Not sure if this is a CRM topic or a website topic but personally, I think it’s both.
I’m curious if anyone else is doing anything with REW in regards to automated home values? I’ve got other tools that I’m paying for that have home values built in and I’ve seen the value(no pun intended) in sending your sphere an automated home valuation email every month as well as using it as a great tool for home seller leads.
Not sure if there’s something I have been missing for years in the REW ecosystem or if everyone is just using bolt on products for this. If you are using 3rd party tool, what is working for you/what do you like?
Great question, Matt. This has actually been a burning question for me for years.
I’ve long been under the impression that some version of automated home valuations was on the horizon for the REW platform, so I’d also love to know where this sits from a product-development standpoint.
To me, this feels like a significant missing piece in an otherwise incredibly robust ecosystem. Automated valuations have obvious value both as a seller lead-generation tool and, perhaps even more importantly, as a way to stay meaningfully engaged with past clients and sphere over time. Having that capability natively integrated with the REW website and CRM would be far more compelling to me than continuing to bolt on another third-party product.
I’d love to see REW put some energy and resources behind this. And if customer input would help move it forward, I’d happily volunteer for a product-development group, beta group, or whatever would be useful in helping spec out what a really good REW-native version of this should look like.
I feel like there is a module already. I’ve seen some REW sites that’s have home valuations built into them and they don’t look like third party tools. They could be querying 3rd party sites though. Either way, I 100% agree with you. Almost every CRM/website provider now is offering a home values tool. Whether they are good or not is one thing but they are offering them. Something extra that helps us stay top of mind to our past clients.
That’s my impression too. I believe some REW customers may have had versions of this built through custom development, although I don’t know what is actually happening behind the scenes or whether those sites are pulling valuation data from a third party.
If that functionality already exists in some form, though, it makes me even more interested in whether there could eventually be a standardized REW module available to the rest of us. It certainly wouldn’t have to be included by default — I could easily see this being a paid add-on, similar to some of the other optional functionality REW offers. I would absolutely be interested in paying for it, depending on the pricing and implementation.
I’ve wanted something like this for literally 20+ years. I remember Market Snapshot (remember Top Producer?) from years ago, where homeowners could sign up for ongoing updates and the agent could use it both for seller lead generation and staying in front of past clients and sphere. The concept certainly isn’t new, but having a really good version of it integrated directly into REW — website, CRM, lead capture and follow-up all working together — would be much more valuable to me than adding yet another standalone product.
So +1 from me if there’s an opportunity to turn whatever may already exist on the custom side into a broadly available REW product.
We do have a CMA module already at real estate webmasters. That’s correct. I think it’s $50 or something like that. I’d have to have an account manager look it up. Let me see if I can find you an example.
Edit: here is the module in it’s current form:
Has a few features - automatically updates the value ranges based on criteria you enter
The ability to draw radius or polygon (though I need to check with @FernandoOrtiz if this is impacted by Google’s recent drawing change
Shows the comparable properties that were used to provide the valuation
There is also something on the horizon that you may have missed (it’s a subtle foundational layer, but it’s going to be built on) and that is “my homes” you can read about it here (it’s already released)
This is a tool that allows a seller to add thier own properties and then can use a powerful feature that lets them do “their own” side by side comparison (it becomes a lot more powerful with guidance from a Realtor as well, so you can use this on listing presentations)
The future state is something simialr to what homebot does where they get saved searches based on “their equity”: Imagine an email that said "based on ranges in your area, your payments made etc your equity could be currently $200-$400k - do you want to ask any questions about this with your realtor? (Like a saved search but for sellers)
FYI those building blocks are also not future state - they are in place “right now”
Since you both provided some great feedback or questions here, this is certainly something we’d love your feedback on. Since the CMA tool is quite old and my home is quite new, I’m sure there are ways to tie these things together better. For example, I should tell Fernando that when someone adds their property to that CMA, we should ask them to register and ask them if they want to add that to their saved homes
So I just realized I used to have this tool on my site lol. Would it be correct to assume REW isn’t planning to offer comparisons to sold data as well (for those with sold data on their site)? I’d be interested in hearing whether anybody thinks that‘s a good idea. P.S. Google put out another map update just today.
In a perfect world a tool could swap between the two (active comparison and sold comparison) or even do a side by side / hybrid view.
The challenge is one of priority (in R & D) for the roadmap.
The way it works is we try to prioritize both front end and backend (website and CRM) in R & D and have at least 1 truly useful feature launch (larger feature) plus several small things (this would be a large upgrade)
@FernandoOrtiz and I have been talking about how to get feedback in a centralized place from clients, and as importantly (perhaps more importantly) allow clients to prioritize feedback.
I’m actually working on that now as part of a larger build and will be asking for help from clients to finish the project / test it - are you interested?
It’s called REW Hub and the vision is to provide you a new, unified dashboard to manage your interactions with Real Estate Webmasters (Billing etc is phase 2) but phase 1 would have your projects, your tickets, profile management and then the new “Labs” (screenshot below) where you could suggest features and then other users could up vote them (and perhaps brainstorm them)
I love this idea and would be happy to help finish/test it. I do not enjoy keeping track of support tickets, custom work, ideas/suggestions, etc. using email & Dropbox. Basically, it’s a mess and very easy to lose track of things. REW Hub’s unified dashboard sounds like it could be the perfect solution.
I also love the idea of collecting votes from clients to gauge the popularity of any given idea. I think it could quickly reveal where the product could or should go in terms of future development. Not that there’s much of a disconnect between the development side and the user side, but with so many possible directions to pursue, prioritization is key.
If you have any open spots, I would love to test this as well. FUB had(or maybe still does) a features request area where users can upvote a suggested feature. Super useful to see what was on the roadmap, what was in development, and what was potentially about to launch. When there’s buy in from the rest of the user base and they interact it can be really cool.
