Placester vs. BoomTown - Pros and Cons

If you're a real estate agent looking to expand your business, BoomTown and Placester stand out as robust contenders worth exploring. While both platforms provide a range of features and tools, they do have distinct characteristics. To determine the better fit for your real estate business, let's delve into a comparison of their offerings.

Pricing

BoomTown

There is no pricing visible on the website - you must fill out a questionnaire first, and then you are referred for a DEMO call with the sales team before you can really get your hands on the products you’ll be using. There used to be four packages available in the below pricing (as to our knowledge, November 2023). The packages are similar, but key differences include lead matching, agent accountability, my listings, and my deals.

• Launch: $1000/month, $750 setup fee (dedicated to individual agents)
• Core: $1,550 a month plus a $1,550 onboarding fee, and includes five users. 
• Grow: $1300/month, $1700 setup fee (dedicated to small teams)
• Advance: $1500/month, $1500 setup fee (dedicated to standard big teams or brokerages)
• btPRO enterprise option
• $250+ /month in PPC advertising – required spend with the Launch package, but PPC spending is not required with larger packages.

Recently, the names of packages changed as follows: Launch, Core, Grow, and btPRO. The first two packers are still dedicated to individuals (Launch - up to 2 people, and core up to 5), with the introduction of btPRO, which replaced the Advance package. The btPRO is a mix of kvCORE and BoomTown technology for a team-centric solution that allows top producers to operate their business at the highest level.

BoomTown’s main plan Grow, has a $1700 setup and $1300/month, not including paid leads. This makes it easily one of the most expensive real estate platforms.

The entire purpose of BoomTown is converting paid leads, so you need to budget for those leads from the get-go. Additional online advertising starts at a minimum of $250/month for the Launch plans and at least $1000/month for the standard plan. Successful teams easily spend 5 figures a month on pay-per-click advertising with BoomTown because when you calculate the costs of all modules, the overall amount might be surprising.

There is a free DEMo, but not a free trial, and if you want to learn more or launch your website, you have to fill out the form and set up a meeting. 

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 the 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. 

Features and Functionality

BoomTown

The real estate platform helps agents and brokers connect with potential clients. The key features are the IDX websites, paid lead generation service, real estate CRM, and lead matching. The BoomTown design is pretty uniform throughout all websites. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. These are IDX websites with forced registration to view homes.

In the basic package, BoomTown products include:

• IDX Site + Agent Subdomain(s)
• Multiple Website Themes
• Site Customization
• Landing Pages
• NOW Mobile App
• Hot Sheet
• Customizable Smart-Drip Plans
• Bulk Actions
• Listing Promotion
• Dynamic Retargeting
• Success Assurance Text + Call
• Zapier + API Nation Int.
• Lead Routing
• Seller Lead Suite
• Tagging & Segmenting
• Best-Fit Leads
• Vitals Report
• Sharing Library
• Back Office Integration

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) subscriptions mean 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 the Do It Yourself (DIY) plan, where you create your real estate website yourself. So, in a nutshell, Placester is built for scalability, and its features reflect that. 

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

In the basic DIY package, Placester products include:

• Website Builder & CRM
• Custom website designs
• Lead capture forms & pop-ups
• IDX listing display tools
• Property landing pages
• Area & community pages
• Testimonial display
• SEO tools
• Integrations
• Royalty free media library
• Blog
• Mobile app
• IDX Integration (Map search, multi IDX, Save listings & save search, Property alerts)
• CRM & Autoresponders (Email drip and blast campaigns)
• Broker-only features
• Free support

Placester 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 

Contract terms

Customer support

User Reviews and Reputation

BoomTown reviews

BoomTown has reviews on different platforms (G2, Capterra, Softwareadvice), but not on  Google, however they display a Google partner badge on their website (in the footer section)

Most positive and negative reviews focus on the CRM and lead capture tools, as these are the most advertised and highlighted features by the Real Geeks.

Typically, clients complain about the same issues: not working up to scratch CRM, with a lot of self-work required, and difficulty of the agreement termination if the service is no longer what they need. 

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 811 reviews (November 2023). This number has steadily grown as more happy customers add their reviews to Google. That number changes so quickly that while preparing that comparison, we had to adjust it a few times. More importantly, it shows that the web-creation process is fast, and satisfied users are willing to express their gratitude immediately after joining Placester and receiving their completed website. 

The highly positive reviews cite the most significant values of the company: responsive customer service and professionalism. 

More than 100 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, 70 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

‍
Since BoomTown is geared toward brokerages and teams, its prices are definitely in a different weight class than other real estate website builders. However, BoomTown offers some brokerage-level marketing strategies, which might explain their pricing. One of the advantages is an efficient lead capture system, because so much of the content on a BoomTown site is gated, meaning users have to input their contact information before gaining access. Still, the costs, make BoomTown mainly tailored to medium to larger-sized real estate brokers and agents, so if you have a maturing small business, team, or brokerage that thrives on paid leads, PPC, long sales funnels, and phone dialers, you can use it.

The reason you want to go with Placester is to stay flexible and save money. The number one advantage is that in Placester, you will get a business partner. Everything that's hard about working with other providers is incredibly easy and enjoyable in Placester because you are messaging a human being and having a real conversation! You get a concierge-level service experience at a great price point with tons of features that make Placester an easy choice.

In Placester, you can request unlimited changes and updates to your website without any additional payments. Basic changes you can do yourself (Do It Yourself plan) or leave a request for them, and they are done within hours (Do It For Me plan). There is a free trial, so you can easily decide which option is best for you and check out the features and functionalities.

Also, they release numerous new features, which you can access automatically the moment they’re released. No need for an upgrade or renegotiation of your contract because you can always choose the pay-as-you-go model, where you pay your monthly subscription. When you wish to terminate your agreement, you can do so. If you want to upgrade your package, it is for different reasons: your business grows, so you need to scale up, and it is not dictated by the sales team pushing you to pay more for new features or changes to your site. 

When you are considering migrating your site to Placester and doing it right now, you will get the 3 months for free with the Do It for Me plan, and we're gonna clone your old website. If it comes to just the capabilities of maintaining SEO, Placester can do it with ease and on a budget. On top of that, you will get an amazing support-friendly team on your side, ready to help immediately without waiting for hours for a response.