Some think there aren’t any free real estate marketing tools out there anymore.
That’s not entirely true.
While there are fewer genuinely free tools every day, there are still some with surprisingly helpful features you can get for free.
In this article, you will learn what I consider a free real estate marketing tool and learn about 27 tools that can assist you in the whole real estate sales cycle.
Sounds good? Then please keep reading.
What Can Be Considered A Free Real Estate Marketing Tool?
Before we get into the different options, I would like to establish what I mean by a “free” real estate marketing tool.
So, by “free,” I mean that you won’t have upfront or monthly costs involved whether you sell or don’t sell properties.
Overall, it means you don’t take any upfront risks using a real estate marketing tool.
In contrast, some tools may take a cut based on your performance.
So, you only pay the provider when you sell; otherwise, the tool is free to use.
I know this is not completely free in a strict sense, but my emphasis during my research for this article was to focus on and select only such tools where you do not take any upfront risk in using the tool.
However, remember that you often pay with your time when you get something for free.
So, something completely free actually doesn’t exist.
But I will stop here because if I follow this line of thought, we will go down a deep philosophical and economic rabbit hole.
44 Free Tools According to the Real Estate Marketing Category
You may know I’ve already written an article about real estate marketing tools, but not with a focus on free tools.
To be a bit consistent with the former article, I will use the same real estate marketing categories as a basis, which at that time, I aligned with the typical sales cycle of a real estate agent.
However, since AI is increasingly rising and influencing real estate marketing, I also considered free AI tools for the categories below where available.
So, the relevant real estate marketing categories for tools are:
- Website development, management & optimization, design, branding
- Digital marketing analytics
- Reporting and optimization
- Direct real estate lead generation
- Content marketing & social media management
- Communication (sales, prospecting), including customer relationship management & follow-ups
- Offline marketing & sales activities
- Property delivery & transaction management
1) Website Development, Management & Optimization
One of the starting points in the real estate marketing journey is having a website.
It is important both for offline marketing and, of course, digital marketing campaigns.
You will get the most out of your real estate website if it’s a one-page digital business card and generates leads for you.
Unless you don’t care whether it gets hacked, you need to manage, administer, and optimize them continually.
This is essential to also get marketing costs down.
A keyword in this context is A/B testing of landing pages – a capacity your website should have.
A second important capacity your real estate website should have is a smooth integration of your MLS via IDX and CRMs.
So, are there any free tools that can provide you with at least some of these requirements?
Well, you won’t find ready-made real estate website providers for free.
To get your real estate website for free, you have two options.
Option one is building it yourself from scratch with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and deploying it on a free hosting platform.
Option two is skipping the programming part and deploying a free-to-use content management system, such as WordPress, on the same free hosting platforms.
Free hosting you can get with Netflify or freehosting.com.
The tricky thing is that Netlify’s free plan only allows you to deploy static websites.
You can use a workaround by converting a website created with WordPress into a static one and then deploying it there (source).
But this makes the whole benefit of using WordPress as a content management system obsolete.
Therefore, I would go with freehosting.com, which allows you to deploy a WordPress site.
Overall, you want to prefer WordPress over a static website since you will have much more flexibility and options to amplify the functionality of your real estate website, including the integration of MLS and CRMs.
You will also have a smoother ride when optimizing landing pages or doing A/B testing.
Doing this with a static website you build from scratch will require quite some coding skills.
You can get a free domain name with freenom.com, but it will be a domain with weird endings like “.TK / .ML / .GA / .CF / .GQ,” which might not be the best option marketing and trust-building wise.
For your website, you will also need graphics and various designs. The same applies to offline marketing materials (e.g., postcards, door hangers, etc.)
And a free tool featuring AI is Canva, but also Midjourney.
Canva is an online platform for graphic design that facilitates the creation of various marketing materials, such as business cards, invitations, flyers, brochures, and YouTube thumbnails, among other things.
Now Canva also offers an AI image generator. You enter the text about what you need, and the AI generates it.
Other free Canva alternatives you may want to consider are:
Canva’s text-to-image generator leads me to Midjourney, the second free AI text-to-image tool I would like to mention.
Depending on your prompt skills, you can generate pretty amazing images and graphics with it or enhance existing images.
Free alternatives to Midjourney are:
And finally, there are free AI-powered logo designer tools (but please try to avoid using house symbols in your logo), such as logoai and logo.com.
2) Digital Marketing Analytics, Reporting, and Optimization
All types of digital marketing, be it content marketing or pay-per-click campaigns, need constant monitoring and optimization.
Why?
You need to see what works on your website regarding lead generation and whatnot and then focus and improve on what works.
For example, analytics tools will enable you to better monitor A/B split testing campaigns with a particular landing page you use to generate leads.
In this article, I dig deeper into how you can use Google Analytics for Real Estate
And in this context, the true free tool you can use is Google Analytics.
It’s one of the most well-known tools for digital marketing analytics.
This tool will always be free when you are a solo agent or a small to medium-sized real estate brokerage.
It provides the following features:
- Comparison tools
- Real-time reporting
- Data-driven acknowledgment model
- Advanced segments
- Cross-Platform and Cross-Device measurement
You can learn more about it here.
3) Direct Real Estate Lead Generation
Most of the time, you don’t find tools in this category but instead services that generate and/or sell real estate leads.
In this category, you also find tools that provide you with allegedly better converting, easier-to-build, or ready-made landing pages.
In the offline world, these would be tools that make your life easier when generating leads, for example, during open houses or individual showings.
Finding free tools or services in this category is much trickier.
For instance, you don’t pay upfront or monthly to the providers that offer free leads, but you will need to share a part of your commission.
They are a bit like a broker providing leads but take a cut from you.
You will also need a good track record most of the time to qualify to work with them.
I covered several providers already in this article.
I will shortly mention them below:
Concerning open houses or individual showings to manage the leads you generate, a free CRM provider you could use here is Podio, which I already covered in this article.
4) Content Marketing & Social Media Management
Most of what you use for your social media marketing is informed by what you do as content marketing as a whole.
Why?
Because you can recycle and repurpose content, you already create for your real estate content marketing.
Various helpful tools and services can help you learn what’s going on across your different social media marketing channels, saving you a lot of time.
Some of the features such tools offer are analytics or post-scheduling.
There are not many free tools anymore, but I could find three: Later, TweetDeck, and Buffer.
And now, you can also get assistance from AI to create your content, such as ChatGPT, which you can use for free in the more basic version.
I emphasize the term “assistance” since you will not end up in a high-quality place content-wise when you have AI generate content without much of a strategy, deeper and creative thinking, digging deeper, fact-checking, and editing afterward.
It will even sound convincing to the untrained eye.
However, I consider the tools like ChatGPT in many cases like a bloated Google search autocomplete.
5) Communication (Sales): Customer Relationship Management & Follow-Ups
Ideally, you don’t want to stop at just generating leads.
After you generate some, you also want to follow up with them and nurture them to turn them into paying real estate clients.
Many customer relationship tools for real estate and other industries come with lead nurturing functionality.
And if they don’t have a native lead nurturing system, they can at least integrate different types of email marketing software.
The tools I want to mention in customer relationship management and follow-ups or lead nurturing are
Podio (as a CRM) and Mailerlite (email marketing).
Both are free and offer a lot for being free. I have used them in the past myself, and I am happy with them to this day.
The best part is you can even integrate Mailerlite with Podio via the software bridging tool Zapier.
I covered how you can use Podio for real estate in this article.
However, I also found several other free CRMs for real estate and email marketing software, which you also may want to consider.
So regarding free CRMs, you may want to check out the following ones:
And regarding free email marketing software, you may also look into the following beside the earlier mentioned Mailerlite:
6) Offline Marketing & Sales Activities
When you come to the point of being able to use tools for offline marketing & sales activities, you are often already closer to having a paying real estate client.
These marketing activities can be pre-visits, home inspections, and showings.
When navigating to a property you want to pre-visit or for a showing, you can use two free tools: Google Maps and Waze.
If you need free tools to live stream a property you are visiting, there is Facebook Live and Instagram Live Stories.
And when it comes to open houses, as already mentioned, no free tools are directly tailored for this use case.
But you could tailor Podio in a way that can help you capture leads from open houses.
Another workaround could be to use voice memos from your smartphone and/ or take pictures of presentation cards you get with your smartphone or use the free version of Evernote.
The latter can help you in many different use cases offline and online. But the free version has its limits.
7) Property Delivery & Transaction Management
Now, we arrived at the part of the real estate sales cycle where you, as a realtor, actually get paid.
It’s when the property you sell is transferred from the seller to the buyer.
By nature, the tools in this context need to support a bit more of a transactional context.
When it comes to transaction management services, they usually take a cut off the deal, so, in a sense, they are free regarding upfront costs. But that’s a bit of window dressing.
There are Scrabtitle, Priority Title & Escrow, and Pavaso, to mention a few.
Then, there are the tools that can help you sign documents digitally. While many are not free, some are at least in a basic version.
I will close with a short overview of all 27 free real estate marketing tools mentioned.
Overview of All 45 Free Real Estate Marketing Tools
| Website Development, Management & Optimization, Design, Branding | Digital Marketing Analytics, Reporting and Optimization | Direct Real Estate Lead Generation | Content Marketing & Social Media Management | Communication (Sales): Customer Relationship Management & Follow Ups | Offline Marketing & Sales Activities | Property Delivery & Transaction Management |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress.org | Google Analytics | Opcity/Realtor.com | Later | Podio | Google Maps | Scrabtitle |
| Netflify | Zillow Flex | TweetDeck | HubSpot | Waze | Priority Title & Escrow | |
| freehosting.com | Homelight | Buffer | Agile CRM | Facebook Live | Pavaso | |
| Canva | AgentHarvest | Chat GPT | Really Simple Systems | Instagram Live Stories | DocHub | |
| Fotoram | Navy Federal Realty Plus | Mailerlite | Evernote | PandaDoc | ||
| vistacreate | Clever | Brevo | ||||
| stencil | Upnest | CleverReach | ||||
| Adobe Express | AgentPronto | |||||
| Blue Willow | AgentFixUp | |||||
| Stable Diffusion | ||||||
| Bing Image Creator | ||||||
| LogoAI | ||||||
| Logo.com |
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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