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Kleard is lead verification and safety software for real estate agents.
Platforms: Browser; iOS app; Android app
Ideal for: All agents, teams and brokerages
Top selling points
- App for both mobile platforms
- Tracks each listing visited with client
- Ease of use
- Open house registration
Top concerns
Doesn’t dig deep into public or social media data on individuals, which may concern some agents using competitive products that do.
What you should know
Kleard was developed by a three-year agent named Jonathan Martis with Coldwell Banker Danforth, near Seattle. It was nine months in development and has been in beta since February.
Its intent is to help agents authenticate a new lead before a blind showing and to help agents track who is visiting their open houses.
The app, both web and mobile, looks polished, more mature than was expected given its development timeline.
Kleard uses a text form, filled out by the agent, to capture a person’s name, email and phone number. The individual is sent a code via text, which they’ll share with the agent.
Once the code is entered, that person is locked into the Kleard database and also attached to the property he or she is seeing.
The app then follows up with basic lead questions, such as, “Are you working with an agent?”, “Are you pre-approved?” and “What’s your buying timeline?”
The agent can then “Start Showing,” a command that launches a screen with the following button options:
- Add notes: buyer questions, ideas, etc.
- Visitor details: info on the buyer
- End showing: alert friends that you’re safe
- Send safety alert: send “911” email/phone notification to broker
- House history: additional info on listing
If it’s a multi-house tour, brokers or friends of the agent are alerted each time the user activates the “start showing” command.
If there’s a problem, the agent taps the “Send Safety Alert” to broadcast an email to linked stakeholders. It also sends an email, with a lesser degree of urgency, when the “End Showing” command is not registered.
There is not a single safety app available that can prevent physical harm to an agent once in the presence of a person intending to harm them. Thus, Martis questions the effectiveness of apps that automate a social media and public data background check.
The act of quickly inquiring about a person’s identity, ensuring their phone is theirs and operational and sharing that information with others, can at least provide a few breadcrumbs should something untoward happen to an agent.
Unfortunately, that’s the risk agents take every time they show property.
I believe Kleard could run into an issue by leveraging the word “verified,” as it connotes some sort of automatic, official exoneration of a person. The process is ultimately only linking a person to a phone.
But again, it is tracking data that can be easily legally accessed.
Kleard uses the same process for open house registration, not unlike Spacio and Open Home Pro.
In conjunction with physical signage letting people know they’ll be asked for verification upon entry, the software also tracks everyone who poked around the home.
The solution isn’t only about safety, though. The verification functionality that links a lead to a listing also serves as a light CRM, enabling users to send emails, create groups according to properties, import leads or export leads.
In that capacity, Kleard is merely adequate. I wouldn’t recommend an agent use it for its CRM functions alone.
Overall, the app’s user experience is superb. It uses color coding to determine if a lead is verified or not, offers a number of quick view screens to browse leads and what listings they’ve seen and provides an ever-present compendium of training videos and tutorials.
Lastly, launching soon in Kleard will be an “open house marketplace.”
This is a feature that allows agents to broadcast upcoming open houses for other agents in their brokerage to handle on their behalf. There is a mechanism to offer payment to a colleague for doing so.
This is an add-on that doesn’t really overlap with the intent of the app, and starts it on the slippery slope of trying to do much, but it’s nevertheless an interesting function.
I would like to see Kleard focus more on its safety features, as that’s what drove its creation.
It’s not uncommon for industry software products to veer away from their initial mission, often driven by the need to recoup development costs, which is understandable. However, it often ends taking away from solving the problems it was invented to solve.
After all, do we need another CRM? Because we could always use more safety apps.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
