So, you would like to find out how much BoomTown is per month.
And you probably have already taken a look at their website and didn’t find any prices disclosed.
Believe me; this also happened to me.
And since BoomTown gets some attention in the context of real estate marketing software and how many real estate pros may or may not benefit from it, it’s valid to ask what it would cost per month.
After some significant research effort, I found out the monthly costs:
- Setup Fee (one-time): $1500
- Software License Fee: $1,500
- Buyer Lead Generation Fee: $1,000
- 15% Ad Spend Management Fee: $150
- Total Monthly Costs: $2,650
But I did more than that.
I also reviewed the main features, checked how good their IDX property websites are, and made a calculated estimation regarding their lead generation service and when it makes sense to use the latter.
So, if you would like to learn about that, please keep reading.
Don’t Know What BoomTown Is?
Me neither. No, I am just messing with you.
But even using the company’s website to find that out is not that straightforward.
After closing the “soft popup” that wants to find out more about your business, when clicking on the “products” page, you will get a first glimpse of the different packages’ features.
There and on the main page, you will find out that it’s another one-stop-shop real estate marketing software.
It provides lead generation, marketing automation, IDX websites, a CRM, metrics, analytics, and an in-house digital marketing agency.
Because of its not too economical prices, it is mainly tailored to medium to larger-sized real estate brokers and agents.
An Overview of the Features
Again, once you have clicked away the soft pop-up on the products page, you will find out more about the features BoomTown offers depending on the tiered pricing model you would choose.
In theory, they offer you to see a demo, but when you click there, you will first need to give away your detailed contact information.
I expected some videos to give you a walk-through or actually to see a demo, but that’s not what will happen.
Below you will find an overview of the features depending on the pricing model you choose that is undisclosed on their website.
In my experience, a high price tag is expected when something is undisclosed in terms of pricing.
This suspicion came true, as you will find out later in this article.
Not digressing any further, here comes the overview of the features:
| Launch | Grow | Core | Advance |
|---|---|---|---|
| For 2 Users | For 5 Users | For 25 Users | For 25 Users |
| IDX Website + Agent Subdomains | Everything from the Launch Plan | Everything from the Grow Plan | Everything from the Core Plan |
| Mobile App | Transaction Tracking with CRM | Further Integrations | Multiple Website Connections for Team Members |
| Willow Website Theme | Tagging and Segmenting | Several Website Themes | |
| Real Time Market Updates | Hub with Real Time Market Updates | Sharing Library | |
| Automated Lead Follow Up | Lead Distribution to Agents | Lead Matching | |
| Bulk Email and Text Messages | Google Calendar Integration | ||
| Dynamic Retargeting | |||
| Listing Promotion | |||
| 24/7 Lead Response Service | |||
| Zapier Integration | |||
| Seller Lead Capturing (Home Valuations) | |||
| Lead Routing |
Regarding third-party integrations, should you choose the Core plan, the below additional applications can be integrated besides the standard Zapier integration and the additional Google Calendar integration available in the Grow plan.
- SiSu (growth automation software)
- BombBomb (video emails)
- BrokerMint (transaction management)
- CallAction (follow-up and nurturing automation)
- DotLoop (transaction management)
- Mojo (call prospecting)
- RPR (market data)
- Apination (integration automation)
- Spacio (open house management)
- Google Sheets
- Microsoft Excel
- Google Forms
- Wufoo (online form builder)
- Google contacts
- Office 365
- Gravity (cloud-based accounting software)
- Constant Contact (email marketing)
- Mailchimp (email marketing)
- Real Synch (real estate workflow automation bots)
- Vulcan7 (seller leads provider)
BoomTown’s Four Key Features
To give you a short overview, I took a closer look at some of the critical features offered by BoomTown from a real estate marketing performance perspective.
The key features I identified were the IDX websites, the lead generation service, the real estate CRM, and lead matching.
1) IDX Websites
BoomTown provides you with an IDX integration, so visitors can search for particular properties that come from the MLS you are using and apply different search filters.
Favorite properties can be saved as saved searches.
From the search results page, the potential buyer can communicate with the respective agent by asking a question, sending a message, and/or scheduling a showing.
BoomTown’s website also offers the standard home valuation tool as a lead magnet, and the address information is saved to help capture seller leads.
If you are a broker, you can also create several subdomains for your agents depending on your chosen pricing plan.
2) Lead Generation Through PPC Advertising
I took an even closer look at the lead generation feature, although the IDX websites already aim to generate buyer and seller leads.
But what I mean here is the lead generation through PPC advertising.
As you surely know, without website traffic, there is nothing to be converted into leads, and without a good converting website, no amount of traffic will move the needle in generating leads.
In the features list of BoomTown, lead generation is not mentioned explicitly.
You can find it under “Listing promotion” in all pricing plans and “Dynamic Retargeting.”
Leads are generated through paid traffic from Google Search and Facebook Ad campaigns, and the company claims to have an 80% higher click-through rate than you can usually expect in the real estate industry.
The latter is due to their experience in real estate advertising.
Since pricing is not officially disclosed, it is not clear at first if this feature, which is actually a service, is included in a fixed monthly price or if you have to add a marketing budget on top of the prices for the software usage.
Leads generated will be automatically imported into the CRM, which I will cover in the next section.
A higher click-through rate for PPC advertising is generally a good thing because it will reduce the costs per click for the length of the campaign.
But I would have liked to know the cost per click they can achieve and the conversion rates.
Why?
With these numbers, we could calculate the costs per acquisition, factoring in the monthly costs for BoomTown, and then compare it to other solutions and approaches.
3) BoomTown’s CRM and Lead Matching
BoomTown’s CRM covers all the basics you would expect from customer relationship software but includes some edgy functionality.
Besides the usual lead activity tracking, you can do with it you can also get predictive insights for opportunities and where you could engage in a conversation.
You can also automate the lead distribution and track hot listings.
The feature that stood out most to me was the one that can match suitable listings with the most interested and fitting potential buyers.
Another feature that is basically standard nowadays for CRMs is a lead nurturing feature, which allows you to send automated messages and emails to your list of leads or segmented list of leads.
It also integrates with previously mentioned third-party software such as BombBomb and Mojo Dialer.
Of course, the CRM is also accessible by a mobile app version called “NOW mobile app.”
Let’s Do an IDX Website Search Engine Check
I get slightly suspicious whenever I hear that a real estate marketing software suite offers website builders that promise to integrate IDX.
As I already mentioned in several other articles, such as this one, this one, and this one, it’s one thing to integrate IDX data into a website without breaking the layout.
Still, it’s a different ball game to integrate this data without affecting your ability to get indexed by Google, stay mobile-friendly, and thus get ranked with your property listing pages.
So, I checked several real estate websites made with BoomTown to see if they are search engine friendly and if IDX property pages get ranked.
I checked the side speed, how they got displayed on a mobile device, and if the IDX property pages could be found on Google.
Why did I also check the site speed?
Because it is also a ranking factor for the Google search engine (source).
1) The website of the Jim Allen Group
In terms of site speed, this website, unfortunately, got quite poor results.
Only a score of 5 out of 100 on mobile and 30 out of 100 on desktop devices.
This in itself can hurt search engine friendliness and rankability.
The results were good regarding the display on mobile devices, and I couldn’t find any issues.
As a random sample, I now checked how one IDX-powered property listing page was indexed on Google. I used this listing page.
Unfortunately, this one wasn’t indexed at all.
2) The Duncan Duo Team
With this website, the results regarding website speed were almost identical to the example before.
The site speed on mobile devices got a score of 5 out of 100, and on desktop devices, a score of 28 out of 100.
As expected, since all websites use the same system, the display on my mobile device was also good.
I again checked if a particular property listing page was indexed on Google, and again it wasn’t.
3) Fivedoors Network
I didn’t want this to be a pattern, so I checked the next website.
And what were the results for site speed?
Slightly better, with a score of 18 for mobile devices and 64 for desktop devices (the first in the orange color range).
Now, what about the ranking of a single property listing page?
Unfortunately, again no ranking.
So, in conclusion, it is safe to assume that the side speed performance leans toward underperforming.
This is not good for search rankings, and when it comes to the ranking of single property listing pages pulled from the MLS via IDX, they are not ranking at all.
This is also not good if you are interested in local search traffic.
A Questionable Traffic Conversion Tactic for Buyer Leads
While checking if Google indexed the single property listing pages, I found something else I would consider questionable.
When you come on a property listing page as a buyer and then want to browse a little bit further and see more than one property, you will be forced to register via Facebook or email to keep looking.
Usually, when I come across websites like this, I rather leave and look for alternatives that don’t require that to just using the website.
And should I be desperately looking for a property to buy, I would just leave my spam email address.
While this may increase the conversion rate and generate leads, it is quite likely that the quality of leads that are generated that way won’t be that good.
You can be the best closer in town, but if the incoming leads are often crappy, you won’t close too many of them, regardless of how good you are.
But this popup is maybe a feature you can deactivate (I hope so).
BoomTown Pricing
Since on BoomTown’s website, no pricing of the different plans is disclosed, I tried to make a general inquiry.
I went to the main page and looked for a contact option, and I could only find the contact navigation menu item in the website’s footer after some scrolling.
You won’t find it at the top of the page.
There, it got a bit complicated again.
Once I clicked on “contact,” I couldn’t find any option to make a general inquiry.
You can only contact support and billing if you are already a user and want a job at BoomTown.
Now, I thought, let’s try to see if I can get access to a demo. So, I clicked on “See Demo.”
After that, you don’t get to see a software demo, but you have to enter your contact information and won’t know what will happen afterward.
So, I did that, expecting to likely be “nuked” with sales messages afterward.
But maybe after entering the information, I will get a chance to “see the demo.” That was at least my thinking.
No demo could be seen.
I just got an email from a sales representative that wanted to schedule a call.
I then explained that I was writing an article about the software and would like to know the pricing, but I have yet to hear back.
I understand if you don’t want to reveal your lead generation “secret sauce,” but why hide the pricing?
Maybe there is a pricing war with a competitor I don’t know about yet, and disclosing it would be counter-productive. I am just speculating.
Another reason could be higher price tags. It is pretty common practice not to disclose pricing in the four figures.
Then, I researched a bit further to see if I could find someone that had found out more about the pricing on the web in the past, maybe at a time when this information had not been that “top secret” just yet.
I found an almost six-year-old video from 2017 that disclosed the pricing structure.
Take the information with a grain of salt since this might have changed by now for good or for bad.
The one-time setup fee is stated to be $1,500.
Then comes the monthly licensing fee of $1,500 for 1-25 active users.
For each additional user, you will pay an additional $35 per month.
As already suspected earlier in my article, the online advertising service for lead generation is not included in the licensing fee.
You will have to pay another $1,000 per month, including 3-5 agents, $1,500 per month for 5-10 agents, or $2,000 per month for 10 to 30 agents.
Oh, and then an additional 15% Ad spend management fee comes on top.
Why is this not already included in the monthly advertising service costs? I don’t know.
The seller lead generation service is not included in this pricing, another additional cost of $250 per month.
Estimating BoomTown’s Marketing Performance for Lead Generation
Now, let’s crunch some numbers.
From the assumed cost structure above, you may already see this might be overkill for a very small broker or a single agent.
Let’s make an example of a single agent using BoomTown for a year.
I will include the setup fee in the monthly costs by dividing it by 12. I won’t include the seller lead generation fee, so we can better estimate the lead acquisition costs and compare it with other solutions.
Estimated Monthly costs for a Single Agent
- Setup Fee: $125
- Software License Fee: $1,500
- Buyer Lead Generation Fee: $1,000
- 15% Ad Spend Management Fee: $150
- Total Monthly Costs: $2,775
Since you won’t be able to use the buyer lead generation service without also using the software platform, we will need to factor in all the costs into estimating the lead acquisition costs or, in short, the CPA.
Yes, you can use the software without the lead generation service, but that would not be relevant for this section.
So, from the above, the advertising budget used to generate leads is $1,150 ($1000 + 15%).
We also know that leads are generated through paid traffic from Google Search and Facebook Ad campaigns, with an allegedly 80% higher click-through rate than what you usually get in the real estate industry.
The average cost per click for Facebook ads and Google Search ads in the real estate industry is $1.81 (source) and $2.37 (source), respectively.
And the average click-through rate for Facebook Ads is 0.98%, and for Google Search Ads, 1.08%.
Let’s assume that BoomTown indeed manages to get an 80% higher click-through rate which translates into a reduction of costs per click.
For example, for Google Ads, this would mean you likely get a good Quality Score of 10, which results in a 30% discount on costs per click (source).
The same may likely be true for Facebook Ads.
Let’s apply this reduction to both Facebook Ads and Google Search Ads costs per click for the real estate industry when you use BoomTown.
This would mean reduced costs per click on Facebook of $1.27 and for Google Search ads of $1.66.
Now, we need to find out how many clicks/traffic can be bought with the reserved budget of $1,150, assuming the budget is distributed evenly between both ad platforms ($575 for Facebook Ads and $575 for Google Search Ads).
The Facebook Ads campaign would buy you roughly 453 clicks, and the Google Search campaign, 346.
The next step to estimate the costs per acquisition using BoomTown is to know the average traffic to lead conversion rate for both platforms.
You can expect a lead conversion rate of 10.68% on Facebook and via Google Search Ads at 3.4%.
Using these numbers, you would generate 48 leads (453 x 10.68%) with Facebook and 12 leads (346 x 3.4%) with Google Search ads.
This would be a total of 60 leads.
If your costs for BoomTown would just be $1150 for the lead generation service, we could just divide $1150 by 60 leads and would have the incorrect average costs per acquisition of $19.16.
But since you don’t get the lead generation service without using the software, we need to divide the total monthly cost of $2,775 by 60, an average of $46.25 per lead.
In my article about real estate prospecting conversion rates, I overviewed the different traffic-to-lead conversion rates and costs per acquisition of different marketing channels.
When we compare the $46.25 per lead with the CPA of Google Search Ads, you still save money with BoomTown.
The average CPA for Google Search Ads in the real estate industry is $69.70.
But this is not the case with Facebook Ads, where the average cost per acquisition is $16.29.
So, should you have a say in how your marketing budget is distributed across Facebook Ads and Google Search ads, I would have BoomTown focus on Google Search Ads.
Looking just at the hard cold marketing numbers, you would greatly benefit from Boom Town’s lead generation service with Google Search Ads.
But only provided they get an 80% higher click-through rate than on average and thus a discount on costs per click due to higher quality scores they may achieve.
Otherwise, the high monthly costs wouldn’t be justified, and you may want to do your lead generation independently. This ignores the time cost and the learning curve you may have when you run campaigns yourself.
This is already the case for Facebook Ads, even with a discount on costs per click you likely get with BoomTown.
BoomTown Alternatives
In terms of alternatives, you could go down two ways.
The first is just finding other software solutions that are also real estate marketing suites where you have everything in one place and depend more on the company for many different real estate business processes.
The advantage of this type of software is that it’s more convenient, and you don’t have much setup work.
The second one is to build your real estate marketing “suite.”
Don’t worry; I don’t mean developing it from scratch, but puzzle components together.
In a way, even BoomTown, a real estate marketing suite with different software components working together, is doing this by integrating third-party software.
Regarding risk mitigation and flexibility, I like the second option better since you can more easily substitute one component with another should one of them not perform as you expected at first.
The flexibility also often allows you to reduce costs and better juggle around with your budget.
The disadvantage is that you will have a bit more upfront work to do to set it up and find the right software components.
How to do that will be part of a future longer article or even a little course or info product I may produce.
That’s why, for now, I will provide you below with direct alternatives that offer similar features as BoomTown does.
16 BoomTown Alternatives
- kvCore from InsideRealEstate
- Brivity, and a review of it here
- Ixact Contact
- BoldLeads
- marketleader
- firepoint
- Contactually
- FollowUp Boss
- Placester
- TopProducer
- Liondesk
- RealGeeks
- Chime, and a review from me here
- Wiseagent
- zbuyer
- Zurple
Pros & Cons
I really wanted to find more pros than cons for BoomTown, and while I could, of course, also find pros, the cons, unfortunately, outweighed them a bit.
4 Pros
- IDX websites
- A lead matching feature is included in the CRM.
- A convenient lead generation service
- Allegedly an 80% higher click-through rate for PPC advertising campaigns than the industry average leading to a discount in costs per click.
7 Cons
- Pricing is not disclosed on the company’s website.
- Not easy to chat with a human being by text to ask general questions (e.g., for the pricing).
- No option to contact by email for general inquiries, only support and billing when you are already a user or if you want a job at BoomTown.
- Confusing naming of features, some have different names but mean the same.
- Several IDX property pages are not indexed by Google, so local search rankings maybe are difficult to achieve.
- The Side speed performance of IDX property pages leans towards underperforming, especially on mobile devices.
- A questionable traffic conversion tactic for buyer leads.
The Bottom Line
I wouldn’t buy BoomTown if you only wanted to use the CRM and the IDX property pages and wanted to bet on being found locally and organically on search engines.
But the added value comes in regarding the lead generation service in the context of Google Search Ads.
The likely reduced costs per click you can get via BoomTown, due to the allegedly 80% higher click-through rates they achieve, will be able to reduce your costs per acquisition for Google Search Ads.
But this is only true if you can focus the required budget on Google Search Ads, which often generate better quality leads than Facebook Ads.
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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