If you are into door-knocking as a prospecting and marketing method, you might have already come across some challenges that come with it.
Two of the main challenges that come with door-knocking are related to carrying out door-knocking campaigns in the most effective way.
An example of a not-so-efficient door-knocking campaign would be one where either the homeowners are away, or you knock on several properties twice (not knowing which one you knocked on before).
To help you reduce and mitigate those challenges, there are many door-knocking apps on the market you could use.
But what is the best door-knocking app for realtors?
According to my in-depth analysis based on weighted points related to important criteria for good door-knocking apps for realtors, SalesRabbit is the best one, followed by KnockWise.
In this article, you will learn how I came to this conclusion.
I will discuss what door-knocking apps are, the criteria you want to consider when choosing one for yourself, and finally, how the four selected door-knocking apps perform related to these criteria.
Sounds interesting? Then please keep reading.
What Are Door Knocking Apps?
In my article “Does Door Knocking Work in Real Estate,” I analyzed the marketing numbers of door-knocking.
And one of the essential things you do in door-knocking is go from house to house in a particular neighborhood you aim to target and knock on doors.
A door-knocking app is a mobile application that helps you during this process.
Most apps give you directions, show you additional data about the owners you engage with, and track the doors you knock on so you don’t knock on doors twice.
The old-school way of tracking is leaving door hangers on doors that don’t open for you.
But this will still make some manual tracking necessary afterward so you know which seller at which address you could engage with.
So, if it’s good enough, an app will save you time and may even help in the follow-up process afterward.
What Criteria (and Features) to Investigate When It Comes to Door-Knocking Apps for Realtors
I already implied previously some criteria a good or even best app should have.
So, when it comes to analyzing door-knocking apps for realtors, we need to remember several criteria they should have, so they will be a real help and not just add another junk app to your mobile device.
Below you will find a list of criteria and features I will use later on to analyze the door-knocking apps for realtors that I found:
- The performance tracking ability of houses you knocked on (e.g., no duplicate knocks)
- Performance Analysis
- Navigational help and/or walk list creation
- Price
- Ability to automatically follow up afterward (ideally, integration with a CRM)
- Display of additional neighborhood and seller information on-site
- Sales pitch or script support (although I don’t recommend just reading a script while standing outside the door)
- Task management, reminders, and appointment setting
- Team management ability so you can outsource and scale your door-knocking campaigns
- Import function of existing contacts so you can knock on specific houses.
How will I use the above criteria to determine the best door-knocking app for realtors?
I will include the app’s necessary criteria in one of my often-used tools – a weighted decision matrix.
Each criterion will get a predetermined weight by its importance for realtors, from 0 to 10 (0=no importance, 10 = most important).
I determined criteria with high importance that have a strong impact on costs and/or time.
The ones that receive a lower weight were rather nice to haves and had less of an impact on time or costs you may save.
Then, I will go through the relevant apps one by one and award individual points to each criterion.
These individual points are then multiplied by the weight and summed up to get a total score.
The app with the highest score will win and can likely be considered the best door-knocking app for realtors at this point in time.
Analyzing the Criteria of 4 Door Knocking Apps for Realtors
During my research, I found that very few door-knocking apps directly address realtors in their messaging.
Most features of the more generic ones are tailored for the field of sales teams in general or political campaigns but are also beneficial for realtors in terms of functionality.
Some are even better in features than door-knocking apps tailored to realtors.
Others call themselves door-knocking apps but are prospecting apps you can use on the road.
So, let’s see which ones I found and decided are worthwhile.
1) i360 Walk
This app is available in the Apple or Google Play store and is tailored to political campaigns on the ground to survey voters.
It includes features such as:
- real-time directions
- automatic data collection and analysis
- customized surveys with dynamic scripting
- household information
While this app can help with directions or automatic data collection, I doubt it would be easy to repurpose for real estate door-knocking aims.
Many elements in the app are too explicitly tailored toward potential voters.
Nevertheless, I wanted to mention it here because some features can still be helpful for real estate door-knocking.
The pricing starts at $280, but it is not disclosed whether this is a one-time or monthly price (source).
2) KnockWise
KnockWise is one of the few door-knocking apps I found that is tailored to real estate professionals.
You notice quite quickly that the developers dove deeper into the use case of realtors doing door-knocking.
Therefore, I will dive deeper into their different features than I did with the app above.
So, with KnockWise, you can map a real estate farm and get on-demand homeowner and market data.
It enables you to familiarize yourself with each property’s details before starting door-knocking.
Another feature is task management and reports, both available on mobile devices and desktops.
You can also choose a region via geo-mapping data and canvass a shape in the preferred walking area.
The property owner data then automatically loads, and you can check the records in a spreadsheet or on the map.
Another important feature is note and task history tracking, where each property has a task and activity history.
As an agent, you can assign notes for each property.
You can also assign property responses. For example, you can start a timed knocking session when visiting a particular property.
Depending on the results at the door, you can assign an appropriate response to the property.
Here, you can use options such as Do Not Disturb, Vacant, Not Home, Non-Owner, Opportunity, Nurture, or Trash.
Depending on the result status you choose, follow-up tasks are created.
For example, if you mark one property as “Not Home,” the planner automatically generates a revisit.
Other tasks created automatically are mailer tasks, which can also be completed on the app via an integrated portal for bulk printing.
Knocking performance data is also tracked once you start a “knocking session,” so you will learn what has worked and what has not.
Knockwise plans to integrate with further homeowner data, such as predictive market analytics, to find opportunities, divorces, and more.
KnockWise doesn’t disclose pricing on its website, but according to this source, the monthly price is $29.95 with an additional one-time setup fee of $99. The company also offers a 30-day free trial.
You can learn more about it here.
3) SalesRabbit
Salesrabbit is rather addressing the needs of outside sales teams.
Since this overlaps, of course, with the work of real estate agents in the field, I decided to include this app in this article.
Visiting their website, you learn early on that they have a stronger focus on sales teams (which could also be teams of real estate agents) and offer more than just a simple door-knocking app.
While KnockWise would be more suitable for a one-man realtor operation, I see more use cases for medium to larger size real estate brokerages with Salesrabbit.
Since this application has many different features, I will provide them to you via bullet points.
These are Salesrabbit’s features:
- Sales rep tracker to find out about the whereabouts of your team member (includes time and place, visual tracking, and offline capability)
- Sales rep insights about performance data
- Sales gamification to increase team motivation
- Sales statistics with key performance indicators such as the number of doors knocked on, people contacted, closing rates, and more.
- Customizable reporting tools and live reports on rep activity with GPS tracking
- Performance ranking of reps
- Team messaging
- Lead stacking on a specific location (relevant for apartment complexes)
- Lead tracking by pinning a particular residence and assigning a lead status.
- Direct lead communication (text, call, or email)
- Appointment notifications
- Route planner that integrates created areas and territories, prioritized leads and appointments, and suggested ideal sales routes.
- Lead import and export.
- File attachments (e.g., pictures, videos, PDFs, and more)
- Custom fields for special lead data
- Lead assignment capability to transfer lead ownership within your team.
- Custom area creation (e.g., draw an area over a detailed map view and assign it to a rep)
- View of historic area data (e.g., which rep was assigned to a certain area in the past)
- A sketching tool to improve a sales pitch
- Upload option for the training material for sales teams.
- Homeowner information (e.g., renters, owners, credit scores, income threshold, etc.)
- B2B search capacity to look for business contact information
- Custom digital contract builder and mobile eSignature
As you can see, Salesrabbit has a large variety of features, and they did their homework concerning analyzing the different use cases of sales teams that operate in the field.
Regarding pricing, the single-user license costs $35 per month (billed annually), and the essentials bundle for a team costs $66 per month (billed annually) and includes the residential and business search and the digital contracts feature.
You can learn more about SalesRabbit here.
4) Active Knocker
Active Knocker is a door-knocking app that addresses real estate professionals directly on its website.
Many of the features are similar to the ones of Salesrabbit.
You could say it’s a slimmer version of Salesrabbit, which is also reflected in the pricing, as you will see at the end of this section.
You can import records from anywhere and assign them with a route to one of your sales reps.
Further features include the following:
- A feature to assign an area to sales reps
- A live location tracker of sales reps
- Action reminders on a lead to follow up
- Activity monitoring of sales reps
- Status tagging of properties (e.g., not at home, etc.)
- Performance analysis (e.g., the number of homes knocked on a particular map)
- Lead search
- Proposal tool to send custom proposals on the spot
- User management
The base plan for Active Knocker is $25 per month, and you pay $5 per month for each additional user.
You can learn more about the app here.
According to the Analysis, This Is the Best Door Knocking App for Realtors
I will first post my weighted decision matrix table below so you can see how I awarded the points for the criteria I initially pre-determined.
| Criterion | Weight | i360 Walk | Weighted Points | KnockWise | Weighted Points | SalesRabbit | Weighted Points | activeknocker | Weighted Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance tracking ability | 9 | 5 | 45 | 10 | 90 | 10 | 90 | 10 | 90 |
| Performance analysis | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 100 | 10 | 100 | 10 | 100 |
| Navigational help and/ or walk list creation | 10 | 10 | 100 | 10 | 100 | 10 | 100 | 1 | 10 |
| Price | 10 | 5 | 50 | 9 | 90 | 8 | 80 | 10 | 100 |
| Follow-up ability | 9 | 1 | 9 | 10 | 90 | 10 | 90 | 8 | 72 |
| Display of additional seller information | 8 | 5 | 40 | 10 | 80 | 10 | 80 | 1 | 8 |
| Sales pitch or script support | 5 | 10 | 50 | 1 | 5 | 10 | 50 | 5 | 25 |
| Task management, reminders, and appointment setting | 10 | 1 | 10 | 10 | 100 | 10 | 100 | 10 | 100 |
| Team management | 10 | 1 | 10 | 1 | 10 | 10 | 100 | 7 | 70 |
| Import function of existing contacts | 9 | 10 | 90 | 1 | 9 | 10 | 90 | 10 | 90 |
| Total | 414 | 674 | 880 | 665 |
Ordered from highest (best) to lowest score (not so good), this is the order of the door-knocking apps for realtors:
- SalesRabbit (880 points)
- KnockWise (674 points)
- ActiveKnocker (665 points)
- i360 Walk (414 points)
So, according to my somewhat objective analysis, the best door-knocking app for realtors would be SalesRabbit.
One of the convincing parts of this app was the vast array of features that surpassed the pre-defined criteria a good door-knocking app for realtors should have.
Nevertheless, KnockWise shouldn’t be ignored either as the second best.
Suppose you can live without on-site sales (e.g., scripts, contracts, etc.), team management, and an import function of existing contacts. In that case, you may want to go with this app since it comes in at a slightly lower monthly price, but only if you move from the free trial to the paid version before the trial ends.
Otherwise, you pay the $99 one-time setup fee.
I will leave you with a pricing overview of the analyzed apps.
| App | Price | One-time fee |
|---|---|---|
| i360 Walk | $280 | |
| KnockWise | $29.95 | $99 |
| SalesRabbit | $35 | |
| activeknocker | $25 |
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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