Technology For Agents

One of my favorite contact managers just introduced a new feature that goes hand-in-hand with their market snapshot product. Market builder is an automated prospecting solution designed to streamline the direct mail process and help drive traffic to your market snapshot feature of Top Producer.

Learning About Market Builder

Choosing how your lead generation will be handled is undoubtedly a very important part of your real estate business. It’s important to keep your overhead low, conversion ratios high, and the level of complexity manageable.

We know that Market Builder aims to satisfy at least two of these requirements (conversion ratios and level of complexity), but is it still affordable?

I went to Top Producer to see if I can uncover some pricing, and it looks as though you must purchase the complete Market Builder bundle in order to take advantage of what this new product has to offer.

Three times a year, 400 homes in your defined targeted area will receive effective direct mail postcards, personalized with your contact information. Leveraging the power of interactive web tools, interested prospects’ contact and home information is captured on www.BetterHomePrice.com and immediately recorded within your Top Producer 7i account.

With a 14% discount, the pricing includes a $149.00 setup fee, and a monthly rate of $189.00 a month. Now this includes Top Producer 7i (the main nuts and bolts of their contact management system), Market Snapshot, Top Connector (to connect your account to your local MLS), and finally of course: Market Builder.

In order to bring this down to perspective, Top Producer 7i alone costs $34.95 a month. Add market snapshot for $79.00, and you are looking at $113.95 a month. Top Connector is a one-time setup fee that will set you back $149.00 (obviously the setup fee mentioned in the Market Builder Bundle).

This leaves us with a final amount of $75.05 a month or six pennies over $900 a year. The market builder feature will mail 400 postcards to the subdivision or target area of your choice three times a year, so that’s 1200 postcards.

Assuming that the average rate of a postcard to be printed and mailed at your preferred direct mailer for as little as $0.34* per postcard, you are looking at a $408 expense by doing it all yourself.

The Final Question

Is $492 worth outsourcing 400 postcards to be mailed out three times a year? I’ll leave the final decision up to you. In the meantime, I’m going to get some questions answered about Market Builder by Top Producer to write about in a follow up post later in the week.

I’d like to know:

• What size are the postcards?
• Are they in color, half color, or black and white?
• If I wanted to add another target area, what expense would I incur?

*-Taken from my Quantummail.com pricing for postcards.

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