LionDesk Review: The New King of the Real Estate CRM Jungle?

LionDesk is the real estate CRM version of a great screwdriver: It does one thing really well, it’s affordable, and it’s essential for doing your job properly. Pretty much everything you want from a great tool to close more deals with less stress. Did I mention LionDesk starts at only $25 a month?

Check out our in-depth review of LionDesk below, or hop on over to the LionDesk website to start a free trial.

Visit LionDesk

How Much Does LionDesk Cost?

Amazingly, LionDesk is affordable enough for pretty much any serious agent. For all the features in this article, you’ll only pay $25 per month. That’s it. There’s a more souped-up version with a custom phone number, 2,000 texts per month, and video texting for $49.

LionDesk also offers slightly modified versions of its customer relationship management (CRM) software for teams and brokerages, which cost around $20 per agent, per month. That said, they’re not offering any special features—just upping the maximum number of contacts you can bulk text or email. Considering the current limit is 500 people, very few agents will ever need the extra capacity.

Under the Hood: Chris Linsell’s Video Tour of LionDesk

Don’t feel like reading through our full analysis? Want to see the product in action for yourself? Our Senior Writer & Real Estate Coach, Chris Linsell, takes you through everything you need to know in the video below:

Organization, Outreach & Nurturing: What More Do You Need?

Founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur David Anderson, LionDesk was built to offer agents, teams, and brokerages a tool to get organized, stay top of mind with leads in all stages of the sales funnel, and nurture closed leads for referrals.

On paper, this sounds pretty simple—obvious even. The problem is that instead of offering you a great screwdriver at a great price, too many software companies try to offer you a Swiss army knife—a bloated tool with a dozen blades and tools, none of which work very well.

We won’t name names, but we’ve all seen CRMs with landing page builders, IDX websites, and everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. Some platforms manage to pull off being all things to all real estate agents, but they charge accordingly. Turnkey CRM systems that include IDX websites are going to run you anywhere from $250 to $1,500 per month. LionDesk costs only $25.

Even if they were priced well, these all-in-one systems have another sometimes fatal flaw: What happens when someone comes out with a slick new app that replaces one element of your expensive platform?

Ease of Use: A Mild Learning Curve & Intuitive Interface

When you first launch LionDesk, you’ll find yourself in the dashboard view. If you’ve ever used a CRM before, you’ll feel right at home.

On the left, you have a simple, easy-to-read menu bar that gives you a quick shortcut to the main functions of LionDesk.

To the right, you have the “Daily Vitals” view, which gives you a quick snapshot of how you’re doing with outreach. It keeps a running tally of outgoing and incoming calls, texts, and emails.

This is a great way to visually encourage agents to push past their comfort zones to take their business to the next level. Only called three leads today? You’ll see that number every time you log in to your CRM.

You also have recent contact activity, tasks due, a visualization of expected total sales, and your activity for the year.

Getting (& Staying) Organized With LionDesk

If you click over to the Contacts tab, you can quickly add or edit a current contact, bulk upload contacts from another platform with a CSV file, or direct import from platforms like Gmail.

Even better, when you click on a contact, you are immediately presented with a wealth of information. You can see emails they’ve last opened, previous calls or texts, and as much biographical or deal data as you have on them.

You can even add custom fields for your contacts if you want to, say, add how many children they have, what kind of dog they have, or what baseball team they follow. All of this granular data can come in very handy when it comes time for outreach.

If I had one complaint about LionDesk’s contacts view, it’s that they try to pack a lot of information into a small space. While I get the strategic reason why they would do it, it means small fonts and small buttons, which can be tricky to click quickly.

That said, it’s a well-designed interface and I think I would rather have too much information displayed on one page than have to dig through endless menus to edit information.

Outreach: Bulk Emails, Texts, Calls & Video

Outreach in LionDesk is very straightforward. You can either click to call, text, or email individual contacts, or send bulk emails, texts, and even video, based on which campaign you have them on.

You can even set rules for leads from different sources. For example, you can set LionDesk to trigger a specific text message or video text message for leads you get from Facebook ads.

Bulk Emails

LionDesk also makes it easy to send bulk emails to your contacts. For example, you can blast out a new listing to buyers, a quick intro video to new contacts, or even a holiday video to your entire list. You can even include videos in your emails without using BombBomb.

Bulk Texts

Or if you want the higher open and response rates you can get from texting, LionDesk lets you set up mass text campaigns just as easily as email campaigns. Want to send out a hot new pocket listing to your hottest buyer leads only? Why not send out a quick text? Oh, and you can send video texts right from LionDesk as well.

Video Emails & Texts

One of the coolest features of LionDesk is the ability to record and send video directly from the platform, and send it out to your leads via email or text messages.

Since texts get high open and response rates, and videos are more personal, why not combine the two and text out a walk-through of that pocket listing before it even hits the market?

Visit LionDesk for a Free Trial

LionDesk’s AI Lead Follow-up: Is Gabby Ready for Prime Time?

Well, we don’t have flying cars quite yet, but we do technically live in the future now. So I guess it was only a matter of time before a CRM like LionDesk harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help you qualify leads. They call her Gabby.

AI lead nurturing isn’t exactly new, but it has taken a few years for both the technology to mature and for people to be OK with it. Let’s face it, everyone hates robocalls, and you can bet that everyone would press “let me speak to a human” right away, 100% of the time, on automated phone systems if given the choice.

Today though, for better or worse, people have grown accustomed to dealing with AI chatbots like the one that LionDesk uses to qualify leads.

Although the technology is pretty complicated, the way it works for you is pretty simple. The AI is smart enough to recognize key trigger words like “buying” or “relocating,” and will then respond with more questions to help glean information from your lead. In the example above, the AI recognized the word “married” from the lead, responded with congratulations, and then told them the agent can help them make their move easier. Basically exactly what you would say if you had them on the phone and had time to qualify each and every lead.

Not Perfect, But a Powerful Tool to Qualify Leads for Busy Agents

Let’s face it, we humans are pretty smart, and even the most advanced AI won’t get very far pretending to be a human. So some people may get annoyed being pawned off on an AI, but most will happily engage with it knowing their information will help you help them.

The best part is that Gabby can qualify leads via text message, something your younger leads will love you for.

Gabby isn’t free, though; you’ll need a Pro account to get her to qualify leads for you. Even so, $42 a month is a small price to pay for AI and all the other features available in Pro.

Facebook Ad Portal Makes PPC Less Painful

One of the dirty secrets of online advertising these days is that Facebook’s Ads Manager is, well, horrible. It’s needlessly complicated, hard to navigate, and an all-around pain to use—even for professional pay-per-click (PPC) marketers.

LionDesk realized this and decided to give their users a shot of Novocain to make setting up Facebook ads a little less painless. You can create custom audiences, upload images and video for ads, and will even pull MLS data to create instant listing ads.

The only drawback is that LionDesk is still working on connecting every MLS to their Ad Portal. So if this is a killer app for you, then make sure to ask if your MLS is supported.

The Power Dialer

LionDesk’s power dialer will let you upload and cruise through a list of FSBO or EXPIREDs in one power session. While cold calling isn’t for everyone, you can also use this feature to follow up with your sphere of influence once a month to shake up some referrals.

That said, the power dialer is not included in LionDesk’s already very tempting base price, as not every agent will need or want it. Instead, they offer the Power Dialer for heavy-duty cold callers for a very reasonable $49 to $59 per month, depending on the package.

Text 2 Sell

One of the more unique features LionDesk offers is Text 2 Sell. Using your provided LionDesk phone number, you can encourage leads to text you for more information about a listing, a special buyer’s guide, a foreclosure list, or anything else you can think of.

Once they send the text, LionDesk will automatically send them the file and take their phone number and contact information to add to your database.

This is perfect for sign riders, flyers, or postcards when you want to offer an alternative to calling and still track the effectiveness of your ads and get phone numbers instead of emails.

Team Features: Lead Distribution

LionDesk also offers round-robin lead distribution for teams and small brokerages—perfect if you want to outfit your entire team with leads without breaking the bank.

Transaction Management

Finally, LionDesk offers basic transaction management features so you can track deals, save documents, and keep clients and other parties up to speed.

While this is not a fully featured accounting package, it gets the job done.

Or, if you’re already using DotLoop, LionDesk has an integration that lets you plug DotLoop right into your workflow.

Broker Functions

LionDesk also has great broker features available in its enterprise version. Brokers can view advanced reports on leads, build drip campaigns you can assign to individual agents, and have a global view of all deals in the office.

Integrations & Third-party Lead Importing

LionDesk also auto-imports leads from Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zip Realty automatically, which is nice. You can also set up blended campaigns for leads from each source, which will be a huge help since leads from online portals need to be reached out to immediately.

Facebook Leads Are Also Imported Automatically

You can also pull in leads directly from Facebook as LionDesk is an approved Facebook CRM partner. So if you’re doing a lot of Facebook advertising, LionDesk is a great choice of CRM for you.

Document Management

If you’re the type of agent who tends to accumulate PDFs (and who isn’t?), luckily, you can store documents right into LionDesk so you can access them from everywhere. No more Dropbox or Google Docs, so one less app you’ll need to use on a daily basis.

The 30,000-foot View: How Does LionDesk Stack Up to Other CRMs?

If you’ve been putting off trying LionDesk, you’re missing out on a fully featured and powerful real estate CRM that offers some high-end features like AI lead nurturing, transaction management, video emails, and blended campaigns. It’s also very easy to scale when your business grows.

So how does LionDesk stack up compared to other real estate CRMs? Well, in our opinion, it’s a very attractive option, especially for newer agents who don’t want to spend a ton of money.

Given the value LionDesk provides, we recently ranked LionDesk as our best overall CRM in our in-depth CRM buyer’s guide here.

Have a CRM question or opinion to share? Comment below or join our Facebook Mastermind Group to chat with fellow agents.