Numerous real estate marketing suites and all-in-one CRM solutions for real estate professionals make it pretty easy to lose sight.

Firepoint for real estate also belongs to this category.

And if I had to manage a traditional real estate business or brokerage full-time, I would definitely lose sight of the vast array of software solutions for real estate and real estate marketing suites.

Therefore in this article, I will put Firepoint under the magnifying glass for you and analyze the software in-depth.

But I already have several spoilers right from the beginning.

I especially liked the team collaboration feature, and their marketing performance tracking capacity, but not so much the slow website speed of their IDX websites on mobile devices.

Sounds interesting? Then please keep reading.

 

What is Firepoint?

Firepoint is an all-in-one solution or a real estate marketing suite with a CRM as a core software component and done-for-you real estate lead generation services on top.

The software provides a total of three software components, which are IDX websites, CRM, and an automated assistant.

Additionally, they can do real estate lead generation for you via Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads.

In the table below, you will find an overview of everything Firepoint has to offer.

IDX WebsitesCRMAutomated AssistantLead Generation
MLS integrationLead management including contact info, activity, and home search criteriaAutomatic replies to new leads and qualifies themLead generation via Google, Instagram and Facebook Ads
Lead capture pagesFollow-ups directly from one place (call, text, and email)Lead nurturing via 2-way SMSLead targeting my multiple criteria
Lead preferences trackingAutomatic lead nurturingAgent notificationsLead delivery via CSV, Round Robin, Pond, SMS, Email, and CRM integration
Automatic property updatesReporting (e.g., ROI, lead source, etc.)
Map search with polygonDialer
Type-in searchCall recording
Custom search criteria (e.g., new listings, open houses, waterfront, etc.)
Easy-to-use content editor
Unlimited pages you can create
Fast load times (with reservation)
Mobile responsive

 

The Use of Firepoint – Main Components with Features

I will align the use and features of Firepoint with the components and extra service (lead generation) it provides.

Since the CRM is the core component, let’s first look at it.

 

1) The Firepoint CRM

The CRM helps manage your leads, present clients, past clients, and lead sources.

There are different lead sources that can be integrated with the CRM, such as Trulia, Zillow, and Ylopo, to name just a few.

Later in this article, I will dig deeper into all available third-party integrations.

Leads can be distributed within your team or just for yourself.

The CRM can also help manage the lead sources and reporting, including ROI, cost per closing, and other marketing performance indicators.

I found this feature particularly helpful since it can be quite cumbersome to keep track of the performance of different marketing channels over time.

These performance metrics are complemented by some accountability tools that also help keep track of the team’s or your performance.

You can also do follow-ups via calls, text, and email from the CRM.

Although a separate component, the automated assistant is integrated into the CRM and can help you do automatic lead nurturing.

The dashboard, as you can see in the screenshot below, is the most important section in the CRM since it contains all the essential information at a glance, which are:

  • Tasks today
  • Overdue tasks
  • Upcoming tasks

firepoint

These are basically follow-up items you may have created for yourself, someone created for you, or from a marketing campaign.

You can use seventeen premade automated campaigns, mainly follow-ups, email marketing, and text message campaigns.

They can all be customized to your needs.

The dashboard’s following things you can see are the recently active leads and the most active leads within the last seven days.

This area also shows how many properties these leads have looked at, how many they put in their favorites, and how many saved searches they have created.

In the next section of this article, when I discuss the IDX websites, you will see how this ties together with the front end of the IDX websites.

There are boxes in various colors at the top of the dashboard page.

These are leads you may focus on a bit more since they are leads with no tasks assigned to you, leads with no saved searches, new leads, and leads not viewed.

If you work with a team, each agent will have its dashboard.

As a real estate brokerage owner, you can get an overview of all agents and how they are doing in terms of tasks and performance.

You can see the following:

  • When they were last active
  • The number of overdue tasks
  • How many active leads are they working on
  • The number of leads with no tasks assigned to them leads with no saved searches, new leads, and leads not viewed

There is also a second view for lead engagement to find out what the different agents are actually doing.

You can look at different periods and see how many new leads they received, the phone calls, inbound and outbound dialer calls they made, the inbound and outbound texts they received and sent, and the number of emails sent.

Within the CRM is also a click-to-dialer built-in, and each user gets their own number which can be synced with a mobile device.

The calls are recorded so you, as an owner of a brokerage, can also listen to the calls made in the same lead engagement view in the dashboard.

This means that agents can also receive feedback on the calls they make.

With each user’s number, you can also send and receive text messages.

Within the text messages, you can include videos and links to properties created automatically when you start entering their addresses and BombBomb or your own videos.

You can use the texting feature or the dialer directly from the client profile.

Before the call goes out, you can select whether the Firepoint number or your cell phone number is displayed to your client.

For legal reasons, you can also have the system play a call disclosure before the call is accepted, mentioning that the call is recorded.

There is also a mobile version of this dialer functionality, so you can also do all of this from a mobile device.

You can also work as a team with clients, which is important since, as a real estate agent, you will often work as a team consisting of a seller agent, a listing agent, an office manager, and/or a loan officer.

In this case, all team members would have access to this lead.

Unless you have the admin role (likely as the brokerage owner), agents will only see the leads they are assigned to.

Leads can also be tagged individually to find them later under a particular category of your or your team’s choice.

You can also check out your lead-searching activity in detail (see screenshot below).

You can see the corresponding statistics, such as the number of visits, properties, favorites, saved searches, beds, baths, the average price range, and the geographic areas they are looking at.

firepoint

When potential clients get property alerts for their saved searches, you can also check statistics and see how many were clicked and/or opened and which properties they looked at.

Lastly, you can also track information for closings within the dashboard.

You can find this area via the “Opportunities and Closings” section.

There you can enter the buying, selling, and closing information.

Once you create a new closing, the lead gets included with the lead source, which is important for the overall performance reporting.

The latter provides an overview of all the seller and buyer closings and GCI.

In the same section, you can also keep track of the spending by lead source to see which marketing channels are worthwhile using.

The system then calculates your marketing performance numbers, which you can find in the “Lead Source Analysis.”

Key marketing performance indicators that are calculated are:

  • Return on investment
  • Cash conversion cycle
  • Company dollar
  • Cost per closing

Of course, this one and the team collaboration feature were the two that convinced me the most.

2) IDX Websites

Along with the Firepoint’s CRM also comes the IDX website feature that helps integrate your MLS data.

The data is updated every fifteen minutes and will provide you and the website visitor with a gallery property or map search.

Via the map search, site visitors can build polygons and multiple polygons on the map and do their searches based on their criteria (e.g., price, beds, baths, etc.).

There are also additional search criteria, such as:

  • Property type
  • Views
  • Year built
  • Basement
  • Types
  • Number of floors
  • Lot size
  • School district
  • Architectural style
  • Condo end unit
  • Financial terms
  • County
  • Total square feet
  • Attached or detached
  • Property information
  • Style characteristics
  • Taxes
  • Horse property
  • Parking type
  • Construction details
  • Days on site
  • Interior features
  • Property photos

Once the visitor has created their search with one, or the various criteria mentioned above, they can save the search by registering with their email and a password.

During the registration process, they can define whether they want to receive email alerts and, if so, how often they want to receive them (e.g., immediately, daily, weekly, monthly).

If they already have an account, they can check their saved searches.

This procedure generates a lead in the CRM, so you can try engaging in a conversation.

You will see in the backend that someone performed a property search and saved it.

The overall idea is that you can keep track of the behavior of potential clients when they visit your real estate website.

Individual properties that potential buyers find can be shared via email, Facebook, or Twitter or added to their favorites.

Here they can also request additional information by entering their contact information in a form.

The IDX websites are based on templates that real estate agents can customize.

You can create a buyer page and direct links to a specific area on the property map.

Videos and carousel images can also be added. All the different types of customizations can be done in the backend via the “Office Settings” and “IDX Site Management.”

This video gives a nice overview of the two core components I’ve just discussed.

3) Automated Assistant

The automated assistant is an AI-powered software feature that overlaps with the other two components, hence the IDX websites and the CRM.

What it does is that it communicates with leads on your behalf and does this in a human-like style via text messages.

When a new lead comes in the Firepoint CRM, the automated assistant instantly responds and qualifies the lead.

It can notify you to take over the conversation if needed.

 

 

Firepoint Marketing & Lead Generation

For Firepoint Marketing or its Lead Generation service, I wanted to put in an extra article section since it’s not a system component but an extra service you can add.

This service provides PPC advertising campaigns to generate real estate leads for you via Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads.

Since the Facebook platform, including Instagram, is used, they can provide targeting by multiple criteria such as geographic location or area, buyers or sellers, price point, and first-time homebuyers.

The generated leads can be delivered in different ways, such as via CRM integration, CSV files, Round Robin, Pond, SMS, and email.

Since this service depends on the real estate agent’s or broker’s needs and budget, no fixed pricing information is disclosed.

Therefore, I can’t go deeper into analyzing the performance of those campaigns by calculating key marketing performance indicators and comparing them to additional marketing channels.

 

 

Firepoint Integrations

Regarding Firepoint Integrations, there are nineteen third-party software providers you can integrate into the platform, as shown in the table below.

Software/ ToolCategory
YlopoReal estate marketing suite
Real SynchAutomatization and synchronization
SisuReal estate workflow management
verseCommunication
CallActionInbound call tracking
ConversionMonsterLead qualification and conversion
BombBombVideo selling
MojoReal estate prospecting & contact scraping
FacebookSocial media
ZapierAutomatization and synchronization
ZillowProperty database
realtor.comProperty database
zendesk chatLive chat
truliaProperty database
vyralVideo selling
Agent LegendAutomated lead follow up
rokrboxLead qualification
ReadyChatLive chat
Google Tag ManagerMarketing Tracking

 

Firepoint CRM Pricing

Firepoint’s pricing is pretty straightforward, not that affordable, and thus better suitable for real estate teams.

You pay $299 per month. (source) This price includes one to two users.

On top of that come the costs that may occur when you also purchase their lead generation services.

 

Firepoint CRM Reviews

I also researched what other existing and past users had to say about Firepoint across different user-based review platforms and could find positive and negative reviews.

Let’s start with three positive reviews.

“I like that it is laid out in a very easy to navigate and straightforward manner. The user interface was set up in an easy to navigate manner in which the user is easily able to complete the tasks needing done.” (source)

“We switched over a few years back from another big platform and have been extremely happy! The cost savings and the usability of the system has made it totally worthwhile for the change. Our agents love using it and find it so user-friendly. The reporting functions help me keep agents accountable as well as track our marketing budgets.” (source)

“Very professional team. The customer service is some of the best we have experienced in the past 20 years in real estate.” (source)

What about three negative reviews to find a balance? Here they are:

“Firepoint created a forum to collect agent feedback and improve to software, but in 6 months, I didn’t see any action on their part. A few opportunities I saw using the software: Cannot add profile client photos, the system does not automatically sync with email to track history, website design through Firepoint is dated and no way to track site metrics, no document storage, batched .csv uploads have to be emailed to them to upload (no straight-through processing) and the layout made it hard to get a high level over view of transactions in escrow.” (source)

“My team would like features released faster, however, every feature that is released works, from my perspective a proper working system is better than a fast product launch.” (source)

“Too many steps to make to complete tasks compared to other systems.” (source)

To be fair, most of the reviews from these review platforms are a bit outdated (older than two years), and from what I could find, many of the mentioned issues have already been resolved.

I got an overall positive impression of the platform from various YouTube videos, real estate professionals, and agents.

I read on Firepoint’s website about a fast side speed for their IDX websites. When I hear a claim like that, I usually like to test it a bit.

So I found another downside after doing several tests.

I researched ten websites of real estate agents powered by Firepoint, and ran them all through the web development tool from Google to determine website speed for mobile and desktop devices.

Why ten? I wanted to approach a somewhat representative number and find the beginning of a pattern or trend.

And unfortunately, I found one, as you can see in the table below.

Real Estate WebsiteDesktop SitespeedMobile Sitespeed
ritzbergrealty.com5045
torixgroup.com8645
myfairbankshome.comn.a.22
www.agent509.com6445
waioliproperties.comn.a.47
blackhillshomes4sale.com8942
realestateportorange.com56n.a.
pensacolaareaproperties.com6728
idaholifehomes.com5644
belleepoquerealty.com8727

While I did not gather entirely representative data, the desktop site speed performance was acceptable but could be better.

For mobile devices, the site speed was almost always in the red area of the score. The latter is the actual bad news.

Considering that most homebuyers in today’s age are looking for houses on their mobile devices, this is an area of improvement that Firepoint may still want to work on a bit.

But to manage your expectations a bit in terms of website speed. It is almost impossible to get a score of 100. Heck, google.com itself doesn’t get to a speed score of 100 themselves, both for mobile and desktop devices.

Why do you want to care about site speed, too, in the first place?

According to a study mentioned in this article from HubSpot, for each additional second of load time, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42%.

The load time is also a ranking signal that Google uses to determine whether your website is worth ranking higher (source).

 

Firepoint Vs. 24 Alternatives

I would like to end this article with a shortlist of Firepoint alternatives that can provide you with similar features.

Here are the alternative real estate marketing suites that include a CRM:

You can find all the tools I’ve ever mentioned in my articles on this page.

You can find more real estate marketing suites and CRMs I analyzed in the past in this and this article.


This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.


Tobias Schnellbacher