Ylopo CMO and Co-Founder Juefeng Ge walks you through everything you need to know about Ylopo and Homebot integration, and how to set up Homebot for all the homeowners (buyers & sellers) in your database.
[02:21] – How does the Ylopo and Homebot work?
Precisely, what are all the different steps?
As a consumer, this morning, we imported some couple of thousand leads that are existing leads inside our system that already have address data, already have all the different information filled out to receive a Home Value Report. All of those people are going to receive an email that says: “[First Name], your Home Value Report has been updated.” And, they’re going to receive a listing alert from us.
One thing to note is that the subject line is actually dynamic. So we have several different subject lines that we send out to keep tabs of the users’ attention, and it’s different every single month. When a consumer receives the Homebot + Ylopo Seller Alert, what they’re going to see is an alert that has a big button at the very top, the “estimated value of your home is x.” They’re also going to see “Market Competitiveness” data; they’re going to see “Market Trends” data; and they’re going to see “Recently Sold”, “Under Contract”, and “Active Listings” that directly impact the home price. If the consumer clicks on any of these options, it’s going to open up into your website. You’re going to confirm some property details and they can see the sold listing. And if they exit that experience, they will be able to see the entirety of our seller landing page. My expectation is that the vast majority of the people opening this email will look at that big button, click on it, and go straight into the Homebot experience. But we do provide a large menu of different content that we believe the consumer will be interested in.
So, once the lead clicks on Homebot, just to summarize this again, we are showing them a lot of unique metrics that they are not able to get anywhere else. Here’s the value of your home, but what’s more important is here’s the net worth of your home, too. And if you click on this button right here, you can see that the client is able to see their actual loan balances on this property. And that they can use that information to power the rest of this report. What have you paid so far towards principal and towards interest; what your different refi options are; how much money would you save if you refinance into these options; there’s a lot that you can drill down into. Tool tips: it shows you as an agent how much they can buy for their dream home, buy for an investment property, sell and pocket cash—all the different ways that they can use the equity of their home. Even details on if they rented their home on Airbnb, how much would they be able to make on a monthly and annual basis. So all of these rich data that you're seeing here is totally innate to Homebot.
And the vast majority, if not all, of the companies out there doing Seller Nurture just provide an AVM. And a lot of times, that AVM is actually coming from Zestimates or Zillow. The value of this property, as shown in here, is one of the most accurate AVMs (automated valuation models), which is a predictor of home price in the industry. In fact, it is the same platform that powers RPR. That gives you a sense of how precise it is.
Once the consumer has started, from the listing alert, clicked on the Homebot experience to view the Homebot, at that point, we are going to alert you as an agent. You’re going to receive a priority notification Ylopo: “The homeowner has actively engaged with your Homebot Digest Report. Contact them right away and discuss the unique data they just saw. Homebot Report Talking Points: Home value, loan balance, equity shown, Airbnb rates, pay your mortgage early tool.” So once you get alerted about this, now you can contact the lead, try to prospect with them, follow different scripting, etc. to contact that lead. That is how consumers see the Ylopo and Homebot integration, and how you’re going to see the Homebot integration as well.
[07:25] – How do you import your sellers and homeowners into Ylopo and Homebot?
There has been a hundred of you so far that have given us your imports. Our goal is to get all 1600 of our clients to do seller imports in our system. So, we can’t deliver Homebot alerts until...we cannot turn on Homebot until you have given us your seller and homeowner leads. So doing this as soon as possible is what is going to get Homebot a 100% set up.
So, how do you import your sellers and homeowners into Homebot? The first thing you’re going to do is go to ylopo.com/homebot.
[08:20] (Howard): This question here is personal, I don’t get it. We uploaded sellers today, but they sold their home, they no longer live there anymore. What good is Homebot info for a home they don’t live in anymore?
Ge: Well, in that case then, we need to set up a new Seller Report. I think that’s usually the exception, not the rule.
Howard: It’s just a terminology, but you’re talking about potential sellers. You’re not talking about people who helped sell their home and are no longer in that home.
Ge: Sure, if a lead is no longer in their home and you don’t have their new home address, then obviously, you would not set them up on those alerts. I think the category of leads that you would set up are hot prospects: you’re working with their potential listing or they haven’t listed with you but potential hot prospects. The second would be your past client database. I mean, talking about teasing out sellers from people that you’ve done business with already, this is a report where you’re gonna be able to get immediate priority notifications. If they’ve checked you out, you have a previous existing relationship with them. And the third category are leads that you have generated via seller marketing somewhere, whether it’s from PPC, Facebook, zBuyer, whatever the source where you actually have permission to contact this person. Those are the three types of leads.
Howard: Also, every single home search lead, every single buyer lead, let’s say half of it, live in a home...
Ge: Sure, but we can’t capture...we need a physical home address right now.
Howard: I get it. What we need to brainstorm as a group is, you’ve got, let’s say, 50% in your database who live in a home that they own. So we need to create communication tools to say, “Hey, we got this Homebot. This is great for you. You should engage with it. All you have to do is give us your home address and now you get this Homebot tool free.”
Barry: Look, big idea. Anyone who owns a house will like this. So if you have a person that you sold their home a year ago, and you helped them buy another one locally, this is relevant to them. This is about providing data for people that own homes. So if you’ve got 1,000 buyers that you’re not sure if they own a home or not, I think that an email campaign, simply basically going over what Homebot is… I posted the video that I’m using in YSC already where I just go through a generic report, and at the end you just say, “Hey, look, would you like this data?”
[11:15] (Barry): If so, and then, if I wanna manually create a homeowner getting a digest, will I send them to my home evaluation tool or home evaluation page on my website?
Yeah, good question. So this is the v.1 release of Homebot. So, there’s going to be a v.2, a v.3, all of those kinds of stuff. Today, you need to actually get the physical address of the homeowner, and then create the lead within our Stars account.
In the future of what we’re gonna be able to do or you can send out. So this is a splash experience that we have created on your website. It’s gonna have your branding, it’s going to show the value proposition of what you get with Homebot. And of course, the primary call to action is what property would you like to analyze.
And what I’m able to do, let me just demonstrate this…
Howard: While Ge is doing that, let’s put a bow tie on it. So Ellis points out, “Fantastic system! I think you need a buyer list, not a seller list. The buyers are likely still in their homes.” What I’m getting at is, use BombBomb; use Loom, like make a Loom video, and explain it and tease out all these buyers you have who are in a home, who say, “Sure, I’d love to have that. That’d be cool.” Now you’ve got more seller leads from the buyer, that’s what we’re trying to get at.
Barry: And you know, with marketing, it’s all about setting yourself apart. I say that a lot. There’s what is called the “blue ocean strategy.” And so the concept here is, you now have something very unique, and we’re gonna help you tell people about it through different types of branding campaigns and things like that. That’s forthcoming, it’s not live yet. But at the same time, this is something that should work in everything you do. Every time you talk to someone that’s a homeowner, you should be excited about this Homebot technology because they’re going to be; they’re gonna love it.
Howard: Two reasons, Barry. One is, everybody’s got listing alerts. Like, everyone says, “I’ll give you listing alerts.” Okay, we’re doing that and we should do that, but a lot of folks already have that. Whereas our guys have Homebot, and we know that at least for the next year, maybe longer, there’s still gonna be super low inventory. You may not agree with me, but I’m right, we’re gonna have crazy low inventory. Sellers are really important, right, so this Homebot tool unleashes the beast.
Barry: I don’t know if it’s live for everybody, Ge, but there is that ad client section in a share button within my Homebot. I don’t know if mine’s different than the main one that they’re getting, but I can share my screen if you wanna see it. And then you can help us find out whether or not this is something everybody has.
Ge: Yeah, it is something everyone has, but it is not connected to our system. You need to be able to add leads into Ylopo in order for them to go into Homebot. We, unfortunately, due to restrictions with Homebot and Ylopo, are not able to download the leads that come into Homebot and have not touched Ylopo.
Barry: So basically, it only comes from Ylopo to Homebot, but it doesn’t come back from Homebot to Ylopo.
Ge: I mean, you can still see all the data inside Homebot which I’m gonna show how you guys can access it. But if you are doing things within Homebot, you won’t see any Ylopo side.
Barry: But, at the same time, if I say, “You guys gotta check this out…” Somebody uses the link, registers on Homebot, that’s almost like a new lead in a matter of sorts and I can manually add them to Stars in Ylopo, in my CRM.
Ge: We absolutely can do that. Let me show you this experience that you guys are gonna get in two weeks or so. Basically, on your website, you’re gonna be able to put in the address. It’s going to check that address. You’re going to be able to enter in a phone number, your name and email address when creating your Homebot account; asking you some additional questions. Once we’ve asked those questions, we directly send the client into the Homebot experience. And so you can kinda see all of that data within Homebot. That experience that you just saw is what I would basically send out in an email drip to say, “Do you wanna see all this information?” You send them that link and once they fill it out, they’re automatically in your CRM and they’re set up as a seller. So, give us about two weeks. We understand how valuable it can be. It takes a little more testing to make sure all this works, and then we will release it to everyone.
Howard: If I have a new seller lead, how do I upload single seller leads one at a time? Will an email go out immediately once I upload it?
Ge: Yeah, I will walk you guys through that in a second...
[17:25] – How do you import your sellers and homeowners into Ylopo and Homebot? [continuation]
So what we’re gonna do is go to ylopo.com/homebot. And you’re going to go into the Setup section of Homebot. There are gonna be some questions that you need to answer; obviously the file that you need to upload, and some important notes for you to read.
The first thing is to download this excel template (https://bit.ly/ylopohomebot) and to start the process of formatting it so we can import it in our system. If I click on download on that link, as you can see this is the file that we send out, there’s not a lot of information we’re requiring from you. We need the first name, last name, email address, phone, address of the property, city, state, zip code, and lead source. We will import leads if you have a minimum of a zip code so you don’t need city or state necessarily, but you do need an address. So all these fields, essentially, are required other than city and state.
So, let me just demonstrate for you really quickly how you go ahead and do this import:
So the first thing that we ask from you is, all the leads should be in your CRM already assigned to the proper agent. The reason for that is because if you upload, say, 1000 or 500 seller leads or homeowners into our system and they’re not in your CRM, when this person comes back and does something on Homebot, we will send that lead to you as if it’s a new lead because it’s not in your CRM. So it could potentially get round robin to the next agent. If that’s the way that you want to have this set up, you are perfectly happy to do that or want me to do that. But for the vast majority of clients that I’ve talked to, they want to make sure the lead is properly assigned, which is why it is being shown in this format.
So once you have added the leads into your CRM, you can come up with the CSV or the excel file of all your sellers. In Follow Up Boss, this is really easy. In other CRMs, this is really easy. You just press the export button and get all your leads, and you’re ready to go.
The first thing I would do is identify the fields that are necessary and important for this info. And so it’s going to be First Name, Last Name, Lead Source, Email Address and Phone; and then Address, City, State, Zip Code. Once I’ve done that, my advice to you is to do a filter because we obviously can’t import leads that don’t have this information. I’m going to go to the address field and I’m going to, very quickly, remove all of the random addresses or blanks. That way, I have all the leads I can import into our system.
So in this export, if I look at a count, there are a total of 1036 seller leads that we could import into our system. If you give us a spreadsheet that does not have an address for this particular lead, don’t worry, you can still send it to us so you don’t wanna do a lot of data clean-up. As long as you give us the field, we’ll take care of it. We’re just not gonna import that lead and set them up on Homebot. If you give us the zip code, we will set them up on our seller alert that shows the market trends. But the only leads that we will set up on Homebot are going to be leads where you give us the address field. From there, it’s a very simple copy and paste job.
Once you have imported all of those fields, then all you need to do is fill out this form right here. All of the red starred fields are required. Upload the file that you just created. And, once you press Submit, now you’re off to the races. Right now, it is taking us about 24-48 hours to set up Homebot once you have sent us the file. For those of you who had already done so Thursday and Friday, last night we had tested the first batch, and today we’re going to import the rest. So by tomorrow morning, you should have all of your seller alerts going out with Homebot.
[22:50] (Barry) : What if one person owns more than one home?
If you submit the first name, last name, email address, and provide a new address, I believe we will create two alerts for that person.
[23:20] (Barry): A couple people have been asking, people have sent it, like, the day it went live, and there’s been no response from Support. If they had that experience, what advice would you give them?
If Support hasn’t gone back to you, that’s good news. That means that everything was done properly and we are now sending it to our data team to import. As I mentioned, it usually takes a 24-48 hour cycle, but we did our first batch of imports yesterday on Monday. It was successful, and so we are now going about importing the rest. So by tomorrow morning, everyone who has submitted seller imports will be getting their Homebot alerts tomorrow.
[24:12] (Barry) : Brenda asks, do we manually import our past client homeowners into our CRM or do we manually add to Stars, or both? I thought we were supposed to add to our CRM, and then send you the list? I’m confused, still working on getting my database up to speed.
Well, there’s a few different questions kinda been around that subject. Maybe you could characterize this process again for everybody. Where does this link, in the flow of things, where did they place it? In my mind, if you wanna start this process and you’ve got a bunch of people that own a home, you use this. And then going forward as you get more sellers, what would their process be?
Ge: Yeah, 100 percent, I’ll talk about that in a second. So here’s my recommendation for step-by-step how you do this.
First step: enter your seller leads into your CRM. If you have an excel, you can use the import feature for your CRM to import that. If you’re manually entering those past homeowners, manually enter them into the CRM. From there, do an export of the leads from your CRM, which then should allow you to get a sheet like this (this is an export from Follow Up Boss) that will contain all of the fields that you have just updated. Once you’ve done that, just copy and paste the columns that are relevant into the template that we built out. Send it to us and you’re off to the races.
So for the majority of clients, I would say, because you want your leads to be assigned to the right person in your CRM, you’re gonna wanna upload your CRM, export it from your CRM, and then put it into this format and send it to us. If, instead, you have all of your leads in an excel spreadsheet, you don’t care who the leads are routed to or you’re a single agent, in that case, just give us that excel file in this format and we will take it into our system. Lead becomes a priority lead and we send you that as well.
So, one more PSA announcement: two items. The first is, as I mentioned earlier, the three types of leads that you should be importing in our system are hot prospects that are already seller leads in your database, past clients of yours, and any seller lead that you have generated. We will not be accepting imports of any circle prospecting data like Remine, Cole Realty, Vulcan7, all those types of sources. Basically, FSBO expires and circle prospecting data, we are not importing into our system. The reason for that is, one, legally, you do not have the right to send them any messages. That could present problems for you. The second more important reason is that when we send alerts to people who do not expect to get anything from you, you have a really high spam rate. When you have a high spam rate, what happens is that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, all these guys say, “This is a spammer. This domain is spamming. We’re going to go ahead and block and blacklist that domain.” Which means that your future alerts, even your buyer alerts and legitimate alerts, will not be sent. So we want to protect you, we want to make sure that you’re only sending to people that are not gonna report you for spam, and that’s why we’re not allowing that data.
The second is, there are hard costs, meaning dollars that Ylopo is paying out on your behalf to Homebot. It’s based on how many leads in your system we are nurturing. And so, beyond a certain number, that number being 500 leads, we are going to charge you the same amount that Homebot charges us, which is $25 for every 500 leads. And so, if you have 10,000 leads that you’re importing in your system, which by the way should be like, less than one percent of our clients, we will charge you $250 a month. So it’s not a big fee, but it covers us beyond 500. And just know that 95% of our clients are probably gonna be in the 250-500 range. So, the vast majority should not pay anything. If we get an export from you that requires payment, Support will email you, let you know that, and get you an authorization before we proceed.
[29:22] (Barry): So, one question that I didn’t know the answer to...a lot of tag questions. There used to be a seller import tag, and people are asking about that. Do you wanna speak to that?
So we have removed the seller import tag as a function for importing leads on our system. There are two reasons for that. The first is, we found that there’s a lot of errors that arise when you tag leads that makes it so that your lead doesn’t get imported in our system. So as an example, you already applied a Y_import tag, applying another seller import tag does not import that lead. And so, you don’t have feedback from us of which leads get imported, which leads don’t, and you could think that you imported 1000 leads into our system, but in reality, you only imported let’s say, 100. So, to ensure the data quality, we are asking you to give us a CSV and export because we could audit that data and come back to you with any problems that we might have. And so that is the reason we are doing that. It should only be one extra step for you, which is to export your sellers, send it to us on this particular form, and that’s all you need to do. So, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
The second reason is because, with that import tag, we imported all the leads that you tagged, so we have no controls in place to audit the data and make sure that you are only importing in the leads that you’re supposed to. And so that created a vulnerability to potentially sink your email and your domain reputation. So for now, we are now allowing tags. In the future, that may come back but that’s the reason we’re not tagging these leads.
One other note on this, very great point, is that once a lead has been imported in our system and has been set up on a Homebot alert, we will send a tag of Seller_imported into your system. That way, if you sort by Seller_imported, you will see all of the leads that have been set up on Homebot.
[31:49] (Barry): Another one that I didn’t know the answer to is, if they add someone to Stars and they ask to add it to Follow Up Boss, of course the answer is yes to that. But, if we do not have a list to upload, why wouldn’t we just add to Stars?
Yeah, 100%. If you don’t have a list to upload, then you should just add to Stars. And, I’ll jump ahead real fast on the Stars site. On every Stars link, there is a button that says “Create Seller Alert”. If you press the “Create Seller Alert”, you can go ahead and give us a zip code, address, and a quick label: it could be home address, it could be anything, Alert 1. And tell us the frequency that you wanna send, as well as anyone you wanna CC. Create the seller alert and automatically set up on Homebot.
You can also see the seller alerts that we have set up already for the consumer. If you press Edit right here, you can see all the details of that particular address. And so, you can both add multiple, as well as edit the existing. And that’s all within the Stars.
[33:14] – How do you see what the consumer sees?
So right now, in order to see what the consumer sees, you’re gonna go into the Homebot experience. In the future, you’re going to be able to do this right inside Stars that is part of our v2 release. In order to go into Homebot, there are multiple ways you can do that. If you are in Mission Control and you are an admin, if you click on the Marketing tab, there’s going to be a “Visit Homebot” button. When you click that button, you’re going to go into the Homebot backend and you’re gonna be asked to log in. We have set up a Homebot account for every client, and that Homebot account is using the email address that you use inside Stars to log into your Ylopo account. If you don’t know what that email is, just email support@ylopo.com and we will send it back to you.
So, enter the email. And what’s going to happen the first time you log on is, you’re going to get an email into the account that says, “Log in to Homebot. Here’s the magic link…” And once you press this button to set a password, it’s going to allow you to go into the Homebot experience to set a password. Now, I would use a generic password because in order for your agents and other people on your team to be able to see Homebot, you are going to need to give them this access. So they’re all going to come in here, log in, and view the content from Homebot. Once again, version 2, we’re going to put all these in Stars but version 1, you have to log into Homebot. You can also just give them this link right here. If you type in homebot login, click on “Real Estate Agents | Homebot” and on the login button. So, Homebot is pretty easy to get into. Just go into your website and you can log in.
Once you have created an admin link, you press Log in, you give them the password. If you ever forget, you can get the link emailed to you. And you are going to go into the Homebot backend. In order to see who has viewed content, there’s a couple ways to do that. The easiest way is, let’s say this is someone that already generated a priority alert, you want to talk to them right away. Chances are you’re going to see them on the first page very high up in the Activity feed, which is a chronological view of what’s going on. So, if I click on [Juefeng Ge], I click on that button, and I click on the address of this property right here, it’s going to take me to the homeowner’s profile. It gives you some basic information about these homes. And if you click on Preview Digest, you’re going to be able to see the exact Homebot report that the consumers saw.
If you have an admin and you want to, let’s say they’re going on a listing presentation or you want to keep the agent that got this abreast of what basically has been sent out, you can press the Send Digest button and put in any email address right here. Press the Send button and it’s going to go ahead and send whoever you put in the email address for a copy of the actual digest.
The other aspect is, in reality, chances are that when someone contacts you about Homebot, they’re gonna reply to your email. And if they replied to your email, as long as you go down in this email section and then press the Home Valuation button, you will also be able to see the exact digest. So, a couple of different ways to do that. The clearest way is to go into Homebot and see all that information in there. If, for some reason, you don’t see the lead in your Activity feed, you can go into the Homeowners tab and you can search for their contact information; everything else is the same. So that is how you see what the consumer sees on the Homebot site.
[37:53] (Barry): A lot of people are saying, when they go into the Homebot link in Mission Control, they’re getting a prompt that says like, “Pro Plan Only”. And so they’re confused as to why they’re being asked to pay?
It is probably because you are using a different email address than the one you are using for Stars. And as a result, it’s trying to create a new account for you. So if you run into that, just email support@ylopo.com, ask for what email you used to log into Homebot. And once you have that email address, you should not be prompted to pay.
[38:31] (Howard): There’s been a bunch of questions about why they are asking for a credit card, so support@ylopo.com. There’s also been a lot of questions repeatedly about “I was already on Homebot, what do I do now?”, so maybe you could address that?
Also: What if you already have a Homebot account?
In terms of the Homebot experience that you get if you already have Homebot, there’s quite a few things that you get for Homebot now that you will not get if you move your Homebot account into Ylopo.
As an example, on the Homebot alert side, if you had the normal Homebot product, you are able to set for a consumer the agent that the lead is assigned to. So all the branding is related to John Smith or whatever is the case. With Ylopo, we just create one team account for everyone of our clients and so the branding and all that kind of stuff is going to be specifically for your team. So that’s something you’ll lose.
Another thing you’ll lose is, Homebot has a whole buyer market trends section to their product that is very popular. That feature, as well, you might lose if you go off of Homebot. Just understand that if you move off of your existing Homebot into Ylopo, there are some functions that will not work. Over time, though, I believe most of those functions will work.
If you want to move your Homebot account to Ylopo, all you need to do is to email Homebot, tell them that you’re interested in cancelling your existing account and transferring those leads into Ylopo. And ask them to export all your Homebot leads to you into a CSV format. Once they have cancelled your account, then after that it’s the exact same process: you download the leads, we import into our system, everything is set up and they start receiving email alerts. And so, for the most part, if you follow these steps, the consumer may not even be aware that they’re not getting a Homebot alert because they’re going to get a more valuable and a higher converting email directly from you once you’ve imported those leads. So the bottom line is, cancel with Homebot, get an export from them, import it into our system, and we turn them on our site.
Howard: So Ge, at the highest level, they move over, cancel Homebot, then now have Homebot for free through Ylopo. Over time, some of the tools that they had will come back with us. But the highest level will be the number one or two arguments to go with an integrated Ylopo-Homebot system, versus you’ve got Ylopo, you’ve got Homebot, and they’re separate worlds.
Ge: Yeah, I’d say the two big benefits that you’re going to… The first benefit is, if you guys have seen the Homebot alert, it pretty much is just an alert that has a button at the very top that says “View your Home Digest” right now. With our Homebot integration, we are sending them a much more feature-rich experience than just a big button that you can click. So we haven’t enough data for me to conclusively say this but, my suspicion is that we are going to get even a higher open rate and click rate and engagement rate from our integrated alerts than you might get directly from Homebot.
The second thing and probably the most important thing is, right now if someone engages with Homebot, you have to log into Homebot in order to see all that content. You have to contact the lead from there, do everything within the Homebot system. As an integrated experience, as soon as someone has engaged with your system, we’re going to send you a priority alert that’s gonna show up in your CRM and you’re able to have this integrated experience. So if you want to stop logging into Homebot to see everything, you wanna work out of your CRM, that is a functionality that you’re going to get with Ylopo and Homebot that you aren’t gonna get with Homebot.
[43:35] (Howard): Ellis asked, “What is the frequency of the Homebot emails?” He’s testing it and he’s getting emails everyday he sent to himself. And he’s wondering, is that too much? Is getting Homebot emails everyday too much?
So if you are on the Homebot integration itself, I believe you get a Homebot every month. I’ve never heard it being sent everyday. If you’re integrated on the Ylopo side, the default is weekly so they will receive alerts on a weekly basis. If it’s dynamic, right? So if they don’t open the email after a certain amount of emails, we switch it to monthly. Then we switch it to quarterly. If they start engaging on every single email, then we’re gonna start increasing the frequency from quarterly to monthly, from monthly to weekly, and so on and so forth. So the lowest frequency should be set at “weekly”. If you are seeing us sending these on a daily basis, if it’s not coming from Homebot, right? Homebot is obviously their own thing. If it’s coming from Ylopo, then please email us at product@ylopo.com and we will check out and see if there’s a bug going on.
[45:00] – What are your configuration options for Homebot/Ylopo?
As I mentioned, there are some restrictions to the Homebot experience because we’re only creating one account for the team. When we set this up for default, what we’re doing is we’re putting the name of the account as your first and last name of the account holder. The company is going to be whatever company you gave us for your website. And then the contact information, once again, is going to be the contact information of the account. If you would like for us to use a different contact information, company name, phone number, all that kind of stuff—just complete the form at the Optional section at the bottom of this form and we will update everything.
Unfortunately, right now for the email address of your account, we are not able to change that. So it’s going to display whatever you use in our Stars platform right here. That’s also a v2 feature we’re looking at to be able for you to put in any email address that you want.
That being said, how much do people engage with this top section or rather the entire report, chances are it’s gonna be very low engagement there, so I wouldn’t worry too much about the branding other than to make sure that it is at least semi-correct for your information. So that is the configuration options that you have available for Homebot and Ylopo.
[46:40] (Barry): One person is talking about importing their data and phone number formats. Basically, I don’t know if some of her data has no dashes, no periods, or no parenthesis around the area code, and sometimes it does. And she’s concerned about normalizing all that data. Do you have any hacks or what would you recommend that she do, that’s ‘cause she said she’s taking a long time to work through all that?
Yeah. We accept most formats so if you give us something that looks like this, or something that has all the numbers or some dashes, we should be able to normalize all that for you. If you wanted to be triple sure that you’re doing so, here’s some excel hacks that you can use.
So if you go to Ctrl + H or go into the Edit section, I believe… It’s going to come up with the Replace function. And what you can do here is, say, any parenthesis right here, I’m going to replace. Any kind of parameters, I’m gonna replace. I’m gonna replace all spaces and I’m gonna replace all dashes with blanks. Now we have this format that we’re looking for. So use the Replace function and replace all of the extra markers and all that kind of stuff and you’ll have a clean spreadsheet. But if you have some other configurations, you should be fine.
[48:55] – How do you update a seller’s Homebot already in Ylopo?
I just showed you guys that, right? If you go to Ylopo Stars, if you click on Seller alert or edit the Seller alert, you’ll be able to add a Seller Digest to any lead in Ylopo. So that’s pretty straightforward.
[49:15] – Why and how do you add a lender partner?
On the lender side, I highly recommend that you add a lender partner to Ylopo. The reason is because your lender is going to get all of the positive signals from Homebot if they start playing with the refi widget, if they look at home equity kind of concepts, all that kind of stuff that relates to refinancing that your lender is going to get, and they’re gonna obviously value your partnership more if they’re a part of Homebot.
The caveat to this is they have to make a small investment—it’s a de minimis amount of money—to also sign up for Homebot because of RESPA and co-marketing. So in order to respect RESPA and co-marketing, they have to get their own account on Homebot and that they will be able to see all these details.
[50:17] – Follow-up: How do you do that?
It’s really, really straightforward. If you go into the Homebot experience, at the very top is a button that says Co-Sponsor. You click on that, you put in your lender’s first name, last name, email address, and they’re going to receive an invite. They set up Homebot; they’re gonna be able to see everything. And the branding is going to be on all of your Homebot alerts.
I think this is a no-brainer. I don’t know what lender would not want access to your homeowner and seller database and be able to get those refi opportunities.
[50:51] (Howard): What is the cost for the lender to license Homebot? What’s the monthly cost?
I’m not 100% sure. I believe that it’s up to a certain number of lenders, like on their team, it’s $100. I think it might be like two lenders, or something like that, is $100. Don’t quote me on this. I mean, your lender needs to contact Homebot in order to get it. But I believe Homebot told me their average lender pays around $100-$150 a month.
[51:31] (Howard): But this is really a requirement for our clients that if they gotta get a lender onboard at some point, right?
It’s not a requirement but, if you don’t do it, I think your lender’s missing out huge opportunities so I don’t know why anyone would not do this. Especially as a realtor, you’re not paying for this yourself.
Howard: And if our clients don’t yet have a lender as a co-marketing or advertising partner, I would think that this would be a good way to build that relationship at first and say, “Let’s do this.” And then over time, “Hey, do you wanna continue this relationship with me? Here’s the next step...” So it might be a good way to get that conversation going with a lender; build the relationship and rapport with the Homebot connection. And then bring it up to, “Hey, why not we just generate a lot more buyer and seller leads…” and then they could actually help you kinda double your spend if you bring them on as a 50% co-marketing partner.
Ge: Exactly. And there’s two other benefits: one for you, one for the lender. For the lender, they are getting access to seller and homeowner opportunities that’s from your database. So these are all net new opportunities so obviously, that’s a huge benefit to them.
The second is the lender will import in all the homeowners that they have done mortgages for. Those are opportunities that you have access to that you did not have before. So it makes total sense to bring this lender onboard because you mutually have a win-win of being able to access each other’s database, in addition to everything else that Homebot brings to the table.
[53:12] – What should you do once you receive a priority alert?
So this one’s for you, Barry. So once an agent has received the Homebot priority notification, what would you recommend, step-by-step, they should do with this particular lead?
Barry: I would say that remind yourself that the only person who’s excited about a home being sold is the agent. Sellers don’t get excited normally about selling their house. That being said, however, this is a great opportunity for you to be super relevant for the homeowner. And, honestly, if you just approach it with the idea of, “I’m sure you’re not looking to sell your house just yet, but wasn’t that information interesting?” What’s gonna happen is the seller’s gonna be disarmed and you’re gonna be able to talk to them about their investment. And from that angle, you’re gonna be relevant to them and continue the conversation, and talk about what their plans are. If I have buyers, which I’m not sure if you saw in that report but I do have buyers looking, would you be open to discussing selling the home with them? So it’s just a great conversation starter; that’s a great way to summarize it.
Howard: And Ernie, who is the CEO of Homebot, he said, “Look, if they want to talk about tapping into the equity of their home, you’ve got to let them do it. You can’t just keep saying, ‘Yeah, but you could sell it.’” That’s not what they want, right? So we want what they want. They wanna pull equity out of their home; they wanna refinance; they want to get an equity line of credit, whatever they wanna do, then you help them. Help them become the expert. Connect them with your lender. Like, help them navigate those waters. Now you’re a trusted advisor. You will be there for the day when they wanna sell, or they wanna buy a second home, or they refer you to somebody else as the trusted advisor, right? Plus, every time you can get an opportunity to your lender, you create another reason why that lender should become a meaningful advertising partner with you.
[55:33] – What’s next for the Ylopo-Homebot integration?
Like I said, this is a v1 integration. There’s a lot of rough edges here, and the reason is because this is the first integration, that is a deep integration, that Homebot has done with anyone. And so there’s gonna be some things that we need to add and they need to add in order for this to be a seamless experience.
The first thing is, we actually have a new version of our Seller Alerts that is even more beautiful and more full, that as soon as we get done with that we’re gonna replace our current seller notifications or Seller Alerts. The biggest feature I’m looking forward to is that you will be able to see this Homebot Digest right inside Stars and any site priority alerts, so there’s no reason for you to even log into the Homebot experience other than to add a lender or to see some other details. That is going to be a hotfix at v2 that we’re making.
For a lot of you that have asked how do you add leads to Homebot later on, the first thing is you can manually add them and create the seller alert, as I mentioned, through Stars. We will, however, be giving you two other things. The first is, you can specify a new lead source, like zBuyer, of the leads coming in, to say that these are all seller leads. We will then automatically get them set up with our technology. The second thing is, we are going to give you access to the Seller Experience. And if you want to import a lead very quickly, you can even just drop your address, register them, all that kind of stuff, and then all of these leads are gonna go straight into your CRM. And you can also, of course, send this to your database or buyers, or even sellers that you don’t have addresses for and give them value, and all these leads that are generated will automatically be set up on everything.
And then the last thing is we are going to do a push notification that allows you to send out Homebot instantly, in addition to everything else that we’re doing. So that is what’s coming up, and you will have these incremental improvements over the next couple of weeks.
And we will probably do another training webinar when we have our Seller Lead Generation piece of this done so that we can share all that with you as well.
[58:13] (Barry): When you add someone to Homebot, how soon until they receive… So, you mainly add them to your CRM and Stars, you create a Seller Alert, when do they actually receive that Homebot Digest?
Yeah, first thing the next day. Basically, we send out these Seller Alerts once per day. And it’s staggered from a time perspective so, it might be anywhere from, say, 8AM to 11AM, whatever the time frame is that’s going to get you a high engagement rate. And so, if you submit a new lead at, say, 6 in the morning, there’s a chance that that day, they will receive an alert. If you submit it at 2 in the afternoon or some other time, then, chances are, it’s gonna go out the next morning. Great question.
[59:24] – “The assigned agent only needs to be properly marked in Follow Up Boss/your CRM and not in the spreadsheet, correct?”
Yes, you do not need the assigned agent in the spreadsheet. That will be set on your CRM side.
[59:51] – “Leads that you have already imported into our system that have an address, we will automatically set up on Homebot, right?”
So, right now I believe, in our system total we have about 60,000 sellers that have addresses. All those people, I think starting today on a rolling basis, will start receiving the Homebot alerts. Just to be double sure that we have all of your seller leads that have addresses, my recommendation is to just send us an export, anyways. If we already have that in our system, we’ll just keep it. It’s better to be safe to send us all the alerts.
[01:00:31] – “I have a lender in my current Homebot. What happens to the lender partnership when I switch to Ylopo?”
That lender comes with you. So when we set up the new Homebot account, that lender will be associated with that lender account that we’ve created for you. And so everything else should move smoothly, and Homebot will help you do that.
[01:00:49] – “Can we upload lender-seller leads?”
You know, if it’s your lender’s homeowner leads, we will allow you to send them. Technically, you don’t have permission, but at least, you have the permission of your lender. And you should not get crazy spam rates or anything like that. I would say that’s a safe source for you to import.
[01:01:29] – “What’s the best way for me to get additional seller leads into the process? I assume you don’t want to import a spreadsheet every time I find a potential seller.”
So temporarily, you’re gonna go into Stars and you’re going to go ahead and set up their search by creating a new search alert and all that kind of stuff. In the very near future, you will be able to set up a particular source if you get a lot of seller leads from, say, zBuyer or BoldLeads, you’re gonna be automatically able to import those leads. And within the next two weeks here, you’re gonna have a landing page inside your website that you can enter those leads from directly, and it’s going to go into Homebot. And we can also go into the Ylopo section and press “Add Lead” and be able to add that lead as well. So auto-import is covered, and manual leads missions are covered as well.
[01:02:17] – “What’s the best scenario for us users of Homebot in incorporating this new integration? I know I need to upload my list and then have Homebot stop my current seller outreach monthly. I want to avoid duplication.”
There should not be any duplication if you remove your leads from Homebot and send it to us, then we will just start sending them Seller Alerts. But if you cancel your Homebot account, then their alert will stop and our alerts will happen once the import happens. So there’ll be no duplication.
[01:02:47] – “Once you upload our list, when will the homeowners get their first digest?”
Tomorrow morning, yup.
[01:02:52] – “If we want to send to both the husband and wife, we want the emails to both the husband and wife, do we set them up separately?”
You can set them up separately if you want, or when you’re setting up the alerts inside Stars, you can specify the CC address. So if you want it automatically done, like through an import, set them up separately. If you want to add the lead yourself, you can do it through the CC Email section.
[01:03:20] – “Once we do the initial import with Support, do we need to set ourselves a reminder or something to regularly send Support a file, say, monthly?”
You won’t need to do that going forward because we’ll auto-import those leads, if it’s from a lead source that is a seller. But, if you get sellers outside of your CRM that are not going into your CRM already, then in the near future you’re gonna have this seller page where you can enter the leads yourself. Or, if you have them from a spreadsheet or whatever is the case, then, obviously, send it to us as an import. So, most cases, no. But in some cases, you’ll want us to send us the list just in case.
[01:04:04] – We’ve had a few questions about people who have multiple homes. So like, what about an investment property as well as their primary property?
Yeah, just enter their contact information the same and put in a new address and we’ll set it up.
Okay, so they can have the same name, two addresses, three addresses, and it’ll work.
[01:04:40] – “Does it make sense that non-lender partners advertise and have their logo on my website?” (Kind of not really a Homebot question, this is more of a sort of Branded Site question… Non-lender partners advertising on their Branded Site)
Yeah, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do that, especially if you can get them to contribute someone on the marketing side. So there’s no harm, no foul for doing that. I’ve definitely seen clients do it.
[01:05:07] – Okay, this is a tricky one. “What if the lender wants to keep his leads attached to a client that another agent sold them the house. Can they separate that in Homebot fully?”
So I think what this is asking is, if the lender has leads that are, say, homeowners that they’d done mortgages for that already have a realtor associated with them. In that situation, sure, you can import those leads in if you want to, or the lender gives you permission to do that, you can still import them into Homebot. I guess, from our perspective, we don’t really care. But you and the lender need to work that out.
[01:05:51] – Another tricky question: “Can one lender partner with multiple Ylopo users or clients, if each Ylopo client has a unique account?”
Yeah, 100 percent.
Barry: A lot of confusion around if you have more than one lender. Listen, you guys need to prioritize what you’re doing. And this is an opportunity for you to give your lender something that’s better than what they were giving you. They were giving you Homebot to get you in—to plug you in and connect you to them. Now what’s gonna happen and you’re gonna say, “Hey, thank you for that. But if you’d like to join me on my Homebot, now it’s gonna be integrated with Ylopo. It’s different from what you have.” And if they’re not partnering with you, it makes it a super easy conversation because you can give them access to your CRM and everything like that.
[01:07:08] – “If we partner with a lender, can we then import the lender seller contacts into our CRM/Stars and Homebot? Or they have to opt in through the lender’s Homebot account?”
No, they don’t need to. So if they export those leads, they send it to us at ylopo.com/homebot, then we will import it and then you will see all their contacts. So as long as they give you permission, you import those leads in, we can set them up on Homebot automatically.
[01:07:42] – “What happens with imported buyer leads with addresses?”
They get treated as sellers.
Yeah, that’s the giant point I’m trying to make, which is: most of your leads, most of you, have come in as “buyer” leads. I keep trying to make this point. For me, there’s no such thing as a buyer lead and a seller lead. They’re people, they’re relationships, and we’re gonna keep you connected with them for life. And at certain times, they’re buying; at certain times, they’re selling; and at most times, they’re doing both. So now we’ve got, basically, the connective tissue or tools no matter what they’re signalling they wanna do. But buyers that live in a home, they are signalling before anything if they’re starting to search. And at some point, they’re gonna wanna list their homes.
[01:08:32] – “So if you’ve got a lead source that’s auto-importing as a seller lead, they’re getting Seller Alerts, they’re getting Homebot, does that add to the 500?”
Yeah, it does not add to the 500 right now. But if you abuse that logic, meaning you are importing in thousands of leads, then we’re gonna come back and charge you a fee. So, if it’s like, 50, 100—whatever those types of leads, we are not gonna charge you. We, frankly, probably wouldn’t even do an audit unless we see a crazy amount of activity on your side. So right now, no, but for the people who have really big traffic then, yes. Any lead that Ylopo generates on your behalf does not count to your total.
[01:09:21] – “So this is sort of an interesting question. How do I get Homebot on a webpage within Sierra Interactive’s platform versus just having it in the CRM as a priority alert?”
Howard: I’m not exactly sure what she means by a webpage within Sierra Interactive platform but, it just got me thinking about to what extent would Homebot be a present sort of tool on our clients’ Ylopo Branded Sites.
Ge: Yeah, so basically, right now on your Branded Site we already have a Home Valuation section. And, by the way, anyone that comes in through the Home Valuation section right now, today, is going to automatically get set up with Homebot as well. The current Home Valuation experience is what we have done on our 1.0 and 2.0 release. And so, very soon, what we’re gonna do once we test this feature is, we are going to drive the consumer to this landing page instead. So fairly soon, as soon as the consumer comes to your website, they press Home Valuation, they’re going to go into your seller experience, but right now we’re still testing it.
Howard: So, Ge, do you believe that once a lot of folks are seeing this on our clients’ Branded Sites, there’ll be, in a sense, more Homebot initiations?
Ge: Yeah, 100 percent. People have come up with different ideas that are all interesting. They’ve said, “Hey, what if I do a postcard mailer, put the Homebot link in there and generate leads that way?” Totally fine, go for it. That’s a great idea. Run your own advertisements to this page, also a great idea. Post it organically in a lot of places, you can totally do that. So just think of this as a versatile landing page that allows you to do whatever you want and get leads into Homebot.
[01:11:07] – So here’s a question, it might be conflating two different things but, how soon can we add to our PPC budget to do seller ads?
Yeah, probably about two weeks. We’re gonna start testing it this week. Let’s say three weeks, right? We’re gonna test it for a couple of weeks, make sure it works properly, and then we’re gonna do it.
Howard: Okay, guys, remember like, going forward the big mantra, everyone should write it down, is smother your market. Smother your market. We’re gonna come up with a sort of one-pager on why you really need both social and pay-per-click working together because they cost-fertilize in a super unique way, and you’ll be everywhere where the consumer is. Whether they’re on Google searching, whether they’re on social media, right? Lead comes in on Google, you remarket them on social media; they’re gonna see you, kind of, everywhere. And we need to see you three, four, five times smother your market. You gotta do both.
[01:12:15] – “Will you be making DyVA video ads so we could or will post the new awesome platform?”
Absolutely. We definitely are. Because of time constraints, I’m not gonna show what we’ve already done, but we are already working on it.
[01:12:39] – Just to reiterate, if somebody imported 6,000 seller leads when they first joined, will those automatically get the new Seller Alert?
They will, as long as you provided us an address when you imported those leads. But if they don’t have an address, then we’re not sending that out. And so just to be double sure that you’ve given us all the data, I would recommend just giving it to us again. But yes, anyone that you’ve already given to us that has an address, we automatically set it up here.