In the crowded market of all in one real estate CRM and IDX websites, it takes a lot for a relative newcomer to get our attention.
Firepoint, a newer real estate CRM with integrated lead generation IDX website did just that. The buzz in the industry piqued our curiosity, and the impressive list of features and agent centric-design sealed the deal.
Below is our deep dive on what Firepoint offers individual agents, teams, and brokerages.
Stay tuned for our roundup at the end of the year where we compile our list of all the real estate CRM’s we’ve reviewed and pick our overall winner for the year!
Firepoint Pricing: How Much Does Firepoint Cost Agents, Teams & Brokerages?
Somewhat surprisingly, Firepoint offers a good value for individual agents, and a great value for teams and brokerages. Here’s a quick rundown of Firepoint’s pricing:
Smart CRM & Lead Ponds
While websites and auto dialers are great, the true game changer for most struggling agents or teams is a well designed CRM.
Even if (especially if) you attract clients like a magnet, you’ll never truly take your business to the next level until you can effectively capture and nurture leads.
The truth is that you’re never going to be able to answer your emails, texts, and phone calls instantly for every single lead. That means you’re leaving money on the table regularly.
Worse, once you get a lead, you’re going to have to nurture them until closing and follow up regularly to get referrals. No matter how good you are, a great CRM will make you better. Much better.
Since it was designed by successful brokers, Firepoint’s integrated CRM is a just that. A great CRM. It was designed to seamlessly smooth over agent and team pain points and it shows.
A Nice Place to Spend Time
Even we started digging into features, we were instantly impressed with the look and feel of Firepoint’s CRM. The layout and design elements seemed well planned and visually appealing.
While this might not seem like a big deal to some agents, remember that you will be staring at this screen hours and hours a day for the next few years. Whether you like it or not, design matters and will affect how you feel about the software. Brokers take note: for new agents, especially millennials, that might translate into how they feel about their career choice.
The interface was also very intuitive, and Firepoint wisely chose to avoid using weird proprietary names for their tools and features. If you’ve worked in real estate, you can likely get yourself up and running in Firepoint rather quickly without a walkthrough.
Robust CRM Features Without the Feature Creep
Unlike some CRM’s that cram their software with poorly implemented versions of every new bell and whistle under the sun, Firepoint offers features your agents will actually use.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the agent and team friendly features Firepoint offers.
As soon as you log into Firepoint, you’ll notice that the dashboard is all business. Across the top you have lead status reminders that you can check at a glance. How many leads are new, how many have no saved searches, etc.
To your left you have your tasks pane which shows you the most important tasks you’ve been assigned for the day, overdue tasks, and upcoming tasks.
Then to the right you have your recently active leads and most active leads. This shows you which leads have been actively searching or browsing on your website. More on this later.
Drip Campaigns
Like any good CRM Firepoint offers customizable drip campaigns that can include tasks like phone calls, automated emails, and more.
They also include 17 pre written email drip campaigns to get you started nurturing your new leads right out of the box.
Our favorite drip campaign is an automatic new listings email that can be sent to users based on search criteria, or sent directly to individual leads that are looking for unique properties.
SMS Autoresponder & Texting Tools
Since studies have shown that time to lead is crucial and that engagement and response rates from texting beat email every day of the week, texting features are crucial for a CRM.
Firepoint offers instant text autoresponders for initially reaching out to new leads. These can be customized for each agent on your team.
While they don’t offer mass texting options or the ability to fold texts into drip campaigns yet, you can also schedule tasks to reach out to leads with pre-written or customized texts right from the CRM. Merge tags can instantly add first names or other lead info to your texts.
Integrated Dialer & Call Recording
On of the coolest features Firepoint offers is an integrated dialer and call recording. There is no better way to train new agents or hone your own skills than listen back to your calls for an objective critique.
Even better, agents can tag brokers, lenders or or team members to invite them to come listen to the call to answer a client’s question or offer advice.
Lead Ponds, Advanced Lead Distribution, & Activity Feeds Make Team or Brokerage Management Easy
One of the most challenging aspects of management is ensuring your team is working to their full potential and growing their skills, without being an overbearing micromanager.
Firepoint is a god send for tweaking and streamlining how your team works with and shares leads.
Lead Ponds a creative and fun way to make sure older leads never slip through the cracks and newer agents can never say they have no leads to call.
Using sophisticated tagging features, agents and team leads can assign leads based on a round robin system, specific criteria like location and price point, or even whether or not they’re hitting their targets with the leads they are getting.
If an agent is not hitting targets or doesn’t have the time to work a lead, they or a team lead can put it in a lead pond for anyone to claim and start working whenever they want. If an agent doesn’t work the lead, they lose it and it goes right back into the pond.
The idea here is that even amazing agents will have a hard time working more than say, 100 leads effectively. Using lead ponds, team leads and agents can be forced to decide what leads they can really work and what leads they can’t. When they go over 100 leads, their older leads will be automatically get put back in the pond for newer agents to work.
Activity feeds are a great way for teams to share information or for brokers or lenders to check in with individual agent’s progress. They work something like Slack or Trello, and offer a snapshot of an agent’s work as well as the ability to loop in other team members for advice or assigned tasks.
Turnkey IDX Websites
In addition to their CRM, Firepoint offers agents and teams slick, well designed IDX websites that are designed for one purpose; to generate leads.
The websites are well designed and offer visitors a chance to search IDX listings, get a home valuation, or check out your blog, reviews, and team pages. You can even add multiple MLS’ for an additional fee.
Let’s tackle these one at a time.
The bread and butter for any lead generation site is their IDX listings. Like their closest rivals Real Geeks, Boomtown, and Chime, Firepoint presents visitors with an intuitive and well laid out IDX search.
Visitors can favorite properties, search by any criteria they like, or sign up to the site to get email updates and start working with an agent.
What’s really great about Firepoint’s IDFX website is that it is so tightly integrated with the CRM. For example, once you’ve captured a lead, you can spy on what they do each time they come back to the website. You can see what listings they clicked on, what they searched for, saved, or spent a long time looking at.
Armed with data like this it’s easy for agents to offer leads timely information at exactly the right time.
Home Valuation Landing Pages
Their instant home valuation page makes an ideal landing page for generating seller leads. It also offers an instant evaluation which has been shown to increase click through rates over pages that just offer a phone call.
Click below for a live example of an IDX website built with Firepoint:
https://www.mainehomeadvisors.com/
PPC Management (Done for You Social Advertising)
Firepoint wouldn’t be a truly turnkey platform without offer PPC (pay per Click) management.
If you’re new to online marketing, this means that for a small maintenance fee plus a monthly ad spend, Firepoint will run ads on social media on your behalf to generate buyer leads.
For many agents this is an ideal way to advertise. First, they don’t have to spend time A/B testing and running ads, and second, they can rely on seasoned experts to design and run their ads for them.
This means they don’t have to waste money testing new techniques and can just sit back and work on what they do best, nurturing and closing leads.
Drawbacks: No Facebook Seller Lead Generation
The only real drawback with Firepoint’s PPC management is that for the time being they only offer Google Adwords advertising and not Facebook or Instagram. That means you’re really only getting buyers leads.
They have good reasons for this, namely that targeting ads to sellers has become incredibly costly and difficult since the recent data scandals, but we’d like to see them offer native Facebook advertising in the future.
Biweekly Reports & No Monthly Minimum Spends
One thing we loved about their PPC management is that they have no monthly minimum spends, and offer customers a bi monthly status report so you can see how and what they’re doing.
Reporting & Analytics
Another great feature Firepoint offers is their reporting and analytics. You can drill down and look at ROI from different lead sources, call data, email data, CGI vs net profit, and more. Even better as a team lead you can do this for each team member for a quick and easy way to find out which agents need improvement and with what.
Customer Support
When it comes to customer support Firepoint is pretty amazing. They offer customers a monthly strategy call where an expert goes through what they could be doing better after analyzing data from their team.
They also regularly offer webinars on demand, trainings, and walkthroughs that are easily accessible right from Firepoint.
Integrations
Firepoint offers integrations with Zillow, Zendesk, BombBomb, Trulia, Realtor.com, Ready Chat, Mojo, Happy Grasshopper, Agentology, Agent Legend, Vyral Marketing, Rockrbox, and Ylopo.
The only integration we’d really like to see is with Dotloop or another transaction management platform. While Firepoint offers basic transaction management features, many teams get Dotloop for free so might already be used to the platform, or have managing brokers who demand they do.
Over to You
Do you currently use Firepoint as a CRM and IDX website? What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
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