Homesnap – A Deep Dive Analysis

Compared to Zillow, Homesnap is one of the smaller property databases offering lead generation for real estate professionals.

Since I have already discussed Zillow and Redfin in past articles, I decided to also look into Homesnap for this article.

The features of both sides (buyers and real estate professionals) of this two-sided platform sound promising.

However, if I were to believe several user reviews I found during my research, there seems to be still some room for improvement.

So in this article, I will discuss more in detail…

…what is Homesnap, and who owns it
…what Homesnap is used for, and what features the company provides
…how the software company makes money
…what Homesnap has to offer in terms of real estate marketing and lead generation
…pricing and their training for agents
…whether it’s part of the MLS
…the pricing of Homesnap Concierge
…the differences between Homesnap and Homesnap Pro
…how it compares against Zillow, Redfin, ShowingTime, and Homespotter
…the accuracy of Homesnap’s data
…and whether it is good for realtors (including user reviews)

What Is Homesnap, and Who Owns It?

Homesnap is a two-sided platform, including a mobile version that, on one side, gives potential buyers access to real estate listings, homes for sale, recently sold homes, and homes for rent.

For example, with the mobile app, you can snap a photo of any home, and the software will provide you with all the information you need to know about that property listing.

Another type of search you can carry out is by location.

You just enter your location and find all of the properties for sale in the target area.

Additionally, you can search by school district, price range, or the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

On the other side of the platform, it can also work from the offering side, meaning for real estate professionals such as agents.

The application can help them stay connected with their clients, see homes for sale in their area, and access information about homes recently sold.

Agents can also search by price, square footage, and other criteria and share property listings with their clients.

Potential clients can view homes shared by their agents and add those properties to their Homesnap accounts.

The latter helps keep track of houses they are interested in.

Should you use Homesnap Pro, there are additional features in the context of marketing and more property data available.

The software company was founded in 2010 by Guy Wolcott, John Mazur, and Steve Barnes, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. The basic version is free to use and available in the U.S.

The company has a team of 30 and has raised $32 million in funding from investors such as Moderne Ventures, Constance Freedman, Revolution, and Robert Stewart. (source)

What Is Homesnap Used For? – Features

This section will dive a bit deeper into Homesnap’s features.

The software can be accessed via desktop and mobile devices (iOS and Android), as I have already suggested.

It is useful for real estate professionals to access property market data and use marketing features.

But also, for consumers or buyers, it helps them learn more about homes in their neighborhoods.

With the app, you can take a picture of a home, and provided the property is part of the database, Homesnap will provide you with details such as an address, square footage, asking price, and additional data.

Furthermore, you can also find out how homes in your area have been selling recently.

To give you a better overview, I prepared a table with features of the basic, pro, and pro+ versions of Homesnap.

How Does Homesnap Make Money?

While most of the important features for users needing to access the different property market data via the search are free, you may wonder how Homesnap makes money.

The answer is simple: the company charges a subscription fee to real estate professionals who want to use the pro version with more features.

I already mentioned the additional features available to pro users in the table.

As a real estate professional, you get access to comparative market analysis reports that can be generated in less than a minute and shared with potential clients in PDF format.

There are also additional features for lead generation and conversion purposes.

But I will cover more about Homesnap lead generation in the next section.

Homesnap Lead Generation and Marketing – Does Homesnap Provide Leads?

At first glance, you may think that Homesnap is just a property database, but it also includes a built-in lead generation system for real estate pros.

So yes, Homesnap provides leads in terms of lead generation.

When potential buyers use Homesnap to search for properties, they’re given the option to request more information or set up a showing.

A request like that is then directly sent to the listing agent, and a lead is generated.

Let’s look at what other types of lead conversion, generation, and marketing solutions Homesnap offers.

Since it is not very well categorized and organized on their website, I had to filter the lead generation and conversion features for you.

So here they are:

1) Google Business Profile Optimization

Homesnap helps you solicit reviews from current and past customers for your business profile with Google and notifies you when you get a new one.

The software also helps you claim a business profile and load it with your contact information, property listings, and photos.

This also includes performance reports.

2) Content Marketing (a little bit)

All the new listings and recent sales you have as a real estate agent, Homesnap turns into posts published on their platform.

Additionally, they can also publish market commentary on your behalf.

Since most of the time, this is short-form content, don’t necessarily expect that this will get you massive amounts of organic traffic per month from Google.

But it will help when a potential client googles your name and finds some of the small posts Homesnap publishes for you.

3) Homesnap Pro Ads

Homesnap’s Pro Ads will be accessible to you if you are on the pro plan, and it is an online ad campaign management service.

For that purpose, the company uses ad platforms such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Instagram Ads, and Waze Ads.

Besides leads generated via the home search, the ads service I consider the second-largest lead generation method they use.

There is not much technical stuff you need to understand to start a campaign.

You just create ads (ad creatives) automatically created for you based on recent deals from you, set the monthly ad budget, and make the order.

On the downside, you won’t have much control over the campaign on the platforms. So, you will need to rely on the Homesnap team’s digital advertising skills.

While Homesnap discusses the different PPC and social media ad channels they use here, I wasn’t lucky to learn about the performance and results of their ads.

It would be interesting to know how many leads per month they can generate for you for X amount of budget in each of the ad channels they use.

If I had that information, I could have compared that with recent key marketing performance indicators about these channels for the real estate industry and determine if they perform above or below average.

If someone from Homesnap is reading this, don’t hesitate to contact me if you can share some of that information so I can update this article.

4) Messaging

This feature fits more in the conversion category, not lead generation, since Homesnap’s messaging feature helps clients and agents talk about homes.

Additionally, you can keep track of the homes you’ve discussed with potential buyers in one place.

5) Prospect & Client Collaboration

This feature resembles a bit features of a CRM because you can manage clients with it and invite them in the Homesnap app.

Additionally, it is also visible how you are linked to other realtors via the transaction history.

Homesnap Pricing

Homesnap’s mobile app is entirely free.

But once you want to use it as a real estate professional, the Pro and Pro+ version with additional features would require you to commit to a monthly or yearly plan.

Finding Homesnap Pro and Pro+ pricing information on the company website is not that straightforward, but still, it’s not impossible.

Well, at least it’s not impossible for pricing information about Pro+.

Regarding Homesnap Pro, no pricing information is disclosed.

What I found a bit inconsistent is that, in turn, about Pro+, there is pricing information available here.

You can choose between a yearly or monthly plan. If you select an annual plan, Homesnap Pro+ costs $399 for the first year (discounted) and then $599.

The monthly plan costs $49.99.

Homesnap Training

Homesnap also offers training for real estate agents.

It aims to help agents use the platform, including online and offline components.

There are four training phases: sign-up, profile creation, listing, and contact management.

As a participant in the training, you can also ask questions and get expert advice from Homesnap’s team of trainers.

If agents participate in the program until the end, they can create and manage their listings and connect with potential clients.

Here, you can learn more about the different pieces of training.

The place where you can find them is called “University,” and it features tutorials, recorded webinars, and printables.

Is Homesnap Free for Agents, or Does It Charge a Fee?

The web application is free if you don’t want to use Homesnap’s Pro and Pro+ features that lean more towards lead generation, conversion, and extended market data features.

The free version already gives agents access to several helpful tools to stay connected with clients and leads.

You can also syndicate property listings to third-party sites like Zillow, Realtor.com, and Trulia as an agent.

It also doesn’t charge a fee for listing or buying a home.

So, you can list a property for free without having to pay a commission or fees to Homesnap. Home valuations and listing alerts are also free.

Is Homesnap Part of the MLS?

Since you have nationwide access to property listings on Homesnap, the software likely pulls data from different MLSs.

But in itself, it is not part of the MLS.

But to access these listings, you will need an account with the MLS.

So, it is not an MLS but offers a searchable database of MLS listings.

This suggests they have partnered with different MLSs to access their databases through various application programming interfaces (APIs).

This theory can be confirmed by the interviews they already featured in their blog feed with CEOs of various MLSs.

Homesnap Concierge and Its Costs

When explaining what Homesnap Concierge is, think of the marketing features I discussed above but a bit on “steroids.”

It is an advertising service with an allegedly tested and perfected campaign strategy to generate pre-qualified home buyer, and seller leads for real estate agents.

This advertising service is much more customized, so Homesnap’s design and engineering experts plan, develop and execute your advertising campaigns using powerful machine learning algorithms to target potential buyers and sellers.

The advertising channels used are mainly Facebook and Google.

The generated leads will be followed-up via text, email, and phone. This means the service will pre-qualify them for you.

Not much about concrete cost is revealed regarding “Homesnap Concierge.”

The only information my research showed is that according to one of their blog articles, it should be “a fraction of the monthly price” without a long-term contract compared to Zillow’s Premier Agent (source).

Since, according to Homesnap, Zillow’s Premier Agent “runs in at an average cost of $1,200 a month,” we can assume that the costs for Homesnap Concierge should be at least below this monthly amount.

Homesnap vs. Homesnap Pro – The Differences

You might have already learned about the differences between Homesnap and Homesnap Pro in the above table.

Generally, the main differences are that Homesnap offers features focusing more on the property search side of things.

For example, it provides different search filters (e.g., search by street, commute time, etc.), or you can use the mobile app to take photos of a home you see on the street to find out about additional property details.

The Homesnap Pro features focus more on marketing, lead generation, selling, and additional services and data for real estate professionals (e.g., confidential MLS data, off-market home search, done-for-you online advertising via Google, Facebook, etc., Instagram, and Waze Ads, etc.)

Homesnap vs. Zillow

Zillow gets much more exposure in terms of monthly traffic than Homesnap.
According to the latest data, Homesnap got 4.5 million page views (source), and Zillow had 302.6 million page views (source).

So, lead generation via people looking for properties, as both platforms do, will get you more exposure on Zillow.

You can find another difference when it comes to other lead generation methods, such as the services Homesnap is offering.

While Homesnap also offers online ad campaigns done for you via Facebook, Waze, Google Ads, and Instagram Ads, Zillow only offers advertising property listings on their platform via Zillow Premier Agent.

Homesnap vs. Redfin

While Redfin gets far less exposure regarding monthly traffic than Zillow, with 90.5 million page views (source), this is still a multiple compared to the 4.5 million page views Homesnap gets (source).

Regarding marketing and real estate lead generation, they are much more similar to Homesnap than Zillow to Homesnap.

But they only offer digital marketing done for you on Facebook and Google. My research didn’t reveal that they added additional channels, such as Waze Ads.

Another difference is the possibility of agents offering house tours via video chat.

And finally, Redfin acts more like an online brokerage than a property database.

So, they have a slightly different business model than Homesnap.

Homesnap vs. Showingtime

Finding the differences between Homesnap and Showingtime is much easier than the earlier software products.

Showingtime is similar to the one pro feature Homesnap offers, “showing management.”

In contrast to Homesnap, Showingtime is solely focused on helping agents schedule and manage showings.

But it also provides you with some additional features in the areas of offer management and property market data.

But overall, the quantity of features is much less, and the features target different operational real estate processes closer to showings and closings.

Homesnap vs. Homespotter

Homespotter I already analyzed in this article, and in terms of real estate advertising campaign services and management, it comes closest to being a direct competitor to Homesnap.

Why?

Because they work with more marketing channels where your real estate ads would be placed.

In Addition to Instagram and Facebook, ads are also placed on Nextdoor, The New York Times, CNN, HGTV, Realtor.com, and the Weather Channel.

This service is called “Boost” and costs $59 per month per listing ad and $99 monthly for the agent promotion.

But what Homespotter doesn’t have is a whole property database where buyers can search for properties. It also receives fewer page views per month (523,000) (source) than Homesnap, with 4.5 million (source).

You can learn more about Homespotter here.

How Accurate Is Homesnap?

Much of the property data Homesnap gathers comes from multiple listing services and/or public records.

So, they rely on this data to be up-to-date or accurate, which does not necessarily have to be that way.

This means that when the information hasn’t been updated in the MLS or public records, it hurts the accuracy of the data Homesnap is displaying to its users.

Let’s say a property has recently been sold but, for some reason, wasn’t updated in the public records. In that case, the sales price wouldn’t be displayed accurately.

In another example, a real estate agent may have made a mistake when entering data into the MLS.

If this happens, the data displayed via Homesnap won’t be accurate.

Moreover, information about the living area of a house, such as square footage, is not always available.

The same is true when information about a recent renovation wasn’t entered into the MLS.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t come by hard data and metrics about error rates available for Zillow, or Redfin included in this article from the Washington Post.

The only information I could gather was some users complaining about outdated data (see sources in the next section), which may not be representative.

Is Homesnap Good for Realtors? 6 Reviews

Due to the lack of marketing performance data regarding lead generation and data accuracy, it is difficult to determine whether Homesnap suits realtors.

I also looked into different user reviews, and they are, let’s call it, so-so and inconclusive.

You will find an overview of three selected positive and negative reviews in the table below.

(Source 1, Source 2)

Across user review platforms such as Trustradius and G2, the application gets 3 out of 5 stars.

And dissecting all the various opinions, you can conclude that what many find positive is the home searching functionality and the Google business-enhancement feature.

But in general, the positive opinions come from a greater variety of areas of the app.

On the other hand, the negative ones are more consistent and come mostly from three areas: too high prices, poor customer service, and difficulties getting out of a subscription plan.

I also found a somewhat worrisome customer review on Better Business Bureau, where several users complained again about bad customer service and also about low-quality leads for a high price.

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

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Tobias Schnellbacher

Tobias is an internet entrepreneur with a passion for digital marketing and copywriting, particularly in the real estate sector. He also likes cats and fitness. For nine years, he operated an international online referral real estate agency serving U.S., Canadian, and German sellers and buyers, which resulted in multiple seven-figure property sales.Learn more

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