My name is Jake Mabus. I am a Real Estate Broker in Springfield, IL. I have been in the business for 16 years. I have tried numerous website providers over the years. I used Realty Candy just after designing my own site for my current brokerage. Originally I found Realty Candy and began to work on a few development options with James Call for the site that I developed via wordpress and a "StudioPress" theme. He is very responsive and personable. Great to work with!
Then, upon opening my own brokerage, I went with a new site and a template he just came out with. I believe this was around 2013. I really liked the direction he was heading in terms of development. So we came up with a great look and design that was very functional. Speed was not the best but it was a really great site. Since then I know the speed issue using IDX Broker has been improved upon greatly.
I then went back to my old brokerage and during the transition I decided to try Real Estate Webmasters. Expensive but I had to see the difference and get into the nuts and bolts of what they had to offer. It was a good site and very quick but any changes developmentally would cost a premium to make. So I had to incrementally make the changes as I could afford it. Somewhat frustrating to me, because I am a very hands on type of website guy. So much so I got tired of not knowing how to make design changes, I taught myself how to code HTML/JAVA/CSS. Some basic and some in depth knowledge so far, but enough to be quite dangerous...literally dangerous! Especially when I ruin EVERYTHING!!! So with the limitations of control of some of the hard coded universal features of the site, I decided to drop REW. I know that they would have been a wonderful option for me if I was to continue to spend a ton of money with them. I just am not that capable right now in my business to drop 10-15k into the site design.
A year later I jumped to a new Keller Williams office opening up. I loved the Millionaire Real Estate Agent book over the years and wanted to see the operations from inside a kw office. kw has an agreement with Placester to offer a basic site. So the deal that is set up with Placester is a basic plan with 3 of the 5 or 6 features available at no charge for the kw Agents. Nice but not engaging enough for lead generation. So I purchased their Premium Plan for around $400/month. I felt this would allow me to start a decent web presence. They generated some out of the box blogging articles that was nice but other than that I feel they were very well behind the developmental curve with what I've seen out there available for the money they wanted. The back end was very basic and only allowed manipulation of certain areas. They left the wordpress dashboard and widget areas completely inaccessible. The themes for kw Agents were very basic and not worth it in my opinion! Great for a new agent with absolutely no experience with websites or their ability to generate organic leads but lack luster at best for someone like myself who feels that a listings slider of my listings on the home page should be something that I can add and a fairly basic option in my opinion, but after talking with a customer service rep, they said something like that has not been developed yet and might not be for at least 6 months to a year and she would put it into a ticket request for me. I couldn't even get the wording changed from the registration pop up. Very disappointing.
As well, they didn't have my listing information fully displayed on my site. Even after a month of waiting and a work ticket for the corrections was made! It was in clear violation of my MLS rules and after a month of waiting after my request and now two and half months after I started with them, I decided to terminate the relationship. A waste of money for me. In the end I realize that they are quite expensive as well for the features they offer, or lack there of. I got better results with "BackAtYouMedia" adversite for less money.
This brings me back to RealtyCandy and James Call. I have watched his work develop over the years and am very impressed with all the features he and his team have developed! I am very excited to get back into the backend of the site and have the ability to change out a widget or plugin if it's not working for me as long as I stay clear of anything major (code wise) in the editor...I'm sure I'll be fine and satisfied with the results! I will put a link on this review when I'm up and running. But with my previous experience with IDX Broker and RealtyCandy, I know I will have all of the features I want and the monthly expense for security and backup will be worth it! REW and Placester have not been close to the features for much more money and wasted time! Feel free to email me anytime for any other questions about my experiences. I know they aren't the same for everyone. But mine come from a ton of research and hands on development, all on a tight budget! jake@soldil.com
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