Placester vs. Agent Fire

If you're an agent who wants to grow your business, Agent Fire and Placester are both very strong contestants worth checking out. But which one is a better fit for your real estate business? Let’s compare their offers to see.

Features and Functionality

Agent Fire

Agent Fire provides a WordPress-based real estate website with aesthetically pleasing landing pages. They have add-ons for those who want more control over their websites, such as data from Home Junction, or Showcase IDX's tools. Designs are relatively modern and typical, with most sites featuring a portal-like single bar search sporting their logo or video. Other website creation features include neighborhood guides, arena market reports, lead capture tools, search pages, blog and video tools, reviews, and listing pages integration with 3rd party CRM.

Placester

Placester offers an online codeless website builder with a straightforward interface that makes your life easier as an agent because everything falls into place naturally. There is no need to waste time figuring out how things should work when they're already before us. For example, Placester's Do It For Me (DIFM) subscription means that you can focus on your business without doing anything yourself - Placesters experts prepare the site and content. You can also choose a more hands-on approach with Do It Yourself (DIY) plan, where you create your real estate website yourself.

More than 20,000 real estate websites are created with Placester across the US. Clients can integrate Placester with many third-party tools and software, and there is also an extensive range of built-in add-ons. Placester is built for scalability, and its features reflect that. 

Top functionalities:

• Code-free site editor, making website building accessible to anyone in the Do It Yourself (DIY) package,
• Options for unique content creation and social media posting,
• Dedicated CRM is included with every package,
• Unlimited updates and maintenance forever with the Do It For Me (DIFM, DIFM+content) packages,
• Great website features (Property Search, Featured Listings, Testimonials, IDX Listing Display Tools, Mortgage Calculator, Lead Capture Forms, Area and Community Pages, Sold Listings, Blog, etc.).
• Placester mobile app, so agents can work on the go from anywhere they want.

Placester Designs 

Pricing

Agent Fire

• The pricing list starts at $299 for an Express setup with 149$ monthly fee, with few customization options, and gets as high as $2499 with a fully customized setup and the same monthly fee of $149

• However, if you check the Full Pricing List, other payments are detailed with the exact price of additional services not included in the plans. 
• Hourly Rates start from $35/hr (general labor – which would apply to basic content adjustments, the setup of area pages, migrating blog posts from an old site, and general 'data entry' type tasks that are mostly characterized by copy/paste style work). Custom design - costs $100/hr (General design rate that includes custom design work on existing pages.) Custom page design - $200 flat rate + up (this service includes new custom page creations done by our designers. For more complex designs, there is an extra quote required.)
• Most commonly requested tasks come with additional costs: IDX Switch ($100-$150), a large number of area pages (if you need more than 25 pages, you have to pay $5/ea), additional storage space - $5/mo per additional GB of space (sites come default with 1GB), domain name change ($100), site re-brand ($100 - $200), change logo (on the header and CTA's) & colors, additional form — $50, website reactivation — $125/hr, cloudflare API token setup - $100, priority fee — $200-$500 (For any immediately required work outside of the selected package, including but not limited to custom "under construction" page, prioritized queue, etc.)

The point of Agent Fire pricing is that any website customization requires the work of the IT team because it is an engineer-coded website. Each package includes a certain number of IT hours (starting from 3hrs in the Express plan to 8hrs in Semi-custom), but if you need more complicated enhancements or do them regularly, it takes more time to complete the work. It also means that you will end up with a larger amount to pay. That’s why you can easily rack up a bill of a few thousand dollars a month as pay for packages of working hours of the team of engineers. 

• There is a 10-Day free trial for a basic Spark Site, but your credit card is required.

Placester

• Pricing is transparent: you can see how much you pay directly on the website: https://placester.com/pricing. 
• There are no hidden fees or payments and a 20% discount on annual plans.
• Placester offers 3 plans:

• There is a 30-day free trial in the Do It Yourself (DIY) plan (no credit card required), and you have 7 days free that will be spent on building your website by our experts if you choose one of the DIFM (Do It For Me) plans.
• An IDX is optional, so the lowest package refers to the website without an IDX (you can add it for $25), but the price is very low for the market standard.
• If you decide to move your website to Placester on DIFM (Do It For Me) plan, you pay only $500 of a one-time setup fee and get 3 months for free. The best thing is that the transfer is smooth and hassle-free, and Placester does it for you, so you don’t need to worry as every bit of your content is migrated, and your website isn’t down. If you want to know how it works or start your website transfer - BOOK a quick call with us. 

If we were to compare Agent Fire with Placester pricing, the biggest knock is how Agent Fire Pricing is set up. It's very kind of nickel and dime style pricing - everything seems to be in the open, the packages and prices, but you have to include a lot of add-ons to get what you need. When you add everything to the cart, you end up with a higher bill than anticipated. It's not a big criticism, but you might feel tricked: you go in thinking you'll pay a hundred and fifty bucks, and then once at the check-out, you end up paying five hundred dollars a month. And you think: how did I get here?

Generally, the Pricing packages look similar, so you need to pay attention to the level of support. Under the hood, Placester and Agent Fire are fundamentally different companies because Placester invested the time and energy to build a product that makes it incredibly easy to support you so you get an excellent experience. When you buy Placester Do It for Me products, it literally means that you can have unlimited changes to your website any time you want to be done by a human. 

Contract terms

Customer support

User Reviews and Reputation

Agent Fire reviews

Agent Fire has many reviews in different channels and does a good job of displaying them on their website. Google is the primary source of reviews (there are also reviews from Trustpilot and G2t, but not that many), with a 4.9-star rating from 443 reviews (July 2023). 

Placester reviews

Google is the main source of Placester reviews (there are also reviews from Trustpilot and G2), where there is a whooping 4.9-star rating from 595 reviews (July 2023). The highly positive reviews cite the most significant values of the company: responsive customer service and professionalism. 

More than 70 reviewers on Google commented that the Placester team was helpful and “got all of my questions answered confidently.” According to them, responses were quick, polite, and knowledgeable. 

Furthermore, 52 customers highlighted the patience and politeness of support, and 22 people stressed super fast response time and how helpful the chat feature was. They also mentioned friendliness and lack of distance or formality: their issue was treated as very important and dealt with asap.

Summary of pros and cons

Conclusion

Overall, both companies are strong contenders in the real estate website builders market. The biggest difference between Placester and Agent Fire is that they are still writing code behind the scenes at Agent Fire. It is a website builder, but all work is mainly done by engineers. The reason that matters is their ability to support you as a customer after you sign up, as it is much more difficult. Agent Fire add-ons are equivalent to Placester Do It For Me (DIFM) plan features. Still, if you pick their Spark Theme, you get only 3hrs of customization (designers support), compared with unlimited requests for changes to your Placester website. 

Pull out the Agent Fire website right now and check what it would cost you to get just three hours of engineer’s work (priced at $35-$200 per hour). It’s fair to admit that Agent Fire has a few additional capabilities, but what they are signaling to you in their pricing is that if you need help down the road, once you're set up, you're locked into their website product, which is by the way, much more templated than Placester. If you need help, they will have to charge you for every hour they help you. 

Placester has done the work ahead of time. They are so confident they can do anything you need that you get a different level and partnership after the website is set up.

Placester means "Your Personalized Agent Site Made Easy!" - without the complexity, hefty expenses, or technical headaches. Whether you choose the Do It Yourself (DIY) package or let Placester move (or make from scratch) your website in a Do It For Me plans, you can focus on what you do best – connecting with clients and closing deals – while effortlessly maintaining an impressive online platform that reflects your expertise and style.