kvCORE for a new brokerage "Fail"
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use kvCORE as our primary company website as well as the CRM, Google PPC and Social network lead gen system. We have tried to use it for CMA's and listing promotions as well. This is sold as an all-in-one suite that will easily allow all your needs to be met from one dashboard with minimal training. We have found that every aspect of the system we have tried using has either been so difficult to learn or, more often, in my experience, completely incapable of functioning as needed according to tech support that we don't use most of the system at all and rely on other systems we have to pay for on top of kvCORE.
Pros
- Support AI bot is good at replying within 1 to 24 hours but never sooner
- Gives you daily reminders to call people you have already identified as not to be called
- Provides an attractive IDX web site that is down almost as often as it works
- Provides a search alert feature for clients that won't allow you to set up searches with custom criteria more than one option per search
Cons
- Email feature could allow you to send with an attachment
- In my opinion, support could help find resolution or answers to simple problems in less than 3 weeks average, difficult issues take longer and often never get resolved.
- Prospect search alerts could allow reasonable functionality, Cannot set up a search for a 1 story, 1.5 and a 2 story home only. In my experience, this request will land no results because each one cancels the other out and the system will not allow to set up a search for one or the other. We were informed by support after months of trouble with this that it won't be fixed likely ever because no other brokers want to be able to set up searches with that type of customization.
- Provide a dashboard for company and personal account settings that allows you to see what your money is being spent on. In my experience, there are tons of add ons and as soon as you sign up for one you never get to see what you're paying for. You have to go through, in my opinion, the horrible support system to try and learn what you have and cancel or add things. Very user unfriendly and feels like they are trying to scam extra charges to your credit card.
- In my experience, the system is so difficult to use that it's hard to get agents to use it. The ones that do get discouraged pretty quickly when the simple basics don't function regularly and the advanced features are often so difficult to figure out that the agents give up before they even figure out if they do work or not.
- In my opinion, the quality and quantity of the very expensive PPC ad leads are very poor. Majority have no phone and bad email is very common as well. In my experience, when we switched our PPC ads to kvCORE we doubled our ad spend and immediately started getting half as many leads and most with no contact info. I feel they do make you agree to a year contract before allowing you to see how bad their leads are. This is clear why after using this for 6 months.
- If you have support questions, in my opinion, the chat box bot is worthless because even though it's AI it still doesn't respond in a timely matter. It seems like the system watches to see when your browser activity stops and then responds to you. In my experience, when you don't reply immediately it asks if you're still there then it closes your support request out. Even if you're still on the computer working you don't see this unless you're in kvCORE watching the support box. Who in business has time to sit for hours on end watching a support box window, especially one that almost never has any answers for you?
- The sales department for kvCORE is great and they will make it look like a total game changer, which it is. In my opinion, the problem they hide from you is that it changes the game to one where you start losing unless you find another system quickly to cover all the bases that kvCORE doesn't. My understanding is that the custom plan that you can't get unless you're over 100 agents may have better support and allow you to customize the system to actually work. On the lower plans for smaller brokerages and teams, I feel this is a nightmare of a system. So robust with features that do you no good because, in my opinion, they don't function as advertised.
Most Important Features
- Website provided is good looking but, in my experience, doesn't work well for nurturing new or existing clients because it only allows you to set up searches showing them everything in the area they want or you can narrow it to one specific thing.
- AI is pushier than most we have had in the past, in my experience, which has resulted in a lot of extra unsubscribes.
Return on Investment
- ROI has been 0 so far over 9 months. In my opinion, the critical flaws in the system have cost us time and money with the hundreds of hours spent trying to get to a resolution with no luck.
- In my opinion, the smart social leads and the Google PPC leads have been very poor quality at best. We have been buying these types of leads for years so it's not that we don't understand what to expect here. In my experience, most of our leads are coming with no phone number and many with bad emails too. PPC requires you to sign a long term commitment without knowing what kind of results you will be getting.
Other Software Used
Brokermint
