Ylopo | Reviews and Pricing | 2024
Ylopo is an affordable and trending real estate website and marketing suite that provides nurturing tools, listing marketing, and sophisticated dynamic Facebook ad management. Their site comes with several templates to choose from and subdomain sites for individual agents or team members. Their “Listing Rocket” marketing automatically posts a series of ads to Facebook advertising your listings, price reductions, open houses, and more, as well as serves as a professional listing presentation.
Ylopo was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Venice, CA. Their leadership and many of their current staff are veterans of Tiger Leads, the PPC marketing solution that was bought by Realtor.com and subsequently CINC.
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Use Ylopo if…
- Your business is built on Facebook and you’re all in on Facebook leads
- You like Curaytor but want something lighter, more affordable, and/or a different CRM than Follow Up Boss
Skip Ylopo if…
- You are a content marketer focused on SEO, blogging, and organic search (consider Real Estate Webmasters)
- You aren’t interested in Facebook ads and instead want to focus on search engine PPC leads (consider BoomTown)
- You want a fully integrated platform with a CRM backend and numerous tools that talk to each other out-of-the-box (consider kvCORE)
View Other Real Estate Platforms
Ylopo Design Examples
Ylopo is very unique in that they use Squarespace as their website builder and content management system (CMS) instead of the ubiquitous WordPress. Squarespace is known as a more “visual” CMS than WordPress, and is all about making elegant designs and pages. Ylopo consciously made this choice in order to deliver better-looking websites for less than it would cost to customize a WordPress design.
Design is highly subjective, so browse around Ylopo’s mobile-optimized websites to get a feel for what it is like.
They are minimalist. Many agents forgo having the prominent above-the-fold search field and instead have simple call-to-action buttons for buyers and sellers.
The buyer search is clean, though. It takes too many clicks to get there, but once you do, the map search is very simple and enjoyable.
Their sites employ a “landing page” mentality in which many of their subpages get rid of the menu. That can make it hard to navigate the site, but the goal is to get rid of distractions and links taking them away from your goal: collecting their contact information.
A video homepage background is a popular design choice for Ylopo users.
Stephen Cooley Real Estate
Moving the Mitten Real Estate Group
Best Features
Dynamic Ad Campaigns
Running your Facebook Ads is what Ylopo does best. And they do it differently than any other competitor.
They have Facebook Real Estate Ads (previously called “DARE”) that connects your MLS and Facebook and lets you target your advertising to specific demographics depending on the MLS features. For example, your area’s beach homes might be shown to Facebook users in your area who love beaches.
It works the same for sellers, dynamically serving ads of homes that have been listed in their neighborhood, enticing them to click through to spy on the competition and ultimately reach out to you.
Ylopo claims these dynamic ads have a 5-6% click-through rate compared to 2-3% on traditional Facebook ads, plus they don’t get old over time. They are always new because they are serving listings from the MLS and not just a lead generation landing page like “What’s Your Home Worth”.
Even better, Ylopo has transparency in this process. They allow you to see the lead acquisition cost for each campaign and modify your spending accordingly in their “Mission Control”. You can let Ylopo do everything for you, or you can be a “copilot” and modify the advertisements yourself.
Transparency is awesome. Many other paid lead services charge you per lead. You have no visibility on how much it actually cost them to get that lead. Therefore, they are incentivized to sell you the cheapest leads possible. Cheap leads are usually pretty lousy leads.
Ylopo also has DyVA, (dynamic video ads) that organize and publish your listing and advertisement videos to your social media. Most of the advertisement is populated directly from your MLS listing.
Buyer Search
Ylopo has a very sleek IDX home search function. This part of the site is not highly customizable because they split test and refine the experience to be as smooth for home buyers as possible.
After spending a little time browsing homes, they’ve done a good job! It’s better than Zillow, in my opinion. Your buyers will be happy hanging out on your site, saving homes, and eventually contributing their contact info.
Listing Rocket
Using the same technology and tools as their dynamic ads for real estate, Listing Rocket is an easy way to quickly promote your listings on social media.
Within the Ylopo dashboard, you can shoot out your new listings to Facebook in a carousel advertisement. The platform tracks the engagement and views so that you can report back to your seller in an easy format and demonstrate your value.
Below is Gary Ashton, a Ylopo power user. Check out his Facebook page for examples of these ads in action.
Biggest Pitfalls
Poor SEO Organic Results
Ylopo is the only real estate platform or website provider I know of who uses Squarespace as their content management system (CMS). By far, the most real estate sites are built on WordPress. That is not necessarily a bad thing. On the backend, Squarespace sites are easier to manage, quicker, and more secure system.
The common knock on Squarespace by developers is that it seldom has the same SEO power as WordPress or other proprietary CMS solutions.
Anecdotally, I observed this in that my limited SEO studies do not turn up Ylopo sites, and even Googling the owners of websites I know are Ylopo, their own Ylopo site is not always first in the SERP rankings.
The Ylopo sites I checked were getting very little organic visitors per month. Of the ten website examples I found, including four teams in the top 250 in America, the most (estimated) organic traffic any single website earned was just 504 visits a month.
The blog content that Ylopo creates is shared among all their users. So while it can be useful for sharing content with your audience and making your site look “alive”, duplicate content is not going to rank on Google.
A dedicated content marketer won’t be held back by Squarespace or Ylopo. But organic reach clearly isn’t the focus for Ylopo users.
No Native CRM
I hesitate putting this in the “biggest pitfall” category. But some users may see this as a negative.
Ylopo doesn’t have a CRM backend. Instead, similar to Curaytor, they closely integrate with other CRMs like Follow Up Boss.
While these CRMs are not native, Ylopo’s integrations with them go beyond simply dumping website or Facebook leads into them. Ylopo can track client engagement in the CRM, and even be set up to send communications and texts to new prospects via AI.
The CRMs they work with currently include Follow Up Boss, Firepoint, LionDesk, BoomTown, Big Purple Dot, and Velocify.
Ylopo Pricing*
- $295/mo for just the platform with branded site
- One time setup fee of $1000
- 10% fee (up to $100) on monthly remarketing budget
- Optional paid lead spending
Ylopo offers the entire package – lead nurturing, IDX website, and listing alerts – for $295/mo.
Ylopo has flexible pricing on its paid leads (including not paying for any at all, if you don’t want them).
They recommend an additional $75/mo for “DARE” Facebook remarketing campaigns.
Lastly, their optional “sphere marketing”, targeting up to 200 people for another $75, includes direct mail and higher dollar investments.
At an additional cost, you can hire Ylopo writers to create content for your website.
They can also accommodate comarketing campaigns and spending with lender partners.
*This is current to the best of my knowledge at the time of this writing. Contact the vendor directly to check current prices, discounts, and terms.
My Personal Recommendation
Ylopo has really exploded onto the stage of real estate platforms. Along with Brivity, I keep hearing more and more about it all the time, and both appear to be developing a very loyal following of fans. It made my list of one of the fastest growing tech companies in 2020.
While their focus is currently on Facebook and Instagram, they are actively expanding to Pinterest and YouTube, with a new programmatic video program in the works. That suite will automatically generate video ads for listings, farming, and even recruiting. It’s an impressive company that seems to be pathfinding newer and better real estate technology for agents and brokers.
For numerous real estate agents, the lack of a native CRM might be a deal-breaker. Instead, Ylopo lets you plug and play your favorite CRM. I personally think that is okay. Let a CRM company make a great CRM, and let Ylopo be a great marketing/website combo. But if you are wanting a true all-in-one solution, Ylopo isn’t for you.
Ylopo has a lot in common with Curaytor. Both are marketing platforms that emphasize Facebook marketing. Ylopo is significantly cheaper than Curaytor and their marketing is more automated. But if Ylopo is interesting, I recommend comparing the two.
Ultimately, Ylopo is a very intriguing real estate marketing platform. Strongly consider it if generating and nurturing leads on Facebook is a pillar of your business model.
Ylopo Videos
Pros
They do all the setup work after completing a questionnaire and a few more entries on your domain setup
Con
I have been using Ylopo for several months. Many useless responses. $1000 setup fee and a 90 day cancelation policy even when not adequately generating any valid leads. A complete failure and a waste of our money and time. Concept sounds great during sales pitch, but does not produce any serious leads. Most responses are rental leads and people trying to sell us and cross promote other products.