Inman

Ascend Lead Sites is ready to elevate agents in 2021

Have suggestions for products that you’d like to see reviewed by our real estate technology expert? Email Craig Rowe.

After some downtime during the “pandemic months” to augment features and stabilize any performance insecurities within her product, Seattle-area agent Connie Ly is ready to formally roll out her very capable one-woman real estate business suite.

As if being a parent and a working agent (with 50 five-star reveiws) for Agency One isn’t enough to sap a person’s creative energy, Ly decided to add software developer to her resume. And judging by the results, Ascend Lead Sites (formally Zephyr Leads) is no meager “side hustle.”

Ascend Lead Sites focuses on offering IDX-powered websites for lead generation that rests on a fully featured CRM, content management system and menu of digital advertising integrations.

Ascend Lead Sites has a new ringless voicemail feature in its dialer tool, and 24/7 support for the system is powered by ZenDesk.

Ly is catering Ascend Lead Sites to those individual agents who want but can’t reasonably afford what the bigger names in proptech lead gen and marketing offer.

For the stand-alone CRM and solid baseline of marketing features, it’s $25 a month. The Pro Plan, with 500 texts, video email and an IDX website is $99 a month, and the Elite, which offers all features with 2,000 texts and ringless voicemail, is $189 a month.

LionDesk, a well-established industry name, became what it is today using this same low-cost, full-feature approach to helping agents. Instead of aiming to serve giant teams and brokerages, your operations team is tasked with supporting countless individual accounts.

This high-attention roll-out strategy absolutely works, as it creates a swell of individual brand champions and allows more granular user feedback as the product evolves. However, it takes careful internal oversight and deliberate scaling.

LionDesk has built on its success to offer custom enterprise solutions and forge notable MLS partnerships, as well as smartly expand into other industries. I see no reason why Ly can’t emulate what David Anderson’s team now offers to more than 150,000 agents.

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.