master broker (agency holding an exclusive) and the ratio came out almost identical both times. Roughly 90% of the “network” hadn’t touched the project in months. Different company sizes, different project types, same number.

And there’s a second gap on top of that one. Registering a client at some point is not the same as actively selling. When we looked at who was regularly putting units in front of buyers, it dropped again, hard. Out of the original 3000 we ended up with about 25 brokers doing real work. Under 1%. The reason nobody knew is that the entire broker channel runs on Google Drive. You make a folder with the price list, floor plans, renders, you send the link to everyone who ever showed interest, done. That’s the whole infrastructure. Nobody can tell you who opened it, whether the broker is actually showing units to clients, which units get attention, or whether anything gets attention at all.

The part that got me though was the in house brokers. They’d invite agents to the platform, friends of theirs I assume. And those agents would register, probably just to be nice and support the guy, and then never open the inventory. Not once. So you’d see one in house broker who invited 50 people with zero active, and another who invited 10 and all 10 were working. You can’t see any of that in a WhatsApp group. It just looks like a big list of names. Meanwhile all three of these companies could tell me their Meta cost per lead down to the peso. And the B2B channel is statistically doing 60% of their deals. Is this normal outside Mexico? How do you guys actually work with brokers?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

lots of agents get 3-5 leads monthly they can't work. Right now those leads get referred out for a small referral fee or let them die.

Meanwhile, they're buying leads from Zillow at $75/pop with 1-2% conversion

so i built something different

peer-to-peer Free marketplace where agents trade leads.

1. Monetize your overflow
2. Buy quality leads from agents you trust

How it works:

• Post leads outside your area/specialty that you can't service
• Browse and buy leads from other agents
• No middleman. No aggregator markup. Just peer-to-peer
• Free to use

why it's better than zillow:

• Leads come with full conversation history (you see what was actually discussed)
• you buy from real agents, not recycled lead farms
• Better conversion because they're pre-qualified by someone who actually talked to them
• Costs nothing

Business model is simple: We take a percentage per lead sold. Agents retain 100 percent of their commission. That's how we stay aligned with our users.

interested or have thoughts, shoot me a DM or comment below.

I am building an automated solution for solving the speed to lead problem. I have some questions i want to ask Real Estate Agents who have been in the industry for a couple years and understand how it works so my solution is effective and solves their real problems instead of being a nice to have.

1. What happens when a buyer/seller calls after hours? does it go to voicemail or is there an automated solution for it that is effective and most agents use it.

2. How much does a missed lead cost?

3. What percentage of deals are inbound and what percentage is outbound?

4. How are most leads contacted, through a call or a text?

5. is Zillow the primary source for inbound leads?

I would really appreciate some responses.

Thanks

I've been thinking about this while working on lead workflows for real estate teams.

There seems to be a tendency to either:

1. Put everything into a traditional rules-based automation, or

2. Throw an LLM/AI agent at the entire process and call it "agentic."

I don't think either extreme works particularly well.

For example, take a new property enquiry:

Lead comes in

↓

Extract requirements

↓

Determine buying intent

↓

Prioritize the lead

↓

Decide what happens next

↓

Salesperson follows up

I'd probably split this into different layers.

The predictable parts should remain deterministic.

For example:

- Required fields

- Lead scoring weights

- Routing

- Notifications

- CRM updates

- Follow-up timing

- Status changes

AI makes more sense where the input is messy or requires interpretation:

- Understanding a WhatsApp conversation

- Extracting budget/location/timeline from natural language

- Determining buying intent

- Summarizing the conversation

- Identifying missing information

- Flagging unusual or ambiguous cases

And then I'd still keep a human in the loop for decisions where being wrong is expensive.

So instead of:

AI → decides everything → automation

I'd think of it more as:

Rules + Automation

↓

AI interpretation

↓

Deterministic decision layer

↓

Human when confidence/risk requires it

The interesting part to me is that this doesn't necessarily require replacing an existing CRM.

A lot of the value may actually be in the layer between:

"Lead entered the system"

and

"Salesperson knows exactly what to do with it."

Curious how other people working with real estate systems are approaching this.

Where have you found AI genuinely useful in the workflow, and where have you found that a normal automation/rule works better?

A lot of real estate CRMs are marketing themselves as "agentic" this year, positioning it as AI that runs the sales pipeline autonomously. Looking closer at what's actually shipping, most of it is still rule-based automation with an AI-generated message layer on top, not genuine autonomous decision-making.

The real shift, where it's happening, is AI making judgment calls that used to require a human: deciding which leads are worth pursuing today versus nurturing long-term, adjusting outreach cadence based on engagement signals rather than a fixed schedule, flagging when a homeowner's behavior pattern suggests they're close to listing before any explicit signal shows up.

Feels like there's a real gap between "agentic" as a marketing term and what CRMs are actually delivering. Curious if others have used a tool where the AI genuinely made an autonomous call that changed an outcome, versus just executing a pre-set sequence with better copy.

We all know the current landscape with scraping and dnc rules, but who would you say is leading in this space?

I think the following all have pros and cons to them. Curious on your experience with each or if I’m missing any feel free to comment:
- Reonomy
- FastPeopleSearch
- EnformionGo
- Crexi
- CoStar
- BatchData
- Mercero
- TLO (Although can’t be used as an RE agent)

Would be cool if I could see who the most active investors and sellers are in a market by property type.

One workflow or point I've noticed that makes real difference is to prioritize leads before outreach. Instead of treating every property in same way.

A few data points that help us are:

• Estimated property value
• Equity
• Years owned
• Owner occupancy
• Property type

These things do not mean that you will find a seller who is motivated for sure. It can help you spend your time on the leads that are most likely to convert easily. This is better, than going through a list of leads without any planning.

For those handling large lead lists, what data point has been the most useful for deciding who to contact first?

A pattern worth noting for anyone managing transaction compliance at scale: as brokerages grow, disclosure forms, addenda, and state-specific compliance docs often exist in multiple versions across different tools, one in the TMS, another emailed as a PDF, another sitting in a shared drive.

Nobody catches it until an audit or a dispute surfaces an outdated version that was actually signed. The risk isn't visible day-to-day since most transactions close fine regardless, it only shows up when something goes wrong and the paper trail doesn't match.

Feels like version control is a solved problem in most industries but still treated as an afterthought in real estate compliance workflows.

Just want to know, if others have seen this cause real issues, or found a system that actually keeps a single source of truth for compliance docs across a growing brokerage.