Real estate website developer Placester will provide its broker offering to New England brokerage Bean Group, giving 255 agents at 14 offices in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont access to mobile-ready websites with IDX search, MLS integration, blogging features and lead capture.
As part of the broker offering, Bean Group gets a white-label version of Placester’s dashboard, allowing the company to track and monitor leads from any office and add custom attributes for better lead profiles, and develop hyperlocal and real-time marketing strategies to re-establish connections with homebuyers and sellers.
Approximately half of Bean Group’s agents have opted to set up a Placester website, which Bean Group pays for, said Seth Price, Placester’s vice president of marketing and sales. Taking advantage of a National Association of Realtors partnership, the brokerage pays a discounted rate of $3.75 per site per month.
Screenshot of a broker’s Placester dashboard.
Launched in 2010 with a focus on agents, Placester unveiled its broker-level product late last year and already has signed up hundreds of firms, Price said.
NAR-affiliated brokers have access to the above pricing. Other brokers pay $5 per site per month.
In addition to providing easy-to-set-up websites that feature Internet data exchange-connected search, Placester is building out a simple customer relationship platform, which currently features lead-forwarding capabilities, automatic email responders and connection to other platforms.
Some of the CRM-like features to come include lead ranking and different ways to visual leads and contacts, Price said.
Placester also offers marketing services, charging a fee to brokers and agents to promote their sites on Facebook, Google and other places online.
Unlike more enterprise-level platforms like BoomTown, Kunversion, TigerLead and Tribus, which offer all-in-one website, CRM and marketing services, Placester is aiming to provide those tools to firms and agents on a smaller, cheaper scale, Price said.
Placester signed a deal with Cox Media Group last week to power the real estate sections for eight of the group’s newspaper sites including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Austin American-Statesman and the Palm Beach Post.
Placester already powers the real estate websites for the media giant Hearst Corp., which operates 15 daily newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and Albany Times Union.
