Websites and CRM

[Chris P.]

I've been buying, selling and holding single family homes for about 8 years now. My partner and i have over 30 years experience between us and we are working together on acquisitions and sales this year to take our businesses to the next level. I bought a great looking website package from a guru 6 years ago and that website hosting is most likely going to be taken down soon. Thus i will loose my "We Buy Houses" "We Sell Houses" and "We Wholesale Houses" type websites. I really like the layout and functionality of the websites, but they haven't been updated in 4+ years. Built into the back office was lead tracking and deal analysis. I haven't used the back office for quite some time now.

However, with our new venture we have people in several locations that need access to the database of direct mail, internet, phone and other leads. I handle marketing and sales from one location, my partner handles meeting with sellers and the buying and works out of his office. We have an overseas VA who handles incoming calls from sellers and prospective tenants etc.

Because of the impending website hosting shutdown, we are evaluating website solutions. In trying to search for real estate investor website solutions i came across realinvestorwebsites.com. This also lead me to realinvestorsoftware.com/RealProspect. I've given the websites a trial run, though they are not live yet. I have not yet tried RealProspect. The back office interface is pretty, but it's not as easy as it looks in the videos to customize everything to what we want.

I'd like to have some squeeze pages for retail and investor buyers, and possibly double squeeze after they get initial access so that we can weed out the fake squeeze info. We want to have a buying site, a wholesaling site, and a renting/lease option site. We would like to have the CRM software setup to integrate with incoming leads from the websites and handle direct mail campaigns, response rate tracking, lead tracking, pictures, marketing ROI, etc.

All of these things appear to be available in a combination of realwebsites and realprospect. But given my experience so far with the websites, i'm not really gung ho about using this potential solution. The tech support is fairly slow, all through email, and who knows how long the websites will stay up. It's all hosted through him, so if he goes down, i'm back in the same boat in a few years all over again.

The software i would own so if he went down it would still be ours, but it would no longer integrate smoothly with the websites should they go down...

Currently we use a free program called Struggling Investor Lead Manager to handle the direct mail campaign scheduling, lead management, and some other basic functions. We like it but when i compare it to RealProspect, it seems like we could REALLY use some of the extra functions available in RealProspect.

I'd like to know if my laundry list of wants can be satisfied by anything else out there right now without having to pay a full time programmer to start from scratch and pay many $1,000's of dollars. What are other successful active wholesalers and active direct mail marketers are using for their CRM and website solutions?