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Kingston Lane is a listing marketing and lead cultivation suite.
Platforms: Browser; iOS; Android
Ideal for: Any size team; all brokerages and agents
Top selling points
- Rapid campaign deployment
- Budget transparency
- Multiple marketing tactic options
- Mobile-driven user experience (UX) and user interface (UI)
- Community mastermind groups
Top concerns
Surprised to see a lack of video marketing tools within the software, which otherwise blankets the gamut of digital marketing tactics.
What you should know
There’s getting the business, and then there’s doing the business.
The same dichotomy applies to marketing and lead follow-up.
Agents buy customer relationship managers (CRMs) and email marketing templates and devise Facebook campaigns, only to let them stagnate under the pressure of immediate tasks, such as voicemails and picking up lock boxes. If something isn’t directly related to revenue production, it tends to be set aside.
The true value in Kingston Lane is that it drastically minimizes the amount of time agents spend away from their revenue-producing activities. It is led by Sharran Srivatsaa, who sold his Teles Properties to Douglas Elliman last year.
After logging in, the software provides users a series of interactive “cards” that execute different marketing tasks.
There are “push-button” options for digital geographic farming; social media ads; Zillow, Trulia and realtor.com ads; home valuation websites and listing websites; squeeze pages (forced registration) and a number of other commonly executed outreach tactics and proven ways to expose listings to the market.
In almost every use case, agents can avoid veering from the card face to start advertising listings and recent sales or emailing a database. For example, the digital farming feature works in three basic steps:
- Select a budget
- Enter a ZIP code or address radius
- Confirm your order
Kingston Lane generates and executes the creative on users’ behalf, focusing on homeowners via targeted Facebook ads that push home valuation websites. Each campaign can also be made recurring by checking the appropriate box.
The same minimal-touch experience permeates all corners of the software, allowing users to pop in, build a property valuation website and get back to returning voicemails.
For agents in high-demand markets, such as California’s Bay Area, Kingston Lane’s push-button Coming Soon websites display a large timer, some property details and an email registration field.
Listing agents can generate this one-page site while sitting at a listing appointment, and they can report regular email registrations back to sellers as the listing is prepped for the market.
Kingston Lane removes price ambiguity from online marketing budgets by placing budget choices at the top of each card.
Long-term email campaigns are also quick and simple, and they don’t require users to create new content every month or even oversee its sending — Kingston Lane handles it all and sends regular reports.
The lead manager module tracks those who’ve interacted with your ads and pages, and when linked via Zapier, leads can be sent directly to your CRM.
The simplicity of the clearly mobile-inspired user interface can’t be overstated.
Each card emulates a smartphone screen and limits actionable fields to only the most critical. This design choice centers a user’s attention precisely on only what matters to perform that function — there aren’t any redundant options or vague visual elements.
Kingston Lane has leveraged a partnership with Canva for customizing or using ready-to-go listing flyers and branding collateral.
Users can create unbranded listing websites for use under multiple listing service (MLS) marketing regulations, as well as redirect website traffic from popular websites using subtle digital advertisements across the web, a feature now in beta.
There’s also a buyer-matching feature that can recommend off-market properties and registered pocket listings.
Agents should find value in the sales pipeline interface. This screen offers a deep dive into every potential dollar out there, from pending listings to existing buyer needs. It’s designed for easy extraction of valuable information and links the money to its source campaign.
The pro level account is $99/year and offers the full breadth of the product’s capability and support. Free accounts provide quite a bit of value too, including access to the Facebook Mastermind groups that share ideas and tips on using the software. Kingston Lane customers from across the country become part of a network that can be accessed for referrals from within the system.
Lastly, whereas most real estate marketing tools come off as a unified, all-in-one system, Kingston Lane feels more like a marketing spice shelf, where agents can pick and choose what will best complement their strategy without being committed to native features they’ll never use.
At the same time, that approach could deter agents seeking an integrated CRM, transaction manager and outreach platform. Kingston Lane’s broad feature stack and marketing value proposition certainly put it in competition with the likes of BoomTown, Pipeline ROI and Chime.
Nevertheless, this is an innovative and completely unique approach to marketing and lead cultivation that I expect will grow rapidly.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
