Scraping, scrubbing, and skip tracing tools can help real estate professionals access the homeowner’s contact information that otherwise can be pretty time-consuming for one to get.
And if you have been searching and comparing different tools, you might have encountered Cole Realty Resource.
I recently came across this software provider and decided to take a closer look and analyze it.
Therefore, this article will cover…
…what Cole Realty Resource is
…how to use it with its different features
…how much does it cost
…the difference between Cole Realty Resource and Redx and Mojo
…12 alternatives
…and what other users think of the platform
What Is Cole Realty Resource?
Cole Realty Resource is one of the three products from the company Cole Information founded in 1947.
The software product itself is a homeowner and renter contact list provider.
The tool gives you access to cell phone numbers, email addresses, and pertinent household information of sellers and buyers.
How to Use Cole Realty Resource
When you log in and arrive at the dashboard, you will find seven tabs, each representing different features or sections:
- Neighbor search
- Prospect IQ
- Retriever
- Renter
- Commercial
- Aerial view
- Directory
1) Neighbor Search
You can target just listed/just sold properties within the “Neighbor Search” tab. Additionally, you can farm in a particular neighborhood.
The phone numbers you can get from here are limited to landline numbers.
You can create three contact lists: a list of all records, telemarketing, and mailing lists.
You need to enter at least the street name and the state to do a neighbor search.
To filter out only confirmed owners, check “Confirmed Homeowner.”
The usability is a bit clunky because you don’t get search results after clicking on “Search,” but you also need to select how you would like the search results to be presented.
You can choose between Street Search, Radius Search, and Map Search. To improve usability, it could be an option to select before to avoid pressing the “Search” button a second time.
With the map search, you can mark an area on the map around the address you entered in the form to find additional properties and contact information.
Once the area is plotted, you can click “View Available Prospects” and see the downloadable results list.
I won’t use this feature if you plan to do anything other than direct mail marketing campaigns since you will only get landline phone numbers and no cell phone numbers or email addresses.
2) Prospect IQ
You can access more data in the Prospect IQ tab, such as emails and mobile phone numbers.
There are three steps involved in searching.
Step one is entering the geographic criteria, step two is selecting the advanced criteria, and step three is the type of list you want to create.
Step 1 – Entering the Geographic Criteria
You can search data in two ways: zip code or neighborhood.
One experienced user whose video you will find at the end of this article section, recommends not using zip codes because it will give numerous results.
So you may want to search by neighborhood instead.
Step 2 – Advanced Criteria
There are also advanced criteria available that you can use when searching: property, financial, consumer behavior, transportation, and family.
One of the first things you decide is whether to check the boxes “head of the house” and/or “confirmed homeowner” to get only the contacts that meet this criterion.
If you want to target only renters for your marketing campaigns, you can also select the type of renters you are looking for (house renters, apartment renters, condo owners).
I am unsure why they include condo owners in the renters dropdown menu, though; this seemed confusing to me.
The next checkbox in the same row you can select is “Previous Occupants.” It also includes the contact information of anyone ever associated with the respective property.
For the advanced criteria in the property area, you can get pretty granular by entering the total assessed value range, appraised value range, types of subdivisions, the living space range, and the number of rooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms you are looking for.
You can use the financial search box to determine search criteria such as the first and second mortgage amount range, the credit rating, income range, net worth, and whether you are looking for an absentee owner or not.
You can select different car models for the transportation search filter, and in the consumer behavior filter, you have interests and hobbies at your disposal.
Finally, you can use the family search to filter the family position, language, race, the number of generations in the home, the number of pets, the presence of the elderly, and the presence of young adults.
Step 3 – The Type of List
As the last step, you decide what type of list to create. It is recommended that you use “Telemarketing” and “Emailing.”
Selecting “Telemarketing” is a good idea since contacts on DNC lists will not be included in the list.
It may or may not have emails included.
And when you select “Emailing,” all contact lists that are pulled will have email addresses included but may or may not include phone numbers.
Besides, the phone numbers you will find are not scrubbed against a do not call list.
According to the already mentioned user (see video below), Cole Realty Resource’s list accuracy is between 60 and 70 percent.
Other options you can select here are “List of all Records,” “Phones Only” (not scrubbed against DNC lists), and “Mailing.”
It is important to note that you can have Cole Realty Resource prepare the download in a way that is compatible with third-party software providers such as:
- Arch (Dialer)
- BirdDog(Direct Mailer)
- Espresso (CRM)
- IQ Dial
- Lion Desk
- Mojo
- Redx
- SalesRabbit
- Team Leads
- Vulcan 7
- Wise Agent
I would have wished for a direct third-party integration, where you can just export the list directly to a third-party software provider of your choice.
3) Retriever
This feature is ideal if you want to switch to doing more digital marketing.
Suppose you have been doing direct mailing for several years now to a particular neighborhood but never collected the email addresses of those contacts.
In that case, the “Retriever” feature comes into play. You can upload your contacts list to Cole Realty Resource, and the software will try to find the corresponding email addresses.
4) Renter
You can already tell what this feature does from the name, and it is helpful when you want to do a marketing campaign for renters.
After selecting this feature tab, you can select the type of renter you want to target.
This is the same as within the feature “Prospect IQ,” that is, house renters, apartment renters, and condo owners.
You need to enter at least the zip code and state and the type of list you would like to create.
So overall, having an extra tab for this feature is redundant since you already have access to it from the “Prospect IQ” tab.
5) Aerial View
The last feature worth mentioning gives you access to a bird’s eye view of a particular neighborhood of your choice.
You need to enter the house number, street name, and state, and you can view a map with surrounding houses of the address you entered and the corresponding property information.
During my research, I found two videos that also provide a good overview of the Cole Realty Resource’s features, which you can find below.
The first one may be outdated regarding the current look and feel of the software’s design, but the core functionality is still the same.
The second one is more recent.
Video overview from 2020:
More recent overview:
How Much Does Cole Realty Resource Cost? – Pricing at a Glance
Cole Realty Resource has three different pricing plans: Starter, Pro, and Power.
As you can see in the table below, only the “Starter” plan can be paid monthly, and the remaining plans are all yearly plans.
| Starter ($119.95 per month + $99.95 setup fee) | Pro ($995 per year) | Power ($1590 per year) |
|---|---|---|
| One user | One user | One user |
| 2,000 contacts per month | 1,500 contacts per search | 35,5000 contacts per search |
| Cole community content | Unlimited leads per month | Unlimited leads per month |
| Unlimited phone append | Unlimited phone append | |
| Cole community content | Cole community content |
Cole Realty Resource vs. Redx
Cole Realty Resource and Redx are significantly different in terms of search filters.
With Redx, you can filter the searches by FSBOs, expired listings, for rent by owner, and pre-foreclosure property information.
This is not the case with Cole Realty Resource, where the filters focus more on recently sold and just listed properties.
The software also features many other filters, such as:
- Head of the house
- Confirmed homeowner
- House renters
- Apartment renters
- Condo owners
- Previous occupants
- Family position
- Language
- Race
- Number of generations in the home
- Number of pets
- Presence of elderly
- Presence of young adults
Redx is also more user-friendly and has an overall nicer look and feel design-wise.
When it comes to pricing, Redx has more modular options.
Depending on what type of properties or owners you are looking for, you can put the different plans together that start at $39.99 for pre-foreclosures and are highest at $79.99 per month for rent by owner contact information.
Redx doesn’t have yearly pricing plans; it also includes a dialer as part of its native features.
Cole Realty Resource doesn’t have one.
You can check out Redx here.
Mojo vs. Cole Realty Resource
Since this section concerns Mojo vs. Cole Realty Resource, I basically compare a software suite (Mojo), including several components, with just one software component from Cole Information (Cole Realty Resource).
But Cole Information also has two additional components/ products: Cole Neighborhoods and Cole X Dates.
And between the whole Mojo suite and Cole Realty Resource are large differences.
Mojo has more software components and features, including the Dialer, Lead Manager, Data, and Marketing.
So the component you could compare Cole Realty Resource directly with would be just Mojo Data.
Why?
Because Mojo Data is the component that can provide you with homeowner contact information, such as for sale by owner, rent by owner, and pre-foreclosure contact information.
Additionally, it includes a skip tracer and a neighborhood search.
Neither Cole Information nor Cole Realty Resource features a dialer that Mojo does, and it also doesn’t have a CRM, as is the case with Mojo’s Lead Manager.
In contrast to Cole Realty Resource, Mojo’s pricing is also designed modularly (similar to Redx). For each of the different software components you pay a monthly fee:
- Neighborhood search (component): $49
- For rent by owner (contacts): $25
- Expired listings(contacts): $50
- FSBO’s(contacts): $25
- Skip Tracing(component): $49
- Pre-Foreclosures(contacts): $49
- Single line dialer(component): $99
- Triple line dialer(component): $149
You can learn more about Mojo in my review article here.
12 Cole Realty Resource Alternatives
I’ve already analyzed several alternatives to Cole Realty Resource here, here, here, and here.
Since Cole Realty Resource falls into the overall category of the property owner or seller data gathering, scraping tools, and/or skip tracing tools, all such application providers can be considered alternatives.
I put together a list of alternatives below:
- LeadSherpa
- Vulcan 7
- Propstream
- BatchLeads
- BatchDriven
- SkipGenie
- Reonomy
- PropertyShark
- LocatePlus
- Findtheseller
- SearchBug
- Dealmachine
Cole Realty Resource Reviews
Unfortunately, the situation is a bit thin on the user review front and leaning more towards negative reviews for Cole Realty Resource across different user review platforms.
I couldn’t find raving or overly positive reviews.
But to their defense, most of the given reviews were already at least two years old or older.
So the mentioned issues might have already been dealt with in the meanwhile.
Below you will find a collection of those unfortunately rather negative and partially outdated user reviews across platforms such as Reddit, Yelp, and Better Business Bureau:
“I used Cole Realty a few years ago, the contact rate in my marketplace was very low I can recall.” (source)
“We just tried them and out of 1000 records we sent in they sent back 233 and off that 233 there were only 188 with phone numbers. If you want data I would go with Skip Genie they have given us the best data by far. Needtoskip.com and batchskiptrace.com are also pretty good as well! after testing Cole Realty I am not a fan.” (source)
“Their data was super stale. Lots of DNC numbers, too. I would never pay for it again.” (source)
“Property owners, emails, & phone numbers are inaccurate. Paid for accurate information and realized I have been duped by this company. Want a refund. Paid for a service stating it paralleled the Blue Book. As a Realtor, I solicit business through mailings and emails. The Cole service is a smoke and mirrors game as they state their site contains current Property Owners, Property Owner’s emails and phone numbers…” (source)
Negative reviews on Yelp rather come from homeowners complaining about getting too many realtor calls and not having given permission to sell their contact information (source).
This might be due to these owners forgetting to put themselves on a DNC list or technical issues from the data-gathering process.
This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.
- Why Real Estate Conversion Rates Are 6-Times Below Average - March 21, 2024
- How to Manage Your Apartment Advertising Campaign - February 23, 2024
- Finding Marketing Channels for Apartment Advertising - February 12, 2024
