Chime Review 2023: Prices, Features, Reviews, and Alternatives

Chime is an all-in-one solution for real estate professionals marketing needs. They offer an intuitive CRM and a lead generation suite to take care of your lead gen efforts from start to finish. The real question is, are they the best solution for you? 

In this review we’ll go over the important things you need to look for when picking a product that is right for you, like the features, what other users are saying, pricing, and so much more. I may even have a few secret insights up my sleeve, so stay tuned. 

Quick Summary of Chime

Chime’s all-in-one platform was created with the main focus of driving more leads over the finish line for real estate agents. Along with this you’ll get a custom website, robust CRM, and more “traditional” marketing tools to go with all of that technology.

Chime offers multiple avenues to capture leads – PPC, SEO, Social Studio (their automated social media marketing), sphere of influence and a couple other creative solutions. A nice perk – Chime helps you optimize all of this lead gen with competitive market analysis. 

Another thing Chime prides itself on is their time-saving automation. All of their leads flow into the CRM, where the AI assistant will do all the automated nurturing for you. Chime’s CRM will also keep you and your team organized with automatic lead routing where you can assign leads based on price, location, source, or type. 

We’re going to dive into all of that, and also a few other things you may not have expected. 

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Chime Features

Of all the features Chime offers, there are some that shine brighter than others. The ones that I really needed to put my sunglasses on for were their suite of lead insights and forecasting, automated nurturing, power dialer, social media marketing (Social Studio), customizable website, and closely app. Let’s dive in. 

Suite of Lead Insights and Forecasting

Chime is all about getting into the mind of the lead to build a relationship through AI powered insights.They call the combo of all the tracking and insights in their CRM operational intelligence, but we just think it’s pretty cool.

You’ll get lead scores, lead analysis, and smart suggestions to start. All of these are going to give you more insight into your leads activities, property info, how motivated they are etc. to help you know when to nurture and what info to present. My favorite part is the lead score. It’s like having someone rate the leads on a scale of 1-10 for you. 

In addition to the insights Chime offers, they also offer tracking of site users to see what they’re interested in, and offer them listings that’ll fit that criteria. Another feature that I found  to be really cool is the communications analysis. It basically helps you tailor your conversations to your leads to make them flow more smoothly.  

Having all of that info and insight into the leads is great, but sometimes it’s nice to see how you’re doing as well. Chime has a forecasting algorithm that tracks historical trends along with your performance to evaluate your progress. It’s great for teams as well to see how everyone is doing. You can also add business goals for the team and individual agents and track them through closings, lead volume, commissions and revenue.  

Automated Lead Nurturing 

Anything automated is always a plus in my book, and in this department Chime doesn’t disappoint. You’ll basically get to “auto” everything – import leads from multiple sources, property alerts, market analysis, and match the listing to the lead with the MLS and their search criteria. These things may sound simple, but the time it takes away to do them yourself will add up. 

Communication is super important, but can initially be a drain on your time. Chime’s automation and AI assistant will get you set up with texting (directly and in mass texts), auto-triggered emails (bonus, you can integrate all of your accounts from other providers so emails are in one place), and calls. 

Everyone likes an assistant, and Chime’s AI assistant seems like a keeper. It is an add-on feature, but very affordable, and helps with your automation. It’s triggered by lead engagement and will send out a showing or appointment request automatically. Used as a chatbot it keeps an eye on lead behavior to intuitively text them, and again save you time while getting the leads warm so you don’t have to jump in until you’re needed. 

Chime has lead nurture set up so that you can do short or long term nurturing. You can also mix it up and nurture by birthdays, or on the holidays etc. If you don’t want to use the prebuilt options, they let you create your own drip campaign template with a content library there to help you. You can also use their automated action plans for your nurture campaign to keep your team on the same page. 

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Power Dialer  

I am sure you’re sensing a theme here – take the repetitive tasks off my plate please. The power dialer is another time saver. You just click to call the leads until you get someone, leave pre-recorded voicemails, schedule your follow-ups, and leave notes for the leads. You get a live transfer to you or available agents on your team when a call goes through. 

You can either make your own call lists for the dialer, or use our friendly AI assistant to do it for you. The latter will determine your list based on if the leads are at a point where they need to be contacted. Plus, you’ll get scripting help for the call to help increase your success. Plus, Plus, it’s a 3 line dialer, so it’s calling three numbers at one time to really maximize efficiency. 

Just as you ignore numbers you don’t know, you too will probably be  ignored sometimes. So, in order to let the potential clients know they should reach back out, you can have a text or voice message set up to automatically go out to those unanswered calls. This is important because without it you are missing out on a lot of potential clients. 

Social Studio 

Social Studio is Market Leader’s automated (yes, more automation) social media marketing tool. It’s simple…for you that is. This smart feature allows you to post to all of your social media platforms from one spot. You can even create automatic listing videos that you don’t have to edit, may I add. 

Here is the cool thing, once you or your team’s listings sync from the MLS, all of your social channels that you integrated will automatically get posts for these. I really liked that you can also get new posts automatically ready to go out for any new status changes for a listing. This not only saves you time, but keeps your info current and top of mind for potential clients. You can have all your social content go straight to your website as well. 

Customizable Websites 

Chime prides themselves on their websites, and I can see why. They are aesthetically pleasing and high performing. Their CMS really ups your game by making it super easy to create a custom website. 

They have nationwide MLS feeds to keep your listings up to date, and accurate. You can even add your own off-market listings. In addition to listings, the websites offer things like a mortgage calculator, home evaluations, and other lead engaging options. 

A bonus is their websites are SEO focused while still being customizable. One of the surprising/impressive things to me is how easy the editing is given all the custom options at your fingertips. That often makes it too complicated and hard, but Chime has done a good job of giving you tons of options in a user-friendly way.

Closely App

First thing I like about this is that no matter what subscription you choose, you get access to the app. The app itself has some cool features. For starters you can send push notifications to your clients for things like new listings they may like, or open houses. You can also chat with clients through the app with messaging/calls, which is nice to keep the conversation in an easy-to-use place. 

Beyond the communication, their Closely app will give you analytics on your clients to help you know what they are really interested in. For the clients looking to buy, it gives location based search for listings and loan recommendations. Typically, if you want to buy you also need to sell, so the app will give them an updated home value plus trends in home valuations. 

Fun Fact – for an upgrade you can customize your app to fit your branding and style.

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Chime Pricing

Chime has 3 main packages to choose from – Core, Premier, and Enterprise. They also have tons of add-ons you can pay extra for. While you need to speak with a Chime rep to get exact pricing, we can go over some average pricing. While they are not the most expensive option, they definitely aren’t the cheapest either. Let’s look at the breakdown in cost of these packages. 

• Core. Their Core package is the lowest price starting at $449 + $15/seat/month + $500 one-time activation fee (keep in mind there are often discounts you can leverage). In this package you’ll get everything that comes with Chime (CRM, lead gen, website, and tons of features), minus external listing tools. 

• Premier. This package is geared towards teams. It starts around $700 a month + $1000 one-time set-up. You get 15 users and if you want to add more it’ll cost you $25 extra month per user. You’ll get the CRM, lead gen, websites, and all of the add-on options, but the CMA, Social Studio, and AI assistant are included. 
• Enterprise. This is Chime’s big dog, geared towards large teams and brokerages. Naturally it costs more. It starts roughly around $1500 a month and you get up to 100 users. The one time setup fee is $2000, and if you want additional users it’ll be an extra $12 a month per user. This package gets you everything, plus add-on options. 

Again, these prices are more of an average since you really need to work with  Chime directly to get the pricing for the package+add-ons that you need. 

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Biggest Pros

Now for the fun stuff – the perks Chime offers. They’ve got a lot going for them like their automation and customization options, they are full-featured, mobile-first technology, easy-to-use, and automated social media marketing. Let’s break these down. 

Highly automated and customizable

As I have mentioned numerous times, Chime really brings it in the automation department. They’ve really focused on time-saving features throughout everything they offer. More importantly, while saving you time they haven’t taken away the ability to customize, so your branding is reflected, and any specific needs you have are met. 

Feature Rich

Chime has really packed in the features. There is a solution for just about everything, which gives you tons of flexibility. You don’t really need to find any external solutions to combine with Chime because they cover all of your bases. 

Easy-to-use

Even with all the features Chime offers, they’ve made their offerings pretty easy to use. This is the best combo – lot’s of choices, but not so complicated that you can’t actually benefit from them. It helps that once you set most things up it is on auto-pilot with all of their automation options. 

Automated Social Media Marketing 

Yes, this is kind of a sub pro to automation overall, but it’s worth pointing out because it’s not common. Social media marketing is common, yes. But, having it automated the way Chime has done is not common in this space and it’s very helpful. 

Biggest Cons

Everything has its drawbacks, but I have to say Chime’s pros list outweighs it’s cons. That being said, there are still some cons we should note. Namely, the initial learning curve due to all of those features, and the price. 

Learning Curve

While Chime is easy to use overall, there’s still a learning curve that comes with all those features we love. In order to get the most out of Chime you’ll want to take some time in the beginning to really learn how to use all of the tools, and get them set up to work for you with the automation. 

Higher Price

This may not be a problem for some, but others may find the price associated with Chime to be a little steep. Especially if you want to take advantage of the add-ons, it can really increase your monthly budget. 

 

Who’s Chime best for?

Chime can be used by individual agents, teams and brokers, but there are some categories of people within those that will benefit more than others. Now let’s pull out some of those categories, and you can see if you fall into any of them. 

It’s great for high volume individual agents.

This is one of the only ways Chime makes much sense for individual agents. High volume agents typically have a higher budget, and have been around the block so they can more easily adjust to learning how to use all of Chime’s tools. 

It’s great for teams that are ready to grow and need help getting organized.

Chime’s tools will set a team up for success on the backend with all of their customization that can be done to make it work for specific team needs. Once you’ve learned all the tools the automation will allow you and your team to focus on closing the deals and growing your business. 

It’s great for teams and brokerages that want one platform to fulfill all of their needs.

Chime has you covered beginning to end, and for the price you’ll want to get as much out of them as possible. Brokerages and teams that don’t want to integrate with other platforms, and do want one solution, are a great fit for Chime.  

Who’s it not good for?

While everyone can use Chime, should they? Probably not. Like any platform, there are a few categories of people that will not benefit as much as others from their services. In this case, there aren’t many, but let’s go over the few. 

It’s not that great for individuals starting out.

Chime may take too much ramp up time and too much money, both of which you may not have if you are starting out and building your business on your own. While Chime is best for teams and brokerages, it can also help high volume solo agents, but will be too much for the newbies. 

It’s not that great for teams wanting something basic.

For some people more is less. Chime has a ton of features, and for teams that want to keep it simple this may be overwhelming, or a distraction to them. 

 

What other users say

I’ve given you my 2 cents on Chime, but let’s see what everyone else is saying. By and large people are satisfied with Chime. On major review sites they don’t hit a star rating below a 3.9, which is pretty awesome for an all-one-solution to be honest. 

People are happy with the  ease of use they offer, and called out many of the intuitive features they were glad Chime offered. Specifically, the data shared with them for teams along with the AI assistant. The one comment that didn’t line up from review to review, was the customer support. Some seemed very pleased while others were hoping for more. I will say, customer service is often a high-low topic in reviews for any service. 

It was encouraging to see that our take on Chime’s platform and offerings seems to be pretty inline with what others have experienced. The features seem to have won over quite a few users, especially in comparison to other competitors’ feature options. 

 

Chime Alternatives

There are obviously quite a few players in this space, but only a handful that’re top contenders. If you fell into one of the “maybe shouldn’t play to pay” with Chime categories, take a look at some of these alternatives. 

• Top Producer. If price was a concern, Top Producer is a little more budget-friendly. You won’t get as many avenues for the lead generation side, but they do cater more to solo agents.   

• Real Geeks. If you liked what Chime offered, but you flying solo as an agent or with a smaller team, Real Geeks could be a good fit for you. They have a good full-featured CRM and lead gen options.  

• CINC. This one is an alternative mostly going to be based on your preference. In terms of features and price they are pretty comparable to Chime, but will have some key differences as you dive into all of the details. 
• Follow Up Boss. If you have the lead gen covered, and the CRM part of Chime is the most enticing, but you don’t want the learning curve, Follow Up Boss might be a good alternative. They are not an all-in-one solution, but you can integrate your other tools and benefit from their robust CRM. 
• Sierra Interactive. They are another pretty comparable alternative in terms of what they offer, but they have a strong SEO focus, which is different from others. They are a great option if you are a smaller team or indy brokerage. 

The Final Verdict

I have to say overall Chime’s a solid platform that people really seem to like. They’re a good option for you if you’re a team or brokerage looking for an all-in-one solution and are ready to pay for quality. The only people I would say should maybe look at some alternatives are solo agents that just aren’t built up enough yet to justify the price. 

I would recommend diving deeper into their pricing by talking to one of their team members and making sure you understand the total cost once you customize the package with add-ons. Seeing how they stack up next to some alternatives in a more detailed way may help as well. 

Sources

• https://www.techradar.com/
• https://hooquest.com/
• https://www.softwareadvice.com/
• https://www.capterra.com/
• https://chime.me/