The Best 5 Free Tools for Real Estate Marketing
Working in the real estate industry can at times feel like it’s a ‘pay to play’ business. You might find yourself paying for leads, paying for your desk, paying for marketing, and on and on. It doesn’t have to be that way though.
Whether you’re a new real estate agent looking to get your career started without tapping into your savings, or you’re a seasoned Realtor looking to trim costs, there are free solutions out there for you! We’ve sifted through all of the options, and rounded up the best 5 FREE tools for your real estate marketing needs:
#1 - MailChimp - The Best Free Real Estate Marketing Tool for Email Campaigns
Mailchimp free real estate email marketing drip campaigns
As a real estate agent, you need to cater to the different information needs of your book of business. Someone looking to buy a house now needs more frequent messaging and follow-up from you than someone who purchased a house four years ago that you’re seeking a referral from.
How are you going to do this? MailChimp is the platform for you! Its basic plan is free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 monthly emails. It allows you to send a one-off mass e-mail, and to set up automated drip marketing campaigns.
Got a Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter guide for your clients? Set your campaigns up with Mailchimp’s easy drag-and-drop designs. Now you’re nurture your relationship with past clients without ever having to lift another finger all year!
You can also use Mailchimp’s analytics to fill your pipeline with leads you might not have otherwise been aware of. For instance – if you see that a past client is opening up your message a lot of times, that’s an important signal that you should follow up with a phone call to check in!
Bonus features: MailChimp helps you manage your unsubscribes to stay compliant with anti-spam laws, and it will sync with most CRMs, so you don’t have to worry about manually updating contact lists and groups.
#2 - HootSuite - The Best Free Real Estate Marketing Tool for Social Media Posting
Hootsuite free real estate social marketing software
So you have a Facebook account. Check. Instagram? Of course! Twitter…maybe? With so many platforms out there, there are a lot of opportunities for you to build your book of business by staying top-of-mind with your network on social.
You need two things to successfully build trust in your real estate brand though: consistent posting, and taking part in relevant social conversations as they happen. Thankfully you can do all of this in one place (for free!) with Hootsuite.
Hidden at the bottom of their pricing page is the “limited Free Plan” which allows you to connect up to 3 social profiles (ex. your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) and manage all your posts, messages, comments, and analytics. The free plan allows you to schedule up to 30 posts in advance, with one user.
What really differentiates Hootsuite from the other options out there is their Streams feature. You can go beyond solely posting and responding to your audience, and monitor specific keywords. This means if something’s trending relevant to the real estate industry that you might want to post about, you can hear about it without having to waste time manually browsing. This is a valuable way to stay responsive to your network and community while juggling the many other things on your plate as a real estate agent.
Their mobile app is also very intuitive, which makes it easy to respond to messages on social while you’re waiting for arrivals to your open house.
#3 - Avery Design & Print Online - The Best Free Real Estate Marketing Tool for Mailer Labels
Avery Design & Print free software for real estate print marketing address labels
Guess what doesn’t have a spam filter? Your client’s mailbox! This is why Avery’s Design & Print Online is our #3 free tool for real estate marketing.
It’s allows you to design and customize the address labels you use when sending out snail-mail cards and mailers.
Once you create an account you select the size and layout of your labels, choose a design (they have some pre-populated ones for the real estate industry), and import your client list from a spreadsheet. That’s it! You get really polished looking address labels as a result.
Note: you’ll need to export your client list from your CRM to then upload into this tool. Also, if you previously used Avery’s Google Drive plug in, you should know that they’re retiring that tool because you can now upload directly to their site.
#4 - Canva - The Best Free Real Estate Marketing Tool for Flyers, Feature Sheets, Social Posts and More
Canva free software for creating real estate marketing and flyers
There’s quite a lot of design work involved in the real estate industry. You need business cards, listing feature sheets, buyers guides, market statistics updates, open house signs, website and social collateral, and more. While you’ll want to use a template or hire a web designer for bigger ticket items like your website, most of your day-to-day design needs can be covered by Canva.
Canva is a user-friendly tool that provides templates that you can customize using drag-and-drop features similar to what you see in Mailchimp. You can also create designs from scratch if you’re one of the more creative ones among us!
Using this tool, you can really tie together your social posts, website, and other collateral by saving your brand colors and sticking with similar themes across all of your designs. This provides a consistent look wherever you post and publish.
They have an excellent training center that will have you designing beautiful marketing collateral for your real estate career with no previous design skills. In fact, even the most design-challenged members of our team manage to make visually-pleasing content using Canva, so we know it’ll work for you too!
Canva has free for life plans with access to real estate and business specific templates, and allow you to export high-quality images right from their tool. Some of their templates and images are behind a paywall, but you can easily identify these as they’ll have a “pro” logo on them.
#5 - RealOffice360™ - The Best Free Real Estate Marketing Tool for Customer Relationship Management
RealOffice360 free software for real estate customer relationship marketing
(We’ll admit, we are a little biased here.) We work hard to counteract that ‘pay to play’ hurdle in the real estate industry, and believe you shouldn’t have to constantly shell out to simply make a living. While we do offer premium and brokerage plans that are paid, all of our core customer relationship management features are included in our free-forever plan.
You can securely track your deals, e-mail clients, capture leads, log property information, set goals and to-do lists, and even create a portal for your clients with HomeHub360. Your clients can log in to see their CMA’s that you uploaded, keep track of their home improvements, and so much more!
There are no time limits on our free plans. In fact, you don’t even need to provide your credit card information to sign up!
Between marketing your business, juggling showings, and staying on top of your leads, you need a system to manage your workload in a stress-free and intuitive way. RealOffice360 is an unbelievably simple CRM, business tracker, and daily planner for real estate agents and Realtors®. Rather being just a data dump for client information, RealOffice360 helps you visually build your business plan, cultivate your real estate database towards your goals, and ultimately keeps you focused on what matters most: your clients and your deals. Get started for free - no credit card required!