I wanted to study a bit about what the market had to offer regarding real estate content production services tailored to realtors, and I found Keeping Current Matters.
Why?
Because creating content for real estate can be pretty time-consuming. You can’t use this time to do prospecting calls or advance in transactions.
Sure, different marketing agencies can provide you with unique and exclusive content.
But I wanted to find something more affordable.
So I came across this provider called Keeping Current Matters, and in this article, I will give you a performance-based deep dive into this software-powered service.
You will learn…
…what Keeping Current Matters is
…what it does
…who owns it
…How to use Keeping Current Matters (6 Features)
…about their app
…about their pricing, reviews, and alternatives
…how to cancel it
…and whether it’s worth it
What Is Keeping Current Matters?
Keeping Current Matters is a content curation platform for real estate professionals.
As a realtor, you can search content for different real estate categories and then curate this content for your marketing uses.
You can personalize different formats with your branding, such as infographics, social graphics, PDFs, PowerPoints, and videos.
What Does Keeping Current Matters Do?
Keeping Current Matters regularly produces real estate content tailored to real estate agents.
The content comes in different formats: articles, infographics, reports, and guides downloadable as PDFs and PowerPoints, and videos.
They also provide an email newsletter builder to design newsletters that you can integrate into existing third-party CRM or email marketing software.
The content is also accessible to potential sellers and buyers visiting the Keeping Current Matters’ blog.
Who Owns the Company?
The owners of Keeping Current Matters are Charlotte and Bill Harney.
Initially, the primary purpose of running this company was to provide information to families that considered buying a home to make them confident when deciding (source 1, source 2).
The second purpose, to help agents educate their clients and themselves about the housing market, only came later.
How to Use Keeping Current Matters – 6 Features Explained
All main features of Keeping Current Matters revolve around searching, finding, sharing, customizing, and branding curable real estate content.
The service and software company promises that you can use the curated content to position yourself as a real estate market expert.
Features available are:
- Daily blog posts
- Social graphics
- Email & newsletter builder
- Weekly videos
- Buyer and seller guides
- Market reports & visuals
Let’s dive a bit deeper into these six features.
1) Personalized Blog Posts
This feature promises daily real estate blog posts that you can personalize with your brandings, such as your photo, logo, bio, and contact information on the company’s website.
According to their website, it’s not a daily blog post but four blog posts per week (source).
Once you find it, you can share the one that suits you via email platforms such as Outlook, Gmail, or CRM.
There is also a BombBomb integration within the platform, so you can also create a newsletter including the respective post via this software.
Additionally, you can share those posts on different social media channels via an RSS feed on your website.
Social media automation can be done via another third-party integration of the software dlvr.it.
Keeping Current Matters also offer the option to send the content via direct mail in this context.
But as you can conclude from the video walkthrough below, there appears to be no third-party direct mail integration.
This means you must use just a third-party provider outside the platform.
2) Social Graphics
The social graphics of Keeping Current Matters are produced weekly (once a week), and they can include your logo and brand colors.
The two dimensions used are story sizes and squares, which fit the different social media channels.
They also come with pre-written hashtags and captions, which are pre-selected to increase their visibility.
The content used in the graphics is one of the most relevant real estate topics.
3) Email Newsletter Builder
This feature is not a whole email marketing software but a design tool that allows you to customize different pre-made email templates. It features a drag-and-drop builder and a one-click copy-and-paste tool.
The latter helps you copy and use them in CRM software or email marketing platforms you might be using.
The emails can also be personalized, so you can put on your brand colors, name, photo, and contact information.
4) Videos
Like social graphics, Keeping Current Matters also produces a 45 to 60-second video each week, which you can share on social media channels and embed into your website.
The videos include pre-written descriptions, a summary, and a call to action.
The content used for the videos is usually one of the most relevant topics in real estate. For example, right now (Spring), the current video is about the spring homebuying season.
Like other features, you can personalize the video with your contact information, name, and photo.
5) Buyer and Seller Guides
The buyer and seller guides feature is another done-for-you service.
They produce eight guides annually with relevant topics regarding the current market, season, or client group.
They can also be personalized and are written in English and Spanish. You can download them as PDFs or as PowerPoint files.
They could be used for the following cases:
- Open houses
- Pre-listing packages
- Listing presentations
- Follow-ups
- Sharing on social media
- Handing them out while door-knocking
- Sending them via your email marketing campaigns
- Making them downloadable on your website
The current buyer and seller guides cover “Things to consider when buying a home” and “Things to consider when selling a home.”
6) Market Reports and Visuals
Keeping Current Matters’ market reports and visuals focus more on market data and illustrating them in an appealing way.
They include graphs and insights into what’s currently happening in the housing market.
Only a part of this service feature is tailored to realtor clients. The main part is rather suited for the real estate agent themselves, so they get a good overview of what is going on in the market.
For potential clients, you can download the visuals and share them.
I recommend you watch the video below to get a visual impression and overview of the features.
The only thing I disagree with within this video is his opinion about being able to get ranked with this type of content. I will explain the main reasoning later in this article.
Keeping Current Matters App
I also researched the Keeping Current Matters App, and unfortunately, I couldn’t find any app with that name on Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store.
According to their website about the mobile use of the members’ area from a mobile device, the photos seemed broken at the time of my visit.
There it is explained how you do different things such as saving slides, creating albums, sending via email and SMS, posting to Twitter, and posting to Facebook via different mobile devices.
So, there is no mobile app for Keeping Current Matters, but since their website is mobile-responsive, you can assume that this is also the case with the members’ area.
Keeping Current Matters Pricing
You can choose between three pricing plans: the Basic, the Pro, and the Premium Plan. The Basic Plan costs $29.95, the Pro Plan $49.95, and the Premium plan $89.95 monthly. (source)
Below is the table I prepared for you with features available with the different plans.
| Basic Plan ($29.95/Month) | Pro Plan ($49.95/Month) | Premium ($89.95/Month) |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer & Seller Guides | Buyer & Seller Guides | Everything from the pro plan |
| Daily Blog Posts (4 per week) | Daily Blog Posts (4 per week) | Mobile video recording app |
| Market Reports & Visuals | Market Reports & Visuals | Market update scripts |
| Access to exclusive KCM Mmember Facebook Group | Access to exclusive KCM Mmember Facebook Group | |
| Educational webinars, eGuides, support materials | Educational webinars, eGuides, support materials | |
| Automated & scheduled posting | Social graphics | |
| Email & Newsletter builder | ||
| Videos | ||
| Brand color matching | ||
As you can see in the table, you will only get the features of social graphics, videos, and the email and newsletter builder with the Pro Plan for $49.95 per month.
Keeping Current Matters Free Trial
Keeping Current Matters offers a free trial for 14 days.
When you create your account for this free trial, you must enter your credit card information.
After the 14-day trial period, your credit card will be charged the monthly price of $29.95.
Keeping Current Matters Reviews
No user reviews about Keeping Current Matters could be found that I could consider reliable data to use.
There are anecdotal reviews on YouTube and others from the employee perspective on Glassdoor.
But that’s not too valuable to build a balanced opinion about the company.
There are several reviews on Facebook, though.
But when you look through them, you realize that the people might have been confused because the majority were talking about their experience with a Forex trading service, or they are just spamming the review section of Keeping Current Matters’ Facebook page.
This may be because there is indeed a company with the same abbreviation, “KCM,” in the forex business, but they are called Kohle Capital Markets.
But I doubt that all the people commenting about their Forex experience couldn’t have distinguished the Keeping Current Matters’ logo from the one of Kohle Capital Markets (they are pretty different). So I tend to conclude it’s spammers.
Keeping Current Matters Alternative and Competitors
Theoretically, all marketing agencies that can produce real estate content for you could be alternatives and competitors to Keeping Current Matters.
But this wouldn’t be a fair comparison.
Why?
Because we would be talking about exclusive, individualized content tailored to your specific target group with higher odds of you getting ranked on Google and much higher price tags.
These would be agencies like this and this one.
So after doing some more digging, I came up with two candidates I like a bit better.
It’s Homebot, which I already analyzed in this article, and LiveBy.
1) Homebot
The alternative provider Homebot automatically generates monthly wealth digests, including financial analysis sent out to homeowners.
As a realtor, you can send these reports to your clients, including information on how money can be saved, or further wealth is built with existing home equity.
These reports include how the equity could be used, what refinancing could be done, and the home’s current value.
In contrast to Keeping Current Matters, this software is tailored to the individual situation of a particular homeowner, based on software-powered data analysis, and designed to increase the lead to appointment conversions.
I wrote this article where I analyzed Homebot more in-depth.
2) LiveBy
LiveBy is pretty similar to Keeping Current Matters at first glance.
But at a second look, you could call it a hybrid of Keeping Current Matters and Homebot.
It is also a content curator platform, but in contrast to Keeping Current Matters, it is focused on local housing markets.
It is similar to Homebot because it uses market data analysis to generate different reports, offers, and pages that capture leads.
It produces the following content:
- Agent insights
- Neighborhood overview
- Neighborhood market summary
- Climate risk
- Lifestyle Trends
- Community demographics
- Commute Highlights
- School information
- Things to do
Suppose you are a lover of web development like me.
In that case, you may also find it interesting that they have a custom API (application programming interface) that allows you to use their entire suite of hyperlocal data.
So theoretically, you could, either personally or with the help of a developer, integrate the data that have access to your personal website in a completely different way.
Here, you can learn more about LiveBy.
How to Cancel Keeping Current Matters
Keeping Current Matters gives you a free trial period of 14 days. After that, you get charged monthly but can cancel the subscription anytime.
According to their terms of service in 5.6, your cancellation is effective as of the next billing date of your license.
Also important to note is clause 5.3 in the same terms of service that states that the subscription renews automatically unless you notify Keeping Current Matters of your decision.
Is Keeping Current Matters Worth It? – A Performance-Based View
Keeping Current Matters is worth it if you only want to send your clients generic content on a national level regularly.
That said, if you think you can position yourself as a local expert with content relevant to your local area, it may not be the best fit for you. Why?
Because all the content they create is rather generic real estate content on a national level, as you can also read in their FAQs.
“At this point in time, we provide content and market insights at a national level.
We also focus on topics that apply to everyone across the country (not “here’s how to stage your home,” but rather interest rates or the concept of homeownership as a way to build wealth)…Unfortunately, at $29.95/month, we can’t provide custom information down to a local market.
But what the Members who use our content find is that they learn how to understand market factors so they can better explain their own local markets when speaking with buyers and sellers.” (source)
Another caveat is, and here I beg to differ from the creator of the walkthrough video above. The written content will not help you in your rankings on Google.
Firstly, the content from Keeping Current Matters you can share and embed on your real estate website will not be unique and exclusively created for you.
You can imagine that many other real estate professionals will have access to that and use the same content you can use.
The only uniqueness you can add is by adding your branding, etc.
If you could rank on Google’s first page by just copying and pasting the content on your website, I would be doing this all day long and not investing hours in research and writing, for example, this article.
Heck, I would write a script that would do this for me all day long.
In their FAQs, they confirm this by stating:
“KCM is not designed to increase the SEO on your website. In order to be shown at the very top and benefit from SEO efforts, your content must be unique. We’ve read mixed reports on whether or not Google ‘penalizes’ those with duplicative content, which is what KCM provides.” (source).
But let’s ignore this for a second, and suppose it would be unique and exclusive content for you.
So pretending as it would be, I also checked the articles regarding ranking potential.
I found that basically all articles had a word count of below 1000 words and were written on usually quite generic topics, with major websites competing on the first page.
To beat websites such as rocketmortage.com, quickenloans.com, Investopedia.com, and Bankrate.com for a topic like “equity in your home” covered in this article, you would have to take the content to a whole other level and produce a much more in-depth article.
And if your website is fairly new with low authority, you can basically forget about beating them.
But if Keeping Current Matters would bring this content creation to the next level, they couldn’t offer their services for the pricing they do right now because in-depth longer-form content, unfortunately, has its price.
If you aim for more local content, I suggest going with LiveBy, and if you want to provide more content on an individual level, I recommend going with Homebot.
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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