I’ve been a real estate agent for 6 years now and I have realized that prospecting is one of the most important things that a real estate agent can do.
I was one of those agents that was taught that “listings give you leverage” It became my mission to make sure I always carried a good amount of listings.
Being in the industry and speaking with other real estate agents, I noticed most of them were using some type of lead generation tool that helped them prospect for listings.
A common way that many top agents prospected for listings was by cold calling for sale by owners (FSBOs) and expired listings. This was something I’ve always known because I had actually traveled down this road before.
What Is A FSBO?
For sale by owners are people who want to sell their homes but they want to do it themselves. The reason why they do this is because most times they don’t want to pay a real estate agent a commission. The owner of the home thinks that they can do it all on their own so they chose not to contact a real estate agent.
What Is An Expired Listing?
Expired listings are homes that were previously on the market with a real estate agent but the home didn’t sell for one reason or another. Listings have a certain amount of time that they have to sell before their agreement with the Realtor expires. Once it’s expired, it becomes available for a new agent.
A common question that I get is how to get expired leads phone numbers. Earlier in my career, I was investing in just about everything for expired listing leads. You name it, Zillow leads, CRM leads, and the random companies that would call me trying to sell me motivated seller leads.
The tool that I settled on when I prospected in the past was the RedX but I ended up canceling my subscription for a couple of reasons.
At the time, I thought RedX was great but it didn’t seem as user-friendly as I thought it would be plus I didn’t feel like the quality of leads was what they should have been.
Here are the reasons why I left RedX:
RedX didn’t have Storm Dialer:
Before the new version came out, the process was very manual. Every day the new leads appeared in the system for me to begin dialing but there was not a tool within the software for me to dial them.
Therefore, I was forced to pay for an external subscription for an auto-dialer outside of RedX. That wasn’t an expense I was originally prepared to spend because most dialers were around $100 and up for a multi-line dialer. Luckily they’ve added Storm Dialer to their arsenal of tools and it’s made a huge difference.
The Redx Storm Dialer has several functionalities but the one that sticks out the most is the ability to call 3 phone numbers simultaneously. This really helps to free up time when using RedX.
The real estate information in the Vortex was very limited
At the time, the lead management system, which they call the Vortex, did not give you a lot of information about the property. This made most of my phone calls really awkward.
RedX would just give you the name on record and the phone number. Sometimes it was the wrong name, and the phone number was the agent’s phone number.
Obviously, this was no good for an agent like myself trying to prospect. There must have been many people to complain because now, it seems that they show a lot more information. The profiles contain much more information such as names, addresses, multiple phone numbers, agent information, and more.
With this type of information, you’re more set up for success when making calls.
The quality of the numbers wasn’t good
Like I briefly touched on before, most of the phone numbers weren’t good in my opinion. I was calling agents, I was getting disconnected lines, and some numbers were to the wrong people.
I was extremely disappointed with this. In this new version, however, it seems that they are getting their data from a completely different place. It also seems that there are more cell phone numbers associated with the records instead of landlines that nobody answers.
Overall, I felt like I was paying for something that wasn’t giving me the return I was looking for due to the product limitations.
I thought that it would be an easy way to help my lead generation but when I realized how limited the contact information was, and there’s nothing you can do about it, then all hope seemed lost.
I Left And Then Came Back To RedX
One day I saw an ad for RedX that was targeted to real estate agents and it was marketing pre-foreclosure leads. I was actually at a place in my business where I wanted to start working more with investment properties and I needed more potential clients.
I followed that ad to RedX’s website and also saw that they were running a sale to waive the setup fee. Before I started up my services again, I decided to do a demo call with someone at the company.
Even though I had the service before, I wanted to bring up my experience from before and see if I should really try the platform again.
I ended up switching back to RedX a few days later after I the agent told me how they completely revamped the whole software.
How is RedX different?
The new version actually was a total surprise to me because it was exactly what it was needing all along. Also, they now have more products. FSBO’s and Expireds were all I remember being able to dial and now they have pre-foreclosures, neighborhoods for farming that they call Geoleads, and also For Rent By Owners.
The best feature that they’ve added, in my option, was their Storm Dialer. Now everything is truly in one place so no more needing to import or export records and the need to operate in two different systems.
The RedX Pricing
You can always find a lot of good deals on real estate lead generation tools, but you have to be careful. Some companies are just trying to take advantage of Realtors and our need to get more business.
I felt like the pricing, even with the sale was still pretty competitive. Like most of the other platforms, you only pay for what you need.
You can choose between expired listings, FSBO’s, pre-foreclosure leads, and Geoleads for circle prospecting. These are all the leads you would really need for real estate.
In Conclusion
I’ve been a real estate agent for many years now and have used RedX as my main lead generator for listings. All in all, they are an amazing company with great customer service, and I’ve done a lot with them at this point.
With any company, there are some downsides that may be deal-breakers for you. There were deal breakers for me that made me leave at one point.
At the time, the information in the platform is very limited so if you weren’t looking to do any research on your leads before calling them it wasn’t going to happen here. The quality of phone numbers wasn’t fantastic either – Now, they are my new best friend and I’d encourage you to give them a shot.
If you are looking to add cold calling as a way to lead generate in your real estate business, I would consider RedX. You can get the $150 setup fee waived through this RedX discount.
There are many services out there that provide the same thing but it is good that at least the new RedX gives you an overall package to manage and prospect to the phone numbers.