In 2018, real estate agent Luis Robledo received a lead for a potential buyer looking to live in Venice Beach, California. The lead had come through Ylopo, a real estate digital marketing solution that aims to help agents find more clients while simultaneously building their brand and team.
Robledo followed up on the lead, and after a few weeks of phone tag, the home shopper expressed interest in two houses. Not long after, the client and his wife ended up putting a $3 million offer on the second home they saw. Robledo was understandably excited. The offer was accepted, but the client re-evaluated and decided that it was not the right house. Instead, he was interested in a different property that had two single-family homes on it. The combined cost of the two homes was listed at over $5 million. They closed on the homes and Robledo celebrated an even more profitable Ylopo generated transaction.
But, that wasn’t the end of that happy story. Two years later, the same client called agent Robledo again. After a series of changed plans, he had now set his sights on Malibu, and Robledo showed him an oceanfront property belonging to none other than Matthew Perry of “Friends” fame. In the end, they closed on the Malibu house at roughly $13 million. A single lead from Ylopo led to roughly $20 million in real estate closings for Robledo.
“You’re always hoping for something that equates to a hole-in-one, like somebody who calls you up and says, ‘I’d like to see this property,’ and then sees the property and puts an offer on it,” Robledo said. “I mean, it rarely happens but if you have enough leads and you’ve got a great lead follow-up system and process, I’m convinced that you are eventually going to score big!”
$1 Billion in Sales Volume in One Year
Around the same time on the other side of the country, Anthony Lamacchia, CEO of Lamacchia Realty in Massachusetts, was frustrated with his main portal lead provider. He hit the breaking point with the name-brand real estate portal when it substantially raised its price of leads. Even worse, the company was going to require Lamacchia Realty to manage those leads via the portal’s own proprietary system, not the custom CRM solution that Lamacchia had just built at a considerable time and expense.
“Ultimately they wanted more of our commissions,” Lamacchia said. “They were clearly headed towards being our competitor, and now they actually are our competitor. I’m not interested in giving any money to our competitors.”
At the time, online leads accounted for about 20% of his business. The transition to Ylopo was not one to be taken lightly. However, with the ability to tie Ylopo leads into Lamacchia Realty’s own CRM, the match was made. With the help of online leads from Ylopo in 2020, Lammachia’s business generated over $1 billion in sales volume.
“We just enjoy doing business with Ylopo,” Lamacchia said. “They provide solid, cost-effective leads, don’t require referral fees, they advertise and promote our brand, not theirs. And it’s like a family business. You can call them on the phone and actually talk to them and you won’t get shifted from one customer representative to another.”
How (and why) It Works
Both Robledo and Lamacchia have experienced great success from Ylopo leads, and none of that is by chance. A key ingredient to Ylopo’s business is its ability to remarket and retarget at a very precise level. Ylopo Head of Growth Aaron Franklin compares this retargeting to the “related products” shoppers will see when browsing Amazon. Ylopo first provides real estate agents and brokers with a home search site that has all of their properties on it. The site is branded with the agents’ team name and logos. Ylopo then drives traffic to the site via both Facebook Dynamic Ads as well as Google Pay Per Click ads (PPC).
“As the user starts clicking around, we know exactly what sort of properties they are interested in,” Franklin said. “And then we’ve got a huge catalog that’s uploaded into Facebook. So next time that the user is on Facebook or Instagram, we show them properties really similar to the ones that they have been looking at.”
Since all of this is done under the clients’ brand, they’re not only gaining leads, but brand awareness as well. For Ylopo clients like Lamacchia, who has had disappointing experiences with other lead providers in the past, “this is a very refreshing change of pace.”
Both of Ylopo’s lead generation methods – social ads and Google PPC – can be used for different purposes. For example, Ylopo leverages social ads to generate lower cost local buyers and sellers and Google PPC ads to capture more “down funnel” ready to buy and sell leads.
And for Ylopo’s clients, it doesn’t stop at lead generation. Ylopo also offers dynamic remarketing to keep the consumers coming back to its clients’ branded IDX home search websites as well as lead communication follow-up through RAIYA (Real Estate AI is Your Assistant), an AI text-based automated ISA that can be fully integrated into agents’ Ylopo platform under their brand.
“There’s basically a full 360-degree coverage,” Franklin said. “We’re following leads everywhere so that there’s a lot of activity coming in. But we know agents are busy, so that’s why the AI handles all the follow-up as well.”
And perhaps the No. 1 selling point for Ylopo’s clients like Anthony Lamacchia is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to integrate any of these digital marketing capabilities since Ylopo has already integrated with most of the popular CRMs that agents and brokers are currently using.
As Howard Tager, Ylopo’s co-founder and CEO puts it, “CRMs should be CRMs, digital marketing companies should be digital marketing companies and with how advanced and specialized everything has become and how rapidly technology is evolving, it’s absurd to think that one company can be the best at everything. As such, great, seamless integration is critical for us, our partners, and our clients!”
