Chime is a real estate CRM, website provider, and lead generation suite that provides the tools busy real estate pros need to run their business. Chime’s all-in-one solution seeks to solve the problem of lost and overlooked real estate opportunities, something that regularly happens when you’re juggling your prospects, leads, and clients across multiple platforms.

Is Chime right for you and your real estate business? In this review, we’ll dive into what Chime is, what it does well, and how much it costs, and also make a recommendation for precisely who would (and wouldn’t) benefit from Chime.

The Close Recommendation

If you’re looking to increase your productivity while decreasing the number of tools you use each day, you should consider Chime. Chime provides a comprehensive way to gather leads, convert them into clients, manage them through a transaction, and activate them as referral sources (and repeat clients). Yes, this system has a premium price tag, but in our opinion, the return on an investment from the Chime platform can be substantial.

And since Chime is designed to scale with your business, it’s a solution that will likely serve you throughout your career—whether you’re a single agent, running a team, or operating a brokerage.

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While our overall review of Chime is positive, it’s not a tool for everyone. Here’s a breakdown of who Chime is (and isn’t) a good fit for:

Chime Works Well For:

  • Agents with a growing business that they’re willing to invest in. If you’ve got a budget and a business plan that incorporates paid lead generation, referral nurturing, farming, and more, the Chime option is a good one for you.
  • Teams who are looking to take their lead generation, distribution, management, and nurturing to the next level. Teams who use Chime have access to advanced analytics, reporting, transaction management, and forecasting tools—all essential for building your real estate empire.
  • Brokerages that are looking for a top-down solution to managing all agent operations from a single dashboard. Brokers using Chime also have access to Inside Sales Agents (ISAs), a brokerage website, and websites to offer your agents. You’ll also get 50 hours of dedicated technical support every month.

Chime May Not Be Ideal For:

  • Agents who have a tight budget or part-time real estate professionals who don’t have the time to commit to learning the Chime system and using the tools provided.
  • Teams who are still sorting out their structure and lead distribution strategies, and don’t have hours set aside each week to review reporting and analytics. Chime provides a lot of data on the performance of your marketing, your individual agents, and your team as a whole. If you don’t have the bandwidth to use this data, this likely isn’t the platform for your team.
  • Brokerages that aren’t interested in offering any sort of leads to their agents. A large part of Chime’s value to large teams and brokerages is their ability to integrate their lead generation with their customer relationship manager (CRM). If you don’t plan on offering leads to your brokerage, the value of Chime for your business likely won’t match the price.

How Much Does Chime Cost & What Do You Get?

Chime offers multiple packages, add-ons, and discounts based on the combination of services you choose. The base price of Chime starts with the package you select. Those options are:

Chime Base Package Pricing

Chime Base Package OptionsMonthly PriceAnnual Payment DiscountOne-time Setup Fee
Foundation$59910%$500
Business$1,19910%$1,000
Enterprise$1,75010%$1,500

(Updated September 2021)

How Do These Packages Differ?

Each Chime package comes with their CRM, a customer-facing website, and access to their lead generation tools. But not all Chime packages are created equal. Here’s what users can expect in terms of features from each of Chime’s three packages:

Chime Optional Add-on Pricing

After choosing a Chime base package, you can begin adding on optional services. Here’s a breakdown of your many options (prices updated in September 2021).

Breaking Down Chime’s Most Important Features

Chime’s services can be divided into three basic categories: CRM, website, and marketing. Let’s look at a couple of the most important features in each of these categories to better understand how they could help improve your real estate business.

CRM

Chime Team Dashboard

Chime’s CRM is all about finding the most efficient ways of achieving your goals. The tools available to Realtors here include automatic lead scoring and analysis. Plus, you’ll get “smart suggestions” from Chime on the most effective way to communicate with your leads based on how they’ve responded in the past. Some other powerful Chime CRM features include:

  • Lots of automated marketing options, including email and SMS texting
  • A built-in power dialer (up to three lines available)
  • An available artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to automatically respond to inquiries from your website
  • Built-in transaction management
  • Dynamic lead distribution based on team member performance
  • A native mobile app
  • Hundreds of available integrations with companies like Zillow, Gmail, BombBomb, and more

Website

The Wall Team Homepage

Chime’s websites are easy to use, all IDX-enabled, and if we can be so bold, damn pretty to look at. But, the Chime website’s most powerful feature is its direct integration with the Chime CRM. When visitors come to your Chime website and complete a lead form, they’re automatically added to your CRM.

After that, nearly every move they make on your site, including the number of properties viewed, searches made, even the number of visits made daily, are logged and factored into the Chime lead scoring system—allowing you to better prioritize who you reach out to first, based on their website activity.

Some other Chime website features of note include:

  • In-depth neighborhood data, including demographics, turnover and absorption rates, and more
  • Advanced school district search capability
  • Excellent landing page options, including Home Valuation, Mortgage Calculators, Showing Requests, and more
  • An easy-to-use site editor that makes keeping your website updated easy, even without coding knowledge and experience

Marketing

Chime Auto Import Leads Via Third-Party Providers

Their online lead generation strategy powers the Chime marketing engine. Relying heavily on the “ad agency approach” used by other lead gen companies like BoldLeads and Real Geeks, Chime steps it up a notch by doing two things differently:

  1. They’ve integrated Facebook’s Lead Forms into their campaigns, allowing leads to convert without ever leaving the social media platform.
  2. They use a retargeting strategy to create ads for properties an unconverted prospect viewed on your website to encourage them to give their lead information.

These power-ups, paired with direct integration with the Chime CRM, make this a highly effective lead generation and conversion strategy. Apart from this, some other marketing tools available from Chime include:

  • Branding advertisements you can deliver to your ZIP code or your sphere of influence based on custom lists generated by the Chime CRM
  • Direct mail options that will automate your circle prospecting and real estate farming

A Day in the Life of a Chime User: Video Walk-through

Where Chime Could Improve

Chime has many things going for it, but like most things, it isn’t perfect.

For starters, Chime is expensive. While we believe that Chime’s return on investment potential is very high, there are going to be some real estate professionals who won’t even get in the door because they simply can’t afford the base price. It would be nice to have some sort of express version of Chime for realtors operating on a leaner budget.

Secondly, Chime is so incredibly feature-rich, sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly where to start your day in terms of how you’re using the system. We found ourselves experiencing option-overload when exploring our demo account. Though a regular Chime user would likely develop a daily rhythm on how they use the platform, there isn’t a clear, prioritized, “do-this-first” sort of direction.

Interested in some alternatives to Chime? Check out our review of Propertybase (the CRM competitor most similar to Chime) or LionDesk (an affordable, all-around workhorse CRM).

Bottom Line

Chime has successfully developed a platform that consolidates your CRM, website, and lead generation efforts into a single interface. They offer a ton of shortcuts toward a productive, profitable business and provide the data and analytics to measure your success and set better goals.

Chime is definitely an investment, one whose efficacy has to be measured over the long run. Still, if you have the budget and the attention bandwidth to invest in Chime, this is a system that will benefit your business.

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