Good afternoon, Good evening. My name is Robert Newman I am a real estate online
marketing expert and I am the founder of inbound real estate marketing also known
as inboundREM. You've probably seen my website you're probably on my website
right now. So what are we talking about right now we're talking about Boom Town.
So boom town is a really estate, what I would refer to as a real estate lead
generation website provider. So they make websites and through those websites they
generate leads. There is nothing, Boom Town is
best-in-class. Let me just start off, open up there. If you want to generate leads
and you have the budget. Boom Town is definitely one of the ways that you
should be looking at doing that. All right, so boom town is mostly designed
for real estate teams, small independently owned real estate brokers
and here's how that works. All right so right now we're looking at one of their
larger customers all right. What I mean by that is they have 44 locations
located all over the United States all right so these are all the locations. The
name of the brokerage is Carrington. so how does that work,
owning a boomtown real estate? So please look up here you can see up here that it
says Carolina estate office locations and let's just say that we
clicked on Texas, El Paso. We would then click on that and notice how the URL
changes. So this is now a landing page for the Texas Carrington office and what
this office would do is it would drive traffic. So the way that boom town drives
traffic is let's just say this office is in Fort Worth okay. So we when people do
a search like Fort Worth homes for sale
you get stuff up here. Okay you get anything that says an ad is what's
called paid advertising okay. Boom Town has a multi-tiered fee structure. So boom
town charges $1500, let's see. I listed it out and I'm just
gonna cover it for you. So it's a $1,500 setup. They call that a licensing fee
that's just to access the platform. That doesn't cover anything else. They will
tell, they do have a lot actually I shouldn't say that.
They have a lot that they cover. They provide excellent support you get a
marketing assistant that will teach you and your agents how to use the platform.
So that could include like online tutorials or multi agent classes
and what they're going to do is they're going to show you the backend. The
backend contains a lead management system and it's got two separate sides
to it. It's got the agent side that shows that an agent can log into this platform
and then they can kind of see. So a lead gets assigned to them and they can see
what that lead has been doing and they can email out and kind of touch that
lead multiple times through the platform. the second tier of this is that somebody
can log into a company dashboard and then see how actively agents have been
working those leads. So it covers two separate sides of productivity and of
course you need to be trained on how to use that effectively and that's what
Boomtown will do. Assign a team to you and that team will then train you and
all of that's part of that fifteen hundred dollars per month and it covers
one to 25 users and it's $35 for every additional user. Now a user is defined by
somebody who gets a login to the Boomtown platform. so if you have an off
agent, a hundred agents but you don't want you don't think that all of them
necessarily need to use the platform that's fine but only the agents that are
getting licensed and logging on would be trained on how to use it. Online
advertising which is a must and quite literally Boomtown will tell you and
insist on essentially that if you want leads coming in to your website, from
your website what you need to do is you then need to pay them additional monies
to manage an advertising campaign that will drive traffic into your platform.
The second option is if you already have marketing in place you can drive traffic
into the platform and the way that that traffic is then turning like how would
you generate leads once a traffic is there. So I
showed you somebody clicks on an ad it goes let's just say that it hit the
homepage. So now that person is starting to search properties. So we go in here
and look at this property like ohh! cool! so many neat things, so many neat things. We
click around we look down. Ok and we decide we want to go into another
property and bang. Ok so essentially you get to look at one
property uninterrupted and then from that point forward you get
required to register with the website and it's a little bit hard to get out of
it and get back to these properties but you can. You can just keep backing out
but then you keep getting this popup and so then you can continue with Facebook
you continue with email and once you log in that person is becoming a lead that
is nurtured by the system by the Boomtown system and this is the stuff
like that your agents can see. So then you assign that contact to an agent that
that person who has an email address and they now get to see how many searches
that person is doing and there is a system that will kind of say hey
this person's done twenty searches. They are probably a high-value
lead. so there is a like, a lead prioritization mechanism with Boom Town.
So there's lots of cool stuff and boomtown is definitely focused on larger
real estate teams. so in other words if you are a small broker somewhere and you
have ten or fifteen agents that all need to be fed leads then boomtown is
probably, like in terms of everything that they provide in a one like, one
solution. It is very good, it's the best actually not very good, it's the best. In
addition to everything else for that fifteen hundred dollars boomtown does
provide a very minimal amount of SEO. Okay what do I mean by SEO? so let's take
a look at that. SEO, search engine optimization is the is the ability to
get on the left-hand side of the screen. so let's just take this. so this is
boomtown itself and part of my reviews is I always take a look at how
proficient do I feel, like in a real estate marketing company is in terms of
SEO and boom town is better than most. It's still not great but they are
definitely using SEO. So this real estate team names, is definitely a term that
they've targeted. They're number one for the term. So let's just google that.
Whoops. So we do the search and there we go eight formulas for picking a real
estate team name. So obviously since boom town is being designed for teams this
for them is going to be a high-value search term. So we go into the website
and then we get a fairly clean content page page that talks about Nouns, is
putting two names together? Gives you a little video, points to remember and
click here. Okay so this is definitely a lead generation mechanism for boomtown
who is definitely focused on real estate teams. The article was published in
October 2016 and its first on the page so this is a very good example of fairly
solid SEO work and the only reason that's a fairly solid is that I dug
through a lot of content that boomtown has produced and it's pretty generic but
they're not going for very competitive terms. So most of this stuff
like real estate team names and real estate email templates. When you're
looking at something like, let's just go. So you see what this says? Real estate
team names. So this keyword difficulty is on a scale of 0 to 100. So 4 is about
average in the real estate business not very much is competitive in the real
estate business but just to give you an understanding of what is
competitive. so that you can see what is different in this industry. If we do real
estate websites which would be a term that Boomtown could theoretically target
but they may not want to because they might not want to target
unqualified visitors. So they very well may not think that this is a great
keyword for their business but difficult keywords
do exist in real estate which is why I'm saying hey that keyword, those
keywords aren't all that competitive. So 0 to 100 and this is in 95 so and what
this means is that you're going to need a whole bunch of reference. A whole bunch
of people referencing your article in order for your page to make it to the
first page of the term real estate websites. So there you go. Anyway, so you
can look down here and most of these keywords you just, at this point I'm not
gonna give any more examples you're just gonna take my word for it. Most of these
keywords are just about as competitive and I'm not sure like real estate email
template it's okay I can kind of see like how that might be relevant. my only
question is if they have chops and I always ask this question every single
review, every single company. Boomtown just got a twenty million dollar round
of financing. If you have that much resources why aren't you going for like
real estate lead generation website because that's exactly what they are.
That is a hundred percent descriptive of their business it just happens to be a
much more competitive keyword and yet they're not pursuing it. So, and you
go down here and you'll see like real estate team agreement. like let's just
look at one more. So we do real estate team agreement and they're somewhere
deep on the first page, actually they're not on the first page at all. I don't
know why but all right and then. so,
for those of you have been following me for a long time. I do try to be
meticulously like I I'm a data analyst I look at the data and the data suggests
that these guys despite talking about a SEO in many different places on their
website they just don't pursue it that much which is not surprising because
their primary method of generating business for their clients is paid
advertising and why am i spending so much on these topics because once you
start spending this money you're going to be locked into boomtown for a long
time. This is a $3,500 to $5,000 commitment at a minimum like just to get
in and do a minimal amount of marketing it's $1,500 and setup $1500 per month so
that's three thousand plus a thousand dollars for the advertising so we're
talking 4500 dollars to get started and you're gonna be spending anywhere from
three to five thousand on a month-to-month basis and many companies
probably spend more like ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. Like some of
these teams that they're doing business with and more. that's not even that the
top I'm sure. So what does that mean so it just means that while I'm a big
proponent of boomtown I think they're brilliant and I'm gonna talk a little
bit about their leadership and some of the other things that they've got going
on because they've got a lot of really impressive information surrounding them
but I do want to say this in terms of developing a relationship with a company
where you're spending this much money on a solution on the website that you know
you're never gonna own. On a company that looks like they're fast tracking to be
sold at some point is always risky because you are going to be spending 50,
60, 70, 80, 90 thousand dollars a year and you don't own the website, they do.
because what they're saying is we're so good and so organized at marketing you
need to spend 90 grand on our solution and we're going to continue to feed you
leads. What they don't say is what happens if you go off the rails. You don't
have a backup option. So when you own your own website and you're doing the
marketing yourself. Yes, it is a little bit more work to figure out what all the
solutions are but you always have a backup option because you own the site.
So let's just say that a provider like your solution that you've been using for
let's just call it customer lead management right. Let's say that
solution doesn't work anymore or the plugin that you are using in WordPress
doesn't manage your leads the way that you wanted to. You have a choice of
another four or five plugins, another four or five options on top of a website
that you already own. Also, if you're pursuing SEO. Once you produce a content
page and you get onto the first page most of the time, you stay on the first
page for three to four years. So even with all the changes that Google makes
making SEO even though these guys kind of poopoo it and don't talk about it all
that much. It's the best option the reason that nobody likes to talk about
it is, it's just harder. It's a little more difficult to do. You've got to
produce really good content, you got to drive signals into that content and it
just is a more long and it's lower. So lead generation companies don't like to
talk about that especially since at some point you could remove the lead
generation and still be making money, still provide leads for your team and
they really don't like to talk about that. So in terms of strategy for growth
a real estate lead generation website provider has to lock
you in. They have to. It's part of their business model and they're not doing it
based solely on performance they're doing it on, I own your website you've
got nowhere to go buddy. So I don't like those mechanics in terms of what is in
the best interest of the consumer it's not in your best interest. Now having
said all that if you have a real estate team that needs to get fed leads today
or tomorrow or in the next six months not even I have a solution besides
spending three or four thousand dollars a month on leads. So it is the best
option in a very limited way. What I would always recommend is that you also
spend a small like thirty percent of your budget on SEO seventy
percent of your budget on direct marketing and you switch those numbers
over time. You blend the map, you slowly increase your SEO budget and slowly
decrease your your direct advertising budget over time and if somebody knows
what they're doing in the SEO category and I do believe that for the most part
these guys do. I just don't think that it's in their best interest to provide
these services or focus on it so they son't. So this is problematic for you.
However, if you wanted to you could do add the content pages and do a great job
on SEO on this site and the exciting thing is. Is that since these guys have
build the WordPress website. If you can negotiate upfront that your content will
be moved if you decide never to use them again you could actually do fairly
successful SEO on a boomtown website and still have some measure of control over
your long term marketing prospects. You could easily transfer this to another
WordPress real estate website as long as they gave you the access to do that.
Whether or not they would do that I don't know but I personally think that
anybody buying this kind of solution for this kind of money I think it's a
question that you should ask and that's why I'm raising it for you in terms of
this review. I think it least should be asked and if every single person whether,
even if you didn't have plans to do this in the future. I think that every single
broker should or real estate team should negotiate the possibility because nobody
has a crystal ball. You don't know where you're gonna go. Boom town, and now I'm
going to get into leadership and company structure. Boom town was founded by Greer
Allen in 2006. This is a photo of him when he was a young man and he was
just founding Boom town okay. It's located in South Carolina and it is been
enjoying explosive growth. It's been on the Inc 500 list of fastest-growing
companies for something like four or five years running.
In 2017 that's this year they just for the very first time ever took on a 20
million dollar round of financing which is what this is talking about. They've
expanded their employees from 56 to 96 or 100 and they did that in 2017 and
they just took over a new building somewhere in South Carolina where they
renovated a whole warehouse and you can if you go ahead and read these articles
you can go ahead and see find all of that information for yourself. I'm
pulling it from so online sources that anybody can access. In addition to that
when you look at Glassdoor which it which is something that I look at
everything I do a review. Boom town is one of the
most reviewed companies in terms of like people who work there talking about the
actual company. Here's the thing they absolutely positively have one of the
highest ratings from employees and every single employee says the same thing.
It's a company that you have to come in and work hard for it's a start-up
culture but everybody's very dedicated to their job, everybody tries to do good
work and there's just basically nothing I mean this person says is
not horrible but not what was promised and they're talking about
no breaks or lunches and pretty much everybody that works at Boom town says
the same thing. You have to work really long hours so if you were looking for
some type of work-life balance this is not the company for you. Now I've worked
for three real estate technology startups four if you count my own and I
can tell you from personal experience this is exactly what you want to see if
you are employing a real estate technology company. So in other words if
you're using their services or you're using a real estate website that has
been designed and is managed by somebody else You absolutely positively want
their employees. They're servicing their clients because you're their
client so all of this for you as a consumer of real estate websites is
great news. So I'm sorry to be be callous about it but the fact that people
are saying that they're working longer hours and really focused on the mission
is great for you. It's not necessarily great for them but it's great for you. In
addition to all of that there are famous examples like Ben Kinney. Who have been
using their product and service and quite literally Ben Kinney attests to, I
mean he went from making an average income to making over half a million
dollars a year and he credits much of it to being able to use the Boomtown
platform. So he feels like Boomtown has been an absolutely critical part to his
success. He's continued to grow, he owned six technology companies of his own and
at this point he's put up competing product into the field called brevity
which is a blue town light CRM solution and yet another example of what I was
talking about in terms of people that are developing because brevity does work
with WordPress and so as a result. You have another competing product that can
theoretically plug into other solutions other than boomtown but you will be
locked into boomtown. You won't be using two CRM
simultaneously. So boomtown or Ben has made his own CRM and he probably feeds
the leads that he gets out of boomtown into brevity and I would surmise
that the only reason that he would do that is because there were pieces of
like functionality that he simply wasn't getting out of boomtown and unlike most
people he had the resources to design his own solution. Once that solution was
designed he turned it into a technology offering that everybody can use. So I
have not looked at it, I have no opinions on it, I don't know if it's good or bad
or what it even does. I'm only saying that I know that it
exists. So every single one of these things is great news. I only have
one little note at the end of all of this. I've been doing this a long time
I've been doing this for ten years and I've just watched consistently there
are three real estate technology companies that just absolutely dominate
this interest industry. The company that owns realtor.com, the company that owns
Trulia and the third I'm forgetting right now but these are huge
conglomerates and they have the tendency to find fast moving disrupting
technologies in real estate and they buy them and they mothball them. An example
would be market leader, another example would be Tiger leads. these companies and
there is no amount of money that you can name that they wouldn't throw at these
particular like disrupting technologies. Like I think that Tiger leads was
purchased for 125 million. I don't know what the number was for market leader no
I do know what the number was. Market leader was purchased for 170 million.
Neither one of these companies was worth that much money. They got bought by that
much money because these larger technology
interests simply didn't want to compete with them. They didn't like the way they
were disrupting the industry. So they simply took the company, they didn't
focus on it all that much and then a few years later they sell it for a much less
amount of money and say oh it didn't work out. That's not what's going on,
what's going on is they buy the company,
they don't necessarily fire all the employees but they take the leaders
that were driving growth and innovation away from the company because they've
cashed out and they sign a non-compete and then those companies stop performing
the way that they used to perform and that right now in all of real-estate
boom town is the best prospect for a buyout. They in 2014 they went to a
corporate structure that's called an LLC and they then in 2017 took on their
first round of financing twenty million dollars which now means that boom town
has investors. They are answerable to somebody. One of my previous favorite
things about boom town is they had never taken on investors. So they were
completely and totally unanswerable to anybody but themselves and their own
mission and now they're answerable to investors. Now every single corporate
team ever in the sense the history of businesses says the same thing in terms
of investors. They're silent investors that's just simply not true if anything
has ever been proven in the world of business is that if somebody buys a
large enough chunk of another company they absolutely positively have a voice.
Now typically when people are are just selling pieces of their company company
especially in technology where its rapidly growing businesses know
investors don't tend to have a very large voice but as those businesses grow
the money becomes bigger and the people who are investors tend to be
former CEO's. They're of major conglomerates they look at these
interests and when the business gets big enough they start to have an opinion
like and sometimes those opinions get very loud and one of the most popular
opinions especially for investors is let's sell this business because we're
ending the period of growth. So there's always a time in
every single rapidly-growing technology company which boomtown is at the tail
end of right now, where they're growing by a hundred or a thousand percent every
year and boomtown has been growing like at a thousand percent. It's grown from
one hundred and forty thousand dollars in its first year, all the way up to
something like 25 or 30 million right now. That's pretty pretty decent for
eleven years all right. However, when that growth slows, when it
becomes less than ten or fifteen percent because that's the math. It makes more
financial sense to sell the company it just does and that's when the pressure
starts. So I don't like the fact that they took on a round the financing even
though we probably will see a lot of improvements. I think that customers of
boomtown probably have another three or four years on this platform and then I
would definitely. I mean I personally and no joke if I owned a real estate
brokerage. I a hundred percent absolutely positively no question I'm looking to
create a secondary marketing method that is online so that I can back up my
production with another solution preferably one I am in control of, one
that I own. The same thing by the way that Ben Kinney is doing. Like every sharp
business person that's out there is going to have the same solution to
how they handle getting their business because you don't ever want to rely 100%
on one company especially not a company that you not only don't own, you don't
even own the the marketing platform that you're using. So, which is pretty
incredible when you think about the way that's all been designed inside of the
real estate marketing industry. So anyway I'm done. Boomtown though, I again I just
want to emphasize it has amazing reviews both internally and externally. I've
reviewed a whole bunch of videos on the way that it performs and I think it gives
solid performance. They talk a lot about SEO and you can see their
marketing manager. I've put a video of him Rivers Pierce, he seems to be
passionate, he seems to know what he's doing but they really aren't just
focused on SEO all that much. They do a little bit for their customers
I think as part of their monthly licensing fee. It's like a
value-add and that's pretty cool but they are increasing the value of a
website that you personally don't even own. You own your domain name but you
don't own the website. Alright that's it, thanks for tuning in this is Robert
Newman have a great day.
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