Craig Rowe reviews for Inman a digital marketing solution called RealForce, which offers an array of enterprise-level capabilities ideal for empowering marketing and creative teams for big-brand brokerages.
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RealForce is marketing and advertising management software.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: Marketing leads; brokers; agents; large brokerages
Top selling points:
- Comprehensive campaign oversight
- Enterprise-ready; scalable to smaller ops
- CRM, website integrations
- Multiple ad network options
- Simplifies advertising workflows
Top concerns:
While this is an ideal tool for marketing staff and team leads at big brokerages, it may run into redundancies in smaller brokerages leveraging CRM or stand-alone marketing solutions
What you should know
RealForce was once Adfenix, should you think you haven’t heard of it before. To exercise the phoenix metaphor, the product has matured greatly as a solution, rising up to be something more than simple marketing software.
What RealForce offers is essentially tantamount to having on hand an outsourced digital advertising agency. It manages to encapsulate just about all of the tactical processes a brokerage would pay an agency to do. Granted, strategy is still up to you; it’s not a software company’s job to help you decide what you want to be. But figure that out, and RealForce will help you communicate it.
The solution blends ad creation, ad network selection (Facebook, YouTube, etc.), budgeting and performance. I very much like that the Program Builder module doesn’t stick only to campaigns around listings; it’s also built to enforce brand awareness for a brokerage or a team.
You could use it for recruiting, or to advertise business milestones and new hires. This helps explain my take that RealForce is almost as much an agency as it is software. Its tools aren’t relegated to lead generation or listing posts.
RealForce is scalable and versatile, allowing for leads to be pulled in from a website for use in specific campaigns, or leads can come from its own widget, which offers a quick survey for segmentation and campaign categorization.
The media management functionality provides a library from which company branding elements and assets can be organized and managed. You can use it for logos or entire ads that may be routinely part of an outreach effort. Video content can be stored here, too.
If you want to print things, RealForce grabbed the API from ExpressDocs so postcards or flyers designed within it can be sent directly to the retail production house, complete with your mailing list.
Listings can be fed into the RealForce UI to ensure property information stays consistent between initial agreement, MLS input and campaign creation. There’s no sense in risking the wrong square footage or incorrect home amenities through manual campaign creation.
It’s also generally a good way to work, as it helps to have your product assets tightly attached to their marketing efforts. Remember the days of looking at a printed MLS sheet to enter kitchen features into Adobe InDesign? I do.
The advantages and features here are many, but I want readers to take note of RealForce’s vertical model, and its ability to combine what most brokerages pay several companies to provide. Wasted money is one problem with a fragmented marketing tech stack; the biggest concern, though, should be the disjointed content and data.
If you use Facebook directly, those performance results and its creative are housed there. If some of your agents are big on YouTube, that’s where that business intelligence will stay.
Additionally, agents and brokers aren’t always the best at communicating what they want from an ad campaign, on top of being poor time managers when it comes non-deal related business tasks, meaning they just never get the marketing team what they need when it’s needed. “The listing went live three days ago and you’re just now asking me to create the campaign?”
RealForce can solve all of that, as well as lot of other business needs. Give your creative team something to sink their teeth into for 2025, like 100+ brokerages already working with RealForce have done.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
