Author: Jamie Saine

Introducing CarrotAgency! Grow Your Local Marketing Business without Exploding Overhead

For the past 13 years, Carrot has helped local real estate investors and agents dominate search results and generate highly motivated leads with websites built on SEO best practices, industry-leading performance, and visitor-to-lead conversion elements driven by science and testing, not guesswork or trends.

That’s why websites on the Carrot platform dominate 30-50% of the top search results for impactful real estate keywords across major markets. And why members who try something else come back time and time again.

“Was promised the moon … wasted $9k, didn’t get what was supposed to be delivered, they stopped responding to my emails and texts, and lost all the [SEO] progress I had with my Carrot site. Expensive learning lesson.” — Gagan S.

“I had a PPC vendor who built a super techy site that they swore would out convert my Carrot site — it didn’t. I paid $5,000 to have a custom site designed that was really pretty, but I got less leads. My expensive, pretty site was converting at 1-2% on SEO when my Carrot site was converting at like 8.5% on SEO.” — Ryan Dossey

When you build a product that performs well, people want to use it. And we noticed local marketing agencies using Carrot to get real-world results for their clients. The platform worked for them and delivered those client results, but it wasn’t easy for agencies to use. So we fixed it.

CarrotAgency empowers local marketing agencies to launch high-performing, SEO-optimized websites in minutes based on their own custom template and built on Carrot’s industry-leading lead generation website platform. Managing clients is simple with a clean, streamlined dashboard that eliminates complicated account switching. Effortlessly keep all your client sites optimized with AI-powered recommendations and auto-fixes. CarrotAgency allows solo-operators and small local marketing agencies to grow their client base and deliver high-quality results while controlling costs.

Key Takeaways

SEO specialists, PPC providers, and content marketers can now offer website services to clients without being a web dev expert. Carrot’s easy-to-use platform makes launching and maintaining a top performing website simple. It’s an ideal way for local marketing agencies to add a new revenue stream and meet important client needs.
CarrotAgency makes it simple for small agencies to launch and manage client websites without expensive tools, large teams, and lots of overhead costs. It’s an ideal, affordable solution for small marketing agencies working with local service providers like real estate investors, HVAC, roofers, plumbers, and general contractors.
CarrotAgency incorporates AI tools that make it faster and easier to launch and maintain a website designed to generate local search results.

Features that Make Agency Life Easier

CarrotAgency offers all the website, marketing, and SEO tools members love from Carrot, but adds features designed to help agencies work faster, smarter, and with less effort. It’s built for small, local marketing agencies that want to help local business owners — particularly those who provide services to property owners. The built-in AI and SEO tools and easy-to-use website platform allow small agencies to take on more clients without adding expensive software or running into time and execution constraints.

Here are some of the CarrotAgency features that early adopters find most exciting.

AI Website Builder

Carrot’s AI website builder allows members to quickly and easily create a website personalized to their business simply by answering a few questions (or inputting an existing URL for the AI builder to pull information from). Every site launched is built on Carrot’s proven, conversion-optimized framework and includes key site elements like contact forms in the ideal spots, top page load speeds, and mobile optimization.

But the AI website builder takes things a step further, creating SEO, location, and content strategies customized to each business. These strategies are automatically implemented, targeting the best keywords, creating personalized web copy, and adding location pages that target each market. Upload a logo and select the color palette during the AI experience, and you’re ready to launch with a personalized website in just minutes with a fraction of the work.

Agencies use this tool to quickly launch client websites or create example sites to pitch new clients. Seeing a site that already matches their brand, has their logo and colors, and features pages for each of their markets makes the experience come to life and makes clients excited to work with you.

Custom Template

Many agencies have specific elements they like all their client sites to have. Maybe it’s particular page sections, certain navigation items, or a specific homepage design. While Carrot websites offer a highly optimized framework, we want to make sure agencies can further customize their client sites with the elements that work well for them. But adding those elements individually to every new site takes time … and CarrotAgency is all about saving agencies time and making their work easier.

So every CarrotAgency account includes a custom template for your agency. Work with our team to design your ideal template while preserving good site performance, then use that as your base to launch new client sites even faster with less work. Customize the corner radius on boxes, add the perfect drop shadow, introduce shaped divider lines to make a page more dynamic … the Carrot website editor lets you make sites look unique and stand out with just a little tweaking (no coding required).

Agency Management Dashboards

One of the biggest challenges for agencies using Carrot before this release was accessing different client websites and switching between client accounts. Not impossible, but a pain. That was the first thing we set out to fix when building CarrotAgency.

The new management dashboard lets you quickly and easily navigate to any client or website. This feature alone saves hours each week.

Task Management

How do you manage your tasks? Do you have an elaborate to-do list or expensive project management software like Asana? What if you have multiple team members or work with subcontractors? Keeping up with tasks, managing deadlines, and ensuring everything gets done is a job itself. Missing a task could mean a client’s site isn’t fully optimized, doesn’t get launched, their SEO takes a hit, they don’t show up in AI search results, or they’re wasting PPC spend. Task management is critical to your business, but it shouldn’t take as much of your brainpower as it probably does.

CarrotAgency includes a simple but powerful built-in task management tool. It comes pre-loaded with the website launch tasks that are part of every Carrot website so you (or your team members) can easily work through the checklist. You can also create your own task templates. These are great for one-time tasks that need to happen for every new client and recurring weekly or monthly tasks that need to stay on your radar.

You can assign tasks to any team member and keep track of which are complete, which are due soon, and which were missed so nothing slips through the cracks. It’s part of CarrotAgency, no expensive project management software or upgrade required.

AI Site Improvements

One of the biggest challenges to expanding your client list is the sheer amount of time working on each client takes. Beyond adding fresh site content, launching new PPC campaigns, and keeping up with SEO and AI search updates, you barely have time to go back and check for issues or other optimization opportunities. This either means your clients’ sites aren’t performing as well as they could be, or you have to limit your number of clients to ensure they each get top-notch service. That inherently stifles your business’s growth potential.

CarrotAgency removes a major hurdle with built-in AI Site Improvements. Similar to SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console, this feature highlights issues and areas for improvement across your client sites. Better than SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console, Carrot’s AI Site Improvements will soon make these improvements for you via auto-implemented optimizations. It’s like having a specialist on hand at all times without having to hire one.

Built-In Site Maintenance

Maintaining site security, struggling with plugin updates, and worrying about site speed optimizations take away from your more important work — doing marketing for your clients. But with WordPress sites, custom builds, and AI generated sites that need to hosted somewhere, those important but tedious maintenance tasks take a lot of time. Carrot takes care of foundational site functionality for you. We do the security patches. We optimize site elements to keep pages speedy. We release improvements across our entire ecosystem to maintain top performance. You only have to worry about optimizing sites for your clients, not the underpinning functionality.

Bulk Redirect

When taking over a client’s website, there’s a good chance there’s a decent amount of cleanup and site hygiene you want to do. If that includes implementing a lot of redirects (which it often does), it can be an incredibly tedious and time consuming process. If you’re doing it yourself, that’s a lot of time away from more important client work. If you’re paying someone to do it, that’s a lot of money spent on busy work.

The bulk redirect feature lets you upload a CSV of desired redirects that are then auto implemented for you. The system warns you of collisions, malformed paths, or paths that don’t exist on the site to prevent issues.

(We want to make sure CarrotAgency works for agencies, and this is a direct result of asking what’s needed and responding. Bulk redirects was a member requested feature. This one’s for you Bryan! If there’s something you’d love to see added to CarrotAgency, let me know)

Your Choice of Business Model & Client Billing

Each agency has a preferred model. Some agencies launch a site and bill the client; others manage a site the client already has. CarrotAgency supports both.

With the Agency-Owned model, you create the site for your client and work the cost of the website into your client billing. Each client site on Carrot is $29/month. You have direct access to the site and can add your client if they want the ability to login. With this model, the client pays you, not Carrot, for the website. The client does not need a paid Carrot subscription. If your client engagement ends, the client can sign up for their own paid Carrot subscription and you can transfer site ownership to them.

With the Client-Owned model, the client signs up for an individual paid Carrot subscription and gives your agency access to the site. (Their site still shows up in your client management dashboard, just like normal.) They pay Carrot directly and you don’t incur any additional monthly costs above your base CarrotAgency subscription. If your client engagement ends, they simply remove your access to their site.

You can have both types of account in your agency membership, allowing you to choose whichever option is best suited to each client.

Lead Management CRM

Every Carrot website subscription comes with the free version of CarrotCRM, and agency-managed sites are no different. CarrotCRM is a best-in-class lead management software that makes it easy for businesses to respond to new leads quickly, track lead progress and follow-up tasks, and keep leads engaged via drip campaigns and automated messaging. Originally designed for real estate investing (with built-in property data and nearby comp insights), CarrotCRM will soon expand to other industries.

This is an amazing feature to offer your clients. Spreadsheets are unreliable and most CRMs are prohibitively expensive for small businesses. CarrotCRM gives your clients access to a professional-grade CRM at no additional cost.

“I’ve used a bunch of CRMs, I’ve used Salesforce, I’ve used HighLevel, and they can get complex. I like the simplicity of CarrotCRM. A lead comes in, you see it, it’s at the top, you see the status, you can tag it, you can do whatever you want. The simplicity of the system actually helps us a lot and enables us to just do what we need to do with a lead. That’s the best part. What I love about CarrotCRM is it’s simplicity when compared to other CRMs.” — Kevin Riggi

User Management

And, of course, CarrotAgency features robust user management. Limit what team members can do within the agency account, restrict team members’ or contractors’ access to specific client sites, and invite your clients to access their own sites and reporting dashboards without seeing everyone else’s information. This permission management lets you grow in a way that makes sense to you, whether that’s adding full-time team members, working with a VA, or using subcontractors.

Sites Built for Modern Online Search

The way people find local businesses online has changed dramatically in the past couple of years. People have long turned to search engines to find local businesses and service providers, but over the past two years, the use of AI for local recommendations has sky rocketed. Use of AI tools for local recommendations grew from 6% in 2025 to 45% in 2026, according to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. That is a major behavior switch! Local search marketers can’t ignore AI search optimization if they want to keep their clients competitive.

This is changing how local search agencies need to position their clients. Good SEO alone is no longer enough. While following SEO best practices helps businesses show up in AI search, it expands beyond that into holistic entity building.

Carrot not only understands how AI impacts local business visibility, we’re leading the way in helping businesses adapt and stay ahead. This means our sites are designed with AI search in mind, including LLMs.txt files and AI-friendly page elements like clear site structure, FAQ sections, and features that keep business information cohesive across the entire site.

AI today doesn’t just mean AI that can build a website. It means creating a site that’s prepared for how AI impacts search and local business discovery. Carrot has both fronts covered.

Who is CarrotAgency a Good Fit For?

CarrotAgency is built for anyone who wants to help local businesses get found online. Whether you have a marketing agency right now or have been thinking about helping others improve their marketing, CarrotAgency is an excellent place to start.

Because it’s designed for ease of use and fast results without major effort, it’s ideal for solo marketers and small teams that want to build their client base without adding expensive tools or more headcount. It’s particularly good for SEO agencies, PPC providers, and content marketers who want to expand their services to include websites. Before CarrotAgency, you needed the confidence, knowledge, skills, and time to design, develop, and maintain websites if you wanted to offer this service. With CarrotAgency, you can add this highly valuable solution to your service offerings without being a website expert. Carrot handles most of the heavy lifting, and our drag-and-drop features and visual editor make tweaking and updating sites simple. (Trust me, I built a lot of the pages on this site, and I am by no means a web dev. If I can figure it out, so can you!)

Carrot sites are optimized for real estate and home service providers like HVAC, roofers, plumbers, and general contractors. Local search has been our specialty since 2013, and we’ve tested thousands of website elements and iterations to figure out what works for these types of businesses to show up in search and convince visitors to turn into leads and clients.

Want to work with a different type of business? We’ve had members launch sites for pool cleaning, dumpster rentals, any number of property-based services. With your agency-custom template, you can create the framework of a high-performing site for just about any local business. Own your niche and grow your business. Carrot makes it easy.

How much does CarrotAgency cost?

A CarrotAgency subscription is $299/month.

Each site you add for a client (the Agency-Owned model) is $29/month.

You can add client-owned websites to your agency dashboard for no additional charge.

There is no limit on how many clients or websites you can add to your agency account.

Stop struggling

CarrotAgency is all about eliminating the little paper cuts that slow down your business and make it harder to get work done. It’s not a huge agency-level software with an enterprise-level price tag. It’s built for small marketing agencies that want to help local businesses attract local customers.

No more pain from building (and maintaining, and updating) dozens of custom WordPress sites. No more wasting time with vibe coded AI sites that have nightmare backends with zero conversion optimizations, meaning you just have to do it all again down the road … if your client even still trusts you. CarrotAgency is a simple, clean experience that takes the headache out of the hard stuff and lets you focus on what you do best.

And this is only just the beginning. CarrotAgency just launched and we’re already making improvements. An AI suite add-on is coming soon that will make your work even quicker. A white-labeled version is on the roadmap. And we’re always soliciting feedback from real users so we can make your life easier and your business more successful.

Stop struggling with expensive, overly complex solutions. Stop wasting time on tasks that should be automated. And stop limiting your agency’s growth because “you don’t have time.” Demo CarrotAgency.

June 9, 2026

Does My Local Business Need a Website? Yes. Here are 4 Reasons Why

It’s no secret that owning a small business is getting more difficult. With more competition, higher expenses, and clients tightening their spending, winning business is challenging.

One of the most effective ways to generate new business is with a great website. Traditional marketing methods like offline advertising, mailers, bandit signs, and even cold calling can still work. And modern approaches like being social-only have their place for some companies. But when it comes to local businesses and services, the majority of today’s consumers search online and use a business’s website to judge its credibility.

Let’s explore four data-backed reasons your local business needs a website.

Key Takeaways

People not only search online for local businesses, they use business websites to decide who to trust. Even if you’re advertising elsewhere or are social-first, having a modern website can determine if a customer works with you.
A website with easy contact options — like a clickable phone number and a short, easy-to-find form — lets you generate customers outside normal business hours.
A good website is a foundational part of appearing in AI search results.
Your website is the ideal place to showcase your work and customer reviews. Over 90% of consumers rely on reviews before making a purchase or working with a business.

1. A Website Gives You Modern Credibility

I work for a company that helps local service providers launch a website, so I admittedly have a vested interest in you having a site. But statistics are also on my side. The fact of the matter is, people go online to search for local businesses. Not some people. A lot of people. Approximately 99% of consumers go online to discover local businesses. Yet 27% of small businesses think a website is irrelevant to their industry.

Those holdouts relying on recommendations, old school marketing methods, or social media platforms majorly miss out. Not only on search traffic, but on consumer trust. Having a professional-looking website lends your business credibility.

DreamHost’s 2026 Local Business Trust Index found that:

69% of consumers said a website is essential for a local business to be credible.
Businesses with websites are perceived as 41% more trustworthy than those without.
45% of consumers say businesses without websites feel less “real.”
39% report they have declined to do business with a company specifically because it lacked a website. That figure jumps to 45% among consumers ages 18-44.

If you’re a home services provider, having a website is even more important. DreamHost found that 66% of consumers said they’re more likely to hire a contractor or home service provider with a website.

Even with people continuing to ask friends for recommendations and increasingly turning to social media or AI for searches, a website remains a foundational piece of business credibility. Here’s more from DreamHost:

58% of people check a business website to confirm info they see on social or Google.
Only 35% of consumers consider working with a company recommended by AI that doesn’t have a website.
Having a good website is the second most important trust factor when judging a local business (only online reviews are more important). Social media came in third. Personal recommendations ranked fourth.

The first website was created in 1991. Google Search has been around since 1995. Automatic delivery of the Yellow Pages began phasing out in 2011. Websites aren’t a fad. They’re how people find businesses — and decide which ones to trust — as we move further into the 21st century.

2. Show Up in Local Search (SEO) & AI Search

So people are searching online. How do you make sure you show up in those searches? One of the answers is having an SEO-optimized website.

72% of small to medium-sized businesses say SEO has a medium-high impact on their business, yet only 40% said they have a dedicated website. — Bright Local

Good SEO lets you target potential customers when they’re looking for a specific solution. Here are a few tips for good SEO that will help you rank in local searches:

Be hyper local — When people conduct a local search, they don’t want a business the town over. They want a business in their town. Make sure you target these searchers by clearly including your service areas on your website. Even better, have a dedicated page for each market you serve.
Think (and speak) like a consumer — There may be a lot of technical terms in your industry, but your customers might not know them. When writing website copy, use the terms your customers are most likely to use. Essentially, speak like a human or imagine you’re describing what you do to your grandma.
- Instead of talking exclusively about “buying homes in probate,” create web content explaining how you help people “sell an inherited house.”
- If you’re an HVAC company, your customers might not know what a condenser is. They’re more likely to search for more generic, simple terms like “AC isn’t working” or “AC repair.”
Answer their questions upfront — When someone is looking to sell their house fast, for cash, or is looking for a home service provider, they have a lot of questions. Answer their most common questions with FAQ sections on your webpages.
- Think about the questions your current customers ask you most often, these make great FAQs!
- Google’s auto-suggest feature is another great place to learn what people commonly search for and the phrases they use.

Use Google's auto-suggest to find FAQs for your home services business

These SEO best practices also help with AI search optimization.

McKinsey & Company found that 50% of consumers use AI-powered search. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 found that use of AI tools for local recommendations grew from 6% in 2025 to 45% this year (yes, you read that right, that’s a 650% increase!). AI engines are now the third most popular source of business recommendations, with 40% of consumers trusting AI to provide business recommendations.

To be found by modern consumers, you need to be online. And the best way to control your online presence is with your own SEO and AI-optimized website.

Want help optimizing your website for local AI search? Check out Carrot’s AI Visibility Challenge, built specifically for local services businesses and real estate professionals!

Or want someone to manage SEO for you? We can help!

3. Generate Leads & Get Customers — Even after hours

This one should seem pretty straightforward. People are looking online for a local business. Being online gives you a better chance of being found when (and where) they’re looking — especially if your site is SEO optimized.

But it’s more nuanced than that. Your business (likely) isn’t open 24/7, but that doesn’t mean people only look for service providers during normal business hours. In an emergency repair situation, someone searching for a local service provider needs to get in touch with you quickly — no matter what time of day it is. In this case, research indicates they’ll look at your star rating, read some reviews, then go to your website to verify you can solve their problem and ultimately contact you.

Or maybe someone is contemplating a kitchen remodel or a roof replacement and only has time to sit down and do research in the evenings. These people are more likely to look closely at your website and do deep research before reaching out. They may not even want to talk to someone right away and be more interested in filling out a form for a quote instead.

This is a similar situation for real estate investors wanting to attract motivated sellers. The seller may be dealing with a stressful situation and hesitant to reach out directly. Or they may have limited time to dedicate to selling a property and need to fit it in when they can … even if you’re not immediately available. Offering them a free, fast cash offer via a website form can seem like a lower-pressure option for these visitors. (And using CarrotCRM’s autoresponder feature means you can respond to them immediately, even when you’re offline.)

Without a website, you limit potential customers to only the people who know about you without an online search and those who can get ahold of you when you happen to be available.

Here are easy contact methods you should include on your website:

A clickable phone number for people on mobile devices
- This is particularly important if you’re a service provider who offers 24/7 emergency services!
A contact form in the hero (top) section of your website
A simple contact form that doesn’t ask for too much information
- Our testing shows that more than 3 fields dramatically reduces the form completion rate, so keep your initial contact forms to only the information you absolutely need.

Generate leads & customers, even after hours

4. Build Trust

I already mentioned that people consider businesses with a modern website more trustworthy. But having a website also lets you showcase your business and really build that trust.

When a potential client comes to your site, they want to make sure you can solve their problem and that you’re legitimate. The best way to put their mind at ease is to show them who you are, the work you’ve done, your credentials, and highlight happy past customers. Your website is the perfect place to:

Show before and after photos of projects
Talk about your company’s history and ties to the local area
Show real photos of your team
Walk customers through your process
Publish licensing information
Highlight ratings from Google, BBB, and other review sites
Post local media mentions (like local news appearances or sponsorships)

Most importantly, highlight real customer reviews on your website. SQ Magazine found that 93% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase decision, with 88% trusting online reviews as much as personal recommendations. More importantly, 58% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for businesses with strong reviews!

BrightLocal puts the number of people who read online reviews for local businesses even higher — at 97%. They also found that the percentage of consumers who “always” read reviews jumped from 29% last year to 41% in 2026.

97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. Source: BrightLocal

When you finish working with a client, ask for a photo with them and a testimonial. Better yet, see if they’ll talk about your company in a short video. Putting a face to the review lets people know you didn’t make it up. If you want to use Google reviews on your website, take a screenshot of the review and put it on your site as an image for the same level of legitimacy. (Pro Tip: If you’re using images of reviews, type the content of the review into the image’s alt text so it can be crawled for SEO and AI search.)

A website builds trust with potential customers

Websites are a must for today’s local businesses

There’s no escaping the internet, and companies that try to ignore the need for a business website are only hurting themselves. No matter how small your business, who you target, or what you offer, people want to check you out online before they commit. If you’re a real estate investor or a local services provider (like HVAC, contractor, electrician, plumbing, roofing, etc), having a website with good local SEO is non-negotiable.

Zippia found that 81% of consumers conduct online research about a business prior to making a purchase, with 47% seeking information specifically from the business’s website.

People want information before working with a business, and they turn to the internet to find that information. If you’re not online, your business is effectively silent.

Launching an SEO-optimized website for your local business doesn’t have to cost thousands or require technical know-how. Carrot’s AI website builder walks you through the process in minutes for less than $150/mo.

May 27, 2026

5 Must-Have Elements for the Best Local Business PPC Landing Page

In part one of this PPC landing page series, we covered the 4 Major Problems with Your PPC Landing Page (that cost you leads). These are major, commonly recurring issues we see local business owners make when they launch PPC ad campaigns. But they’re not the only thing standing in your way of having an amazing ad campaign that generates lots of leads and revenue. Once you address the common issues, it’s time to take your landing page to the next level.

Here are the 5 elements we see on every top-converting PPC landing page. Revisit your current landing pages to make sure they have each of these elements, and keep them in mind as you launch new ads and campaigns.

Key Takeaways

Make sure the message, key talking points, and exact phrases in your ads are used on the landing page they link to. This “message match” is important for ad quality, but also reassures visitors that you’re legitimate and will solve the problem that made them click.
Directly address a visitor’s main fears or painpoints. This gives them the confidence that you understand their challenges and can help.
Build credibility by including trust signals like real images of your team, client reviews, and specifics about your business (i.e., locally owned and operated since 2006) on the landing page.
Make the button text clear and compelling. Specific language like “Get My Fair Cash Offer” outperforms generic text like “Click Here” by 49.55%.

Bonus Tip: Match Your Messages!

Before we get into the landing page-specific elements, I want to take a minute to remind you of the importance of having landing pages that match the talking points of your ad.

Covered in The Homepage Problem section of our last blog, message matching gives your ads credibility and helps them score higher in Google’s Ad Scoring algorithm.

So what does message matching look like? Here are a few examples …

It might be tempting to personalize your ads by saying something like “Matt Buys Houses.” That personalization isn’t necessarily bad. But if the ad links to a page that only has your business name and doesn’t mention Matt again, you’ll run into message match and credibility issues. Someone clicked on an ad about Matt, but Matt is suddenly gone, replaced by a nameless business. Because the ad doesn’t match the landing page, visitors (and Google) aren’t sure the landing page is for the same businesses as the ad. Visitors lose trust (cautious of a bait and switch), and Google may flag your ad as scammy. The end result is your ad showing up less often and visitors who leave without contacting you.

You can still run the “Matt” ad and include your business name on your website, just make sure to also use the phrase “Matt Buys Houses” on the landing page in addition to your business name. Similarly, if you use a picture of yourself (or a happy client) in your ad, make sure that image is also used on the landing page for continuity and credibility.
Whatever talking points you specifically call out in the ad (a certain location, quick response times, fast closings, purchasing houses in as-is condition, etc.) make sure every single point you mention in the ad is repeated in the copy of your website. (We walk through some good and bad examples in minute 37:30 of the original webinar.)

Does that mean you need a specific landing page for every ad you run? If each ad has different selling points, then yes, absolutely. Someone who clicks on an ad for emergency HVAC repair doesn’t care that you also design and install new systems. They clicked on your ad to solve a specific problem, so make sure the landing page attached to that ad directly addresses that exact problem.

Pro Tip: You don’t need a dedicated landing page for each ad if the message is the same, but you’re testing different designs. As long as you cover all the same talking points and use the same language on the landing page as you do in the ads, you can point multiple ads to a single page.

Now, let’s get into how to design a simple, high-converting PPC landing page!

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 1: The Winning Headline Formula

Your headline should match the talking points of your ad (I think we’ve covered that thoroughly!), but we’ve also come up with a specific formula that wins over and over again. After spending 10+ years testing and refining landing pages for Carrot members, here’s the most effective PPC landing page headline formula:

[What visitors get] + [How Fast] + [Biggest Fear Removed]

The biggest fear can also be the major painpoint they’re trying to solve for …

Selling a house in as-is condition
A fast closing timeline
Fast or affordable emergency repair for a plumbing or HVAC issue
Wanting a new roof with a long guarantee
Needed a local service provider in their small or remote area

This simple formula captures attention right away and directly addresses the problem a visitor is trying to solve. Nothing complicated, nothing too clever that the visitor needs to figure out, just a straightforward, appealing promise.

Don’t worry too much about length when writing a headline using this formula, just focus on getting your point across clearly and compellingly. (Though you don’t want it to be so long that the visitor just glosses over it). You can also play with the order of the elements, as long as the headline reads naturally. Here are a few examples:

Get a Fair Cash Offer [what they get] Today [how fast] — No Repairs, No Commissions, Close in 7 Days [their fear/painpoint]
We Buy Houses Anywhere in the US [what they get] With Closing in as Little as 5 Days. [how fast] You Pay No Fees and No Repairs [their fear]
- A Carrot member uses this exact headline and sees a 41.9% conversion rate on their landing page!
Emergency Plumbing Repair [what they get] Within an Hour! [how fast] Trusted plumbers in Portland for 20 years! [their fear]

Use this formula to test different headlines and find the best combination that inspires visitors to contact you.

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 2: Address Visitor’s Fears

Fear is the number one thing stopping people from contacting you. (How many times have you talked yourself out of a purchase or service because you weren’t sure about the quality, how reputable the business was, or if it was worth it? Those are all fear-based holdups.) When it comes to selling a property or hiring a local service provider, fear-based emotions are extra hard to get over. This isn’t buying a new jacket, it’s a major transaction that most people are probably inexperienced with.

The best way to get someone over their fears is to address them directly and honestly. You’ve touched on one or two of the major issues in the headline, but that’s only one sentence. You need to drive the point home repeatedly.

Identify 2-3 major reasons someone might hesitate to contact you or what they might be concerned about. These can also be reasons too work with you. Here are some examples:

A specific closing timeline (5 days, 7 days, “close on your timeline”)
No fees, no commissions
As-is condition, No repairs
Fair offer, free quote
100+ five-star reviews
In business since 2016, In business for over 20 years
Local family-owned business
All techs are background checked

Just below the headline is a great place to address these fees. It can be as simple as a bulleted list in the hero section of the page.

Again, make sure the fears you highlight in your ad are the most important ones addressed on the landing page. You can talk about more on the landing page, but keep the main focus in line with the ad.

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 3: Trust Signals

Now that you’ve promised to solve their problem, a visitor’s next priority is making sure you’re a reputable business worth contacting. When someone evaluates a business or service provider, they ask themselves a set of questions:

Is this person/company real?
Have they done this before?
Are they local?

Include credibility builders and trust signals on the landing page to put them at ease. A few of the example fears listed above are also trust builders (in business since 2016, local family-owned business, all techs are background checked). A few other examples of trust signals to include on your PPC landing page are:

Real photos of you and your team
Stats about your business (number of houses you’ve bought/serviced)
Local city/neighborhood references and photos
Reviews and testimonials from real clients
Badges (5 stars on Google, A+ from BBB)
License info
Process transparency (“here’s what happens next,” “here’s our process”)

Here’s what a landing page with good trust signals looks like …

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 4: Make Your Call-To-Action (Button) Clear & Compelling

The button language on landing page forms is another thing Carrot has tested extensively over the years. Known as the call-to-action (CTA), what your button says should be specific and detailed.

Clear language like “Get My Fair Cash Offer” outperforms generic text like “Click Here” by 49.55%. That’s because generic button text doesn’t tell the visitor what’s going to happen, what they’ll get, or what they can expect. Making it crystal clear what happens when they give you their information gives them confidence.

Good CTAs	Bad CTAs
✅ Get My Fair Cash Offer ✅ “See What My House Is Worth ✅ “Get My Free Quote	❌ Submit ❌ Click Here ❌ Contact Us

Having a strong CTA in the hero section of your landing page is particularly important. This is the most common contact point for visitors.

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 5: Low-Friction Contact Methods

By now a visitor has gotten to your PPC landing page, determined that you can solve their problem, decided that you’re trustworthy, and knows exactly what they’ll get by contacting you. The last thing you want is to have them back out now because your contact form is too long or they can’t find your phone number.

If you want people to call you, make your phone number very prominent both as your CTA and in places that a visitor would expect to find your phone number on a website (at the top and bottom of the page). Neary 83% of PPC traffic comes from a mobile device, so make sure the phone numbers on your landing page have click-to-call enabled and are easy to touch with your finger (meaning there isn’t so much stuff around them that the number itself is hard it hit).

Pro Tip: Use call tracking on your PPC landing pages so you know exactly which campaigns generate the most leads and business!

If your CTA is form-based, keep forms short! We strongly recommend using only 3 fields on your form.

For real estate: Name, phone, address
For home service providers: Name, phone, problem

While it’s tempting to want to gather more information with your form, every field you add above three reduces conversions. Think of each field as a friction point. If the form takes too long to fill out, asks for too much information, or makes the visitor think too hard, they’re going to leave without completing it.

If you absolutely need to collect more information, consider using a multi-step form instead of one long form. Multi-step forms put each question on its own “screen” so the visitor doesn’t get immediately overwhelmed by the amount of information they need to share. This is particularly helpful for mobile users where a long form would take up too much space on the screen and be difficult to fill in.

Keep PPC Landing Pages Simple & Focused

A good PPC landing page isn’t difficult to create. It’s actually the opposite. Keep things focused, address the visitor’s main concerns, and help them understand what will happen when they contact you.

If you want to dig into what makes a great PPC landing page even more, check out our free on-demand webinar, The 97% Blind Spot: How to Get 10x More PPC Leads Without Touching Your Ad Budget. Or use the PPC landing page templates built into Carrot to give you a jumpstart and make sure you don’t miss any important conversion elements!

May 13, 2026

4 Major Problems with Your PPC Landing Page (that cost you leads)

No matter what happens in the world of SEO (or GEO or AEO or AI search … or any other organic traffic source), paid ads remain a reliable source of leads for many real estate investors and local home service providers. But even PPC (pay-per-click) has seen some changes in recent months, namely increasing costs without a corresponding bump in leads. Or, if you want to keep your cost per click down, you might be experiencing reach creep well beyond the geography you actually need leads from.

So is PPC a bad marketing channel now? Not at all!

The key to getting the most bang for your buck is making sure your PPC landing pages are set up for success. You can have the best ads in the world, but if the landing page they point to isn’t great, you won’t generate leads. (And Google might actually charge you more to show your ads!)

For many businesses, the landing page is where they lose leads … not the ad itself. If you’re getting a good number of clicks, but none of them turn into a high quality lead or client, the issue isn’t with your ad, it’s with the landing page.

This blog teaches you how to fix your leaky PPC landing pages, based on teachings from Carrot’s webinar The 97% Blind Spot: How to Get 10x More PPC Leads Without Touching Your Ad Budget.

Key Takeaways

The four common PPC landing page issues that could be costing you leads and making your ads less effective overall.
Over 80% of PPC traffic comes from mobile, where users expect pages to load in under 3 seconds. Unfortunately, the average page load time in mobile is over 8 seconds. To improve your mobile load times, choose a website provider that pays attention to site speed.
Make sure your Google ad quality score is high by matching the language and messaging of your ad to the landing page it links to.

Most Common Problems Hurting Your PPC Ads & Landing Pages

Nailing a PPC ad campaign can be tricky. You need the right message, the right copy, the right graphics, targeting the right people and areas … and sometimes it still seems like it’s not working. That could be for a few reasons that have nothing to do with your ads. Here are four common PPC landing page issues that could be costing you leads.

PPC Problem 1: The Homepage Problem

Where does your ad point to? If you’re like nearly 50% of people running PPC ads, the answer is probably your homepage. And that’s an issue. This is the biggest driver of wasted ad spend in PPC.

So why is pointing to your homepage bad? The simple answer is that the messaging in your ad needs to match the messaging on the page the ad links to (i.e. the landing page). Not kind of match. Match. If the ad says something like “Sell your house fast for cash, no realtor commissions,” the landing page that ad points to needs to reiterate all those points exactly the same way.

When someone clicks on your ad, it’s because whatever that ad promised was enticing to them. If they get to the landing page (where the action takes place) and they don’t see that same promise, they may lose interest or trust and not take action.

Google also puts a lot of weight on ad-landing page message match. (It’s a big part of Google Ad’s secret scoring.) If the language in the ad doesn’t match the language on the landing page, Google may decide that your ad is spammy or won’t give the visitor what you promise. If that’s the case, it won’t display your ad as often as the ones it deems high quality.

Recommendation: Does your ad offer something like a fast cash offer? Change your form button from generic “Contact Us” wording to language that better matches your ad, like “Get My Cash Offer.”

PPC Problem 2: The Writing Problem

A recent study found that an estimated 54% of adults in the United States read below a sixth grade reading level. On top of that, people don’t pay close attention to online ads. So the best way to grab their attention quickly and communicate your message in a way that makes them take action is to keep it simple.

And that goes for the copy on your landing page too. During the webinar, we shared that landing page copy written for a 5th-7th grade reading level converts at 11.1%, while copy written at a college reading level converts at only 5.3%. Word choice matters, and in this case, it’s best to keep things simple and clear. The last thing you want is for people to be confused or feel like this service isn’t for them. If you try to get fancy or too clever, you could be costing yourself leads.

PPC Problem 3: The Mobile Blindspot

What’s one of the best ways to waste ad budget? Having people click on your ad only to abandon the page before it even loads. The accepted knowledge among marketers is that people will leave if your site doesn’t load within 3 seconds. … But that stat is from 2011 (I personally remember writing about it back then!). Imagine how much faster people expect load times to be today!

Today, more than 80% of PPC visitors are on a mobile device and, unfortunately, mobile load times are often slower than desktop. (BrowserStack puts the average mobile load time at a staggering 8.6 seconds.) That’s a lot of lost leads … and a lot of wasted budget.

Our data shows that PPC landing pages that load on mobile within 2.4 seconds convert nearly twice as effectively as slower-loading pages.

Keeping your PPC landing page simple and following best practices for page speed will improve your ad ROI by driving more leads. Choose a website provider (like Carrot) that natively pays attention to site speed and enables backend features to keep your site fast. Too many custom website developers focus on what looks good and ignore performance, which can quickly drag down your site. Pretty doesn’t convert leads, performance does.

Recommendation: Use pagespeed.web.dev to see how fast your site or PPC land pages load on mobile and desktop.

PPC Problem 4: Google’s Secret Ad Scores

It should be no surprise that Google has an algorithm to determine where your ads are placed, how often they show, and how much they charge you to show them. It’s called the ad quality score — the higher the score the better. (We explain how to find your ad’s scores around minute 34 of the webinar.)

How do you get a good Google ad quality score? Here are some tips.

Based on the theme of this blog, you shouldn’t be shocked to learn that the quality of your PPC landing page directly impacts the ad’s quality score.

Landing pages that Google deems “above average” not only have a higher click through rate (CTR), but see costs-per-click 36% below average … meaning Google charges them less for each click. If your landing page isn’t high-quality, Google shows your ad less often, shows other ads above it, and charges you more if someone clicks.

How do you make sure you have a high quality landing page? That’s where message matching comes in. Google crawls your ad and landing page specifically to see if they’re talking about the same things, using the same language, and have the same major messages. So make sure your landing page makes the same promises as your ad.

Want to see what good message matching looks like? Check out minute 38 of the webinar.

Fixing Your PPC Landing Pages

Those are some of the most common — and most impactful — mistakes made with PPC landing pages. Some are easy to fix (numbers 1 and 2), and some take a little more expertise (numbers 3 and 4). Working with the right PPC ad manager (or diving deep on ads yourself) can help, but you also need to make sure your website is set up to support high quality PPC landing pages.

In the next blog, we’ll dive into the five elements every high-converting PPC landing page needs (including the fool-proof formula to write a winning landing page headline). But if you don’t want to wait for that post to publish, you can check out the webinar replay now (it includes a lot more helpful information as well, including touching on SEO changes and how AI impacts lead generation).

April 30, 2026

Carrot Website Editor & CRM Updates from Q4 2025

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful and restful holiday season!

The Carrot team made sure to take some time off, but before we did, we released some great new features in the last quarter of 2025. Check out what’s new with Carrot websites and CarrotCRM!

Key Takeaways

New Carrot website design features and templates make it even easier to personalize the look of your site.
You can now individually edit Carrot auto location pages to make them even more customized and localized for your target area.
CarrotCRM “Your Day” surfaces the tasks due that day (or overdue!), gives you a time estimate for completion, and helps you tackle tasks right from the dashboard.
Carrot now offers agency-style “done for you” SEO services!

Carrot Website Updates

Making your site look modern and stand out is important, and we want to make sure you have that ability while still maintaining an SEO-optimized, high-converting framework. With this in mind, we released some new web editing features that keep that successful foundation in place while making it easier than ever to customize the look, feel, and content of your site.

New Ways to Customize Your Site to Stand Out

One of the things we’re most excited about is the all-new Carrot website editor! Currently available for new motivated seller websites, this new editor makes it easier than ever to fully customize your site and have your chosen design elements automatically implement across the entire site.

Start with your favorite modern template (we have four new ones with different vibes to match your business), make a few customization choices, and your site is ready to stand out for 2026. This new editor lets you set design preferences without adding custom CSS. Now, you can easily add design elements like:

Different font options
Rounded box corners
Drop shadows to make your site more visually dynamic
Eye-catching shaped dividers between sections (not just straight lines!)

Examples of the New Carrot Website Designs

Here are some example templates displaying the new Carrot website design features. You can start with one of these templates and customize elements like boxes, divider shapes, colors, fonts, and more. Or mix-and-match from the individual design elements to create something completely unique.

Scroll in each box to see the full example template!

“Friendly” Template

“Professional” Template

“Classic” Template

“Simple” Template

If you’ve been on the fence about getting a Carrot site, or think all Carrot sites “look the same,” this update is a game-changer. Now you can get a beautiful, modern-looking website that matches your brand with Carrot’s proven SEO foundation and tools baked in.

This is just the first stage of some really exciting customization options coming to Carrot soon. So stay tuned!

Edit Your Auto Location Pages

Creating hyper-local webpages helps you target leads exactly where they’re searching (and is great for AI search!). For instance, someone looking to sell their home fast in Beaverton isn’t going to look for a cash home buyer in Portland. They’re going to look for one in Beaverton. So even though you may do business in both places, you need to make that crystal clear on your website with individual location pages.

That’s why we’ve long offered Auto Location Pages. This feature lets you quickly launch area-specific pages with all your key information. But you may want to edit those pages to make them even more localized with their own photos, customer testimonials, and facts about that specific area.

Now you can!

If you have auto location pages, set some time aside early this year to fully customize them. Hyperlocal, original content is great for SEO and AI search optimization!

CarrotCRM Updates

CarrotCRM launched in December 2024, and over the last 12 months our team has been working non-stop to make it even better than its predecessor (InvestorFuse). (If you’re an InvestorFuse user, don’t worry, all these new features are available in IF3 as well!)

An Easier Way to Tackle Your To-Do List

CarrotCRM is an action-based system, making sure every opportunity always has a next step and due date. But we wanted to make working your leads even easier. Now, instead of filtering through all your outstanding actions and deciding where to start, we show you exactly what needs to get done today and in what order!

“We’ve taken all of the thinking out of it,” said John Whitfield, a Carrot Product Manager and co-founder of InvestorFuse.

The new Your Day section of the main CarrotCRM dashboard shows you:

How many tasks are due today (or overdue!)
An estimate of how long completion will take
What order to tackle your tasks in

But we made it even easier to address that to-do list. Not only does Your Day surface what needs to be done today, CarrotCRM walks you through each task in order of importance. Simply hit the Start Now button and get to work. No more hunting around, no more wondering where to start, no more ignoring your tasks. Just pure productivity.

“It’s another easy way for you or your employees to stay on task, tackling the most important things,” John added.

Kanban View

A popular request, you can now see your leads and their pipeline status in a Kanban style view! This popular view puts leads into vertical columns based on pipeline and stage, rather than a straight list view (which is also still available). Like most Kanban views, you can drag and drop the individual cards to update their status.

Better Transaction and Disposition Management

CarrotCRM transaction management features got an upgrade late last year, allowing teams to separate transaction management from disposition management. You can now assign individual owners and tasks, as wall as having separate areas for notes, for transaction management and disposition.

This separation extends to the new Kanban view, where you can see Kanban boards for transaction statuses and disposition statuses. Large teams can also filter these views by individual assignee to keep a close eye on manager productivity and workload.

Bulk Add Leads to Drip Campaigns

Many users love CarrotCRM’s autonomous (AI) lead manager and drip campaign sequences for a zero-effort way of working leads. Now, you can bulk add lists of leads to a sequence to save time. If you have an old list of cold leads you want to re-engage, this is a great feature to use!

Members with a Scale or Team plan now also have access to a new “Nurture Sequence” option that allows them to add leads to a drip campaign while keeping them in your active pipeline. While the traditional outreach sequences remove a lead from your active “Actions” pipeline until they reengage, the Nurture Sequences feature sends automated messages while allowing the lead owner to continue manually working and monitoring the opportunity. This feature is ideal for larger teams managing high lead volume with a lot of touchpoints per lead.

New Carrot Services

Did you know that Carrot offers services like website building? Well, late last year we added two exciting new services for members who prefer to be more hands-off — even after their site is launched.

“Done for You” SEO Services

All Carrot websites have a foundation of good SEO, but you still need to put in the work to optimize your site for your location and business — then regularly produce fresh content to keep it optimized. Understandably, some people want someone else to handle SEO for them.

This agency-style offering gives your site a super strong, personalized SEO foundation, then follows up with monthly optimizations to add fresh content, monitor success, and make any necessary adjustments when new Google algorithm updates roll out.

If you’re just getting started, pairing the SEO services with a Concierge Setup gives you a truly personalized website optimized to stand out and dominate your market.

Enhanced CarrotCRM Setup

Every paid CarrotCRM membership comes with an integration specialist and setup help. But what if you have a complex use case or want to migrate from an existing CRM? Teams with complex needs can now get more help setting up their perfect CRM with CarrotCRM Boost.

This service helps teams set up the more advanced features of CarrotCRM, such as the AI suite, transaction management, and A2P 10DLC registration assistance. Set your team up for long-term success and start using CarrotCRM to its full capabilities faster.

Feature	Included Setup	CarrotCRM Boost
Discovery & Strategy Call
Lead Migration
Integrations Setup
Campaign Setup & Labeling
Training Call
Channel Setup Only available with the Team plan
Campaign Autoresponders Setup Only available with Scale & Team plans
Contract Setup
A2P 10DLC Assistance
Autonomous Lead Manager (ALM) Setup
AI Lead Scoring Configuration
TV Dashboard Configuraiton Only available with the Team Plan
Transaction Management Setup
Check-in Call

Coming in 2026 …

As always, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Each quarter we release amazing new updates, and 2026 is poised to be our most exciting year yet! Stay tuned for an even more exciting update to our website builder — one that will fully customize your website look, feel, copy, and SEO strategy right out of the gate in a matter of minutes. Plus more AI features and CRM tools!

Happy New Year — let’s make it a great one!

January 8, 2026

What’s Changing with Real Estate Investing in 2026

Just like that, another year is almost gone. And what a year it’s been! From the impact of AI to increasing regulations on real estate wholesaling to a still questionable real estate market, 2025 kept investors on their toes and gave them a lot to think about.

And next year is sure to be just as exciting!

To help you prepare, we talked to some real estate industry experts to get their predictions for 2026 and how investors can prepare.

There will be more opportunity than ever in real estate over the next 5 years, but it’ll take a big change in how you do business. — Trever Mauch

Key Takeaways

AI search and state regulations on residential wholesaling had a major impact on the real estate investing landscape in 2025.
Real estate investors need to step up their game in 2026. Those who aren’t ready to commit to better processes, tools, and talent will find themselves out of a job.
AI is going to be just as big — if not bigger — in 2026 (surprise!). Real estate investors need to learn how to use it wisely and optimize for AI search.
2026 will be the year of focusing on the right deals instead of just deal volume. This involves building the right relationships and taking the right approach to each opportunity.

Impacts to real estate investing in 2025

In 2025, we saw some major impacts to real estate investing. You should know about all of these as we go into the new year.

AI has a HUGE Impact on Search Traffic

If your web traffic or leads have dipped this year, it might not be a softening market or increased competition. It might be the impact of AI search.

AI has been a major theme of 2025 across all industries, and one of the most noticeable impacts is how it’s changed people’s search habits. While the old routine was to go to your favorite search engine and click on a link that looked relevant, AI has swept that process away almost entirely.

A solid half (50%) of consumers purposefully use an AI search tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, according to an October report from McKinsey & Company. And these folks aren’t just looking for information. The majority of users told McKinsey that “it’s the top digital source they use to make buying decisions.” Meaning they’re turning to AI for recommendations and insights, not just a list of potential services or providers. The report goes on to predict that AI search tools could reduce traffic from traditional search channels (like Google or Bing) by 20-50%.

Even consumers still using a traditional search engine are likely to be hit with an AI result first anyway. The McKinsey report found that roughly 50% of Google searches return an AI Summary Overview, and the trends point to that number increasing to 75% of searches by 2028 (though I’d honestly be surprised if it takes that long). Real estate investors who have honed in their SEO to rank high in search results have a solid foundation set for AI search, but they can’t rest on their laurels.

Learn how to adjust your SEO for AI search >

Growing Real Estate Wholesale Regulation

States regulating residential wholesaling is nothing new (it’s been happening since at least 2019, when Illinois updated its Real Estate License Act). This year, multiple states introduced, passed, or implemented their own wholesaling laws:

Pennsylvania began requiring people who wholesale residential real estate to have a real estate license beginning in January 2025.
Tennessee signed a wholesaling bill into law in late March 2025 that went into effect only two weeks later (on April 8, 2025).
Ohio’s Senate unanimously passed SB155 in June 2025 to introduce state wholesaling regulations, and the bill was signed by the Ohio governor late this year.
Oregon requires residential property wholesalers to register with the state, effective July 1, 2025.
Maryland’s wholesaling disclosure law went into effect on October 1, 2025.
Oklahoma started imposing several requirements and restrictions on licensed and unlicensed wholesalers on November 1, 2025.
Connecticut passed legislation (as part of its state budget) requiring real estate wholesalers to register with the CT Department of Consumer Protection starting July 1, 2026.
North Carolina introduced House Bill 797 in April 2025 that would impact wholesaling with an “effective” date of October 1, 2025. As far as I can tell, it’s still sitting with the NC Senate, but if you wholesale in North Carolina keep an eye out for potential legal requirement changes.

This is a reminder to keep a close eye on the requirements and regulations in anywhere you wholesale real estate. Whether you’re just getting started or have been in the game for a while, things can change.

For those hopeful of preventing strict regulations on wholesale real estate, presenting the right message could be key.

“Wholesaling has been branded ‘predatory’ by the retail real estate lobby. In reality, the vast majority of wholesalers are doing a massive service to the market — taking non-sellable real estate and getting more inventory on the market, solving problems agents can’t solve with a listing, tackling the hardest properties, increasing property values over the long term, etc.,” said Trevor Mauch, Carrot CEO.

Communicating these benefits to lawmakers could help make sure sensible — rather than overbearing — regulations are put in place in states considering them.

How the real estate market will change in 2026

The state of the real estate market has been a hot topic for several years now, and it’s clear that investment opportunities have cooled off since their pandemic-years peak. But what wil happen in 2026 is anyone’s guess. Some real estate pros think it will be more of the same, while others feel the dam will finally burst.

Dean Rogers, an expert flipper and wholesaler in California and trusted REI coach, doesn’t see things changing much. “The market will stay stagnant and relatively stuck.”

But Brandon Jarvela, an 8-figure investor with more than 600 real estate students, thinks 2026 could be the year the REI space sees more movement again. “I think this could be the year of the inventory snapback. For the for two years, we’ve all been living in this weird low inventory limbo with pent-up sellers and confused buyers. I think that tension is gonna break. We’ve got a wave of financial pressure that’s hitting every day homeowners, and I think we’re gonna see a sharp rise in off-market opportunity for the investors who are prepared for that type of velocity. Investors who aren’t just cherry picking are gonna win big time.”

Carrot CEO Trevor Mauch predicts real estate markets will stabilize a bit, with properties moving “a tab faster” than they did this year. But overall, he doesn’t see a huge change for next year. Those who want to survive, however, have to be ready to adapt.

“We’re in a transitioning market, and there won’t be big appreciation like there was in 2020-2024. This makes it so flippers who didn’t operate effectively aren’t covered by price appreciation, which will thin out flippers. Wholesalers will also be thinned out in the market even further in 2026. Technology + laws + the market are forcing wholesalers and flippers to adapt. There will be more opportunity than ever in real estate over the next 5 years, but it’ll take a big change in how you do business.”

Avrom Smith, owner of HAS Holdings LLC, also feels investors can no longer ignore regulations. “2026 will be no different from any other year in terms of deal opportunities. However, as a wholesaler, more states are beginning to regulate wholesaling, and it’ll be critical to have backup exit strategies in order to close deals.”

Investors need to step up their game in 2026

Trevor isn’t the only one who foresees the investor industry thinning out next year. Both Dean Rogers and Brandon Jarvela agree that things will get tougher and that investors who want to succeed need to adjust and overcome.

“Wholesalers that operate like real business owners and real businesses will dominate,” Jarvela commented. “The hobby people, the side gig type people, the people still slinging contracts in group chat site, I think they’re gonna have a really hard time. 2026 is the year where wholesalers are gonna get real lead sources through PPC, through agent relationships, data data-backed lists. They’re gonna have real dispositions systems or they’re gonna get wiped out by regulation. Regulation is getting heavier and heavier. You see lower spread and increasing seller expectation, so the bar is officially gonna be set higher for investors.”

Rogers agreed, noting that, “Investors have to level up their game. They have to lean into their systems even more, and they have to have better talent on their team. I think that everything has to bring the cream right to the top, so everybody’s gotta be on their A game to be successful. The biggest game changer is the talent piece. The people who are the best trained and are the best prepared are gonna be the ones who win. A lot of real estate investors will give up and the ones that don’t will rise to the occasion.”

But with challenges comes new opportunity. Stefon Henry of PNW Home Offer believes “there will be more off-market sellers, which in some markets means increased competition. Opportunity will be better in sub-markets.”

The key to keeping up, according to Avrom Smith, is to not ease up on marketing. “Marketing will continue to be paramount in terms of generating lead flow.”

In fact, a small survey of real estate investors (conducted by Carrot) found that the majority plan to increase their marketing budget and the number of marketing channels they use in 2026.

Trevor recommends doubling down on direct-to-seller marketing, especially online. “We’ll see more sellers seeking to sell online,” he believes.

How to be a successful investor in 2026

How exactly do you step up your game for 2026? A lot of it comes down to where you focus your energy and the relationships you build.

“Master two things: speed and sophistication,” Jarvela said for 2026. “Speed to lead, speed to offer, speed to close. Then sophistication in your deal structure, like whether you’re doing innovations or doing creative finance. We use something called a retail buyer program, but also dispo optimization, JV workflows, all that stuff that separates the actual operators from the amateurs. I think 2026 is gonna reward investors who run these types of processes and systems and can solve more problems.”

Several pros recommend focusing even more on the right deals next year.

Stefon Henry recommends underwriting more conservatively in 2026. “Double down on lead quality, not lead volume. Find sellers who need speed + certainty more than the highest price.”

Tony Stewart, owner of Property Peace in Ohio, agrees. “Be very strict in working with the real numbers and not speculating.

“Focus on increasing margins, not higher volume. Fewer but better deals is the name of the game,” Trevor added. “Off-market property opportunities will increase in ‘26. Focus on expired listings, sellers in distress that need help, etc.”

Trevor also recommends partnering more deeply with real estate agents.

“Most agents aren’t shifting to ‘hybrid,’ but they’re starting to get squeezed hard by a slow retail market and many deals can’t be done on the retail market, so they’re looking for opportunity to create new listings. Savvy investors will see agents as their best friends in 2026.”

Another angle to explore in 2026 if you wholesale real estate is taking down more deals yourself. “Take downs are going to be a key strategy to survive,” Trevor predicts. While this may be counterintuitive since you’re no longer wholesaling at that point, it’s a more advanced technique with better margins for investors who can pull it off.

“The real opportunity is to actually become the buyer. Wholesalers currently lock up contracts, close a low percentage of them, and create a bad reputation. In 2026, become the actual buyer, taking the property down. If you can get 2-3x the profit taking the deal down, quick clean out, list aggressively at a low price to sell quick — do that versus wholesale. If you can’t get 2x taking it down, that’s when you wholesale instead. You should be in and out of a deal in 90 days, 120 days max,” he said.

When done right, this can give you an advantage over wholesale competitors, Trevor explained.

“Educate the seller on what wholesale contracts actually say, ‘You see this says [this other investor] can back out of the deal all the way up to the day of closing, they aren’t putting up earnest money, etc, etc. With us, we are the buyer and we stand by it. We can and will perform.’”

AI in 2026

The investors who adopt AI as a team member, not just a shiny toy, are going to pull away from the pack fast. 2026 is the first year that a small team can operate with enterprise-level firepower. — Brandon Jarvela

AI was big in 2025, and it’s not going to slow down in 2026. Almost every investor I talked to mentioned AI and everyone who responded to our survey said they will either increase their usage of AI or start using it.

“AI will continue to rewrite the books. We haven’t even scratched the surface of its capabilities,” Avrom Smith predicts.

“AI is going to outperform any and all lead generation, so focus on building a relationship with AI. Let AI get to know you, know your business,” another investor commented.

AI has been a big topic of focus here at Carrot, with Trevor recently hosting two webinars on the subject:

And hosting monthly interactive AI Search Visibility trainings. So it’s no wonder that he agrees AI is going to play a big role in real estate lead generation next year. He recommends focusing heavily on dialing in elements that help you rank in AI SEO and increase website conversion.

Join the next AI Search Visibility Challenge >

Brandon Jarvela agrees that using AI wisely can have a major impact next year.

“Not the cheesy ‘AI wrote my email’ type stuff,” he said. “I’m talking about the real-time lead scoring, predictive, seller motivation, automated follow-up that sounds human, and even dispo engines that match buyers to deals instantly. The investors who adopt AI as a team member, not just a shiny toy, are going to pull away from the pack fast. 2026 is the first year that a small team can operate with enterprise-level firepower.”

Prep for a Successful 2026

While what will happen over the next 12 months is anyone’s guess, these real estate pros have been in the game for a while and know how to recognize a trend. At a bar minimum, pay attention to changing local regulations and DO NOT ignore AI. Whether you’re optimizing your brand presence for AI SEO or using AI tools to get more done in less time, its impact is here to stay and ignoring it will just make you fall behind.

What are your predictions for the real estate marketing and future of investing for 2026? Let us know in the comments!

December 18, 2025

Take Advantage of AI Search to Get Real Estate Leads

How do you search for information these days? If you’re like the majority of Americans, you’re turning to AI more and more. According to a study by the Associated Press & NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 60% of Americans use AI to find information — more than any other use case (like shopping or writing assistance).

Even if you’re not using a dedicated AI service like ChatGPT, you may have noticed that the top result for many Google searches is now an “AI Overview” generated by Google’s Gemini.

So what does that mean for SEO and how you get found online when trying to generate real estate leads? While there’s no guaranteed way to make sure you appear in AI search results, there are best practices that give you a better-than-average chance. Let’s dive into how you can use AI search results to build your real estate business.

Key Takeaways

There is no guaranteed way to make sure you appear in AI search results, but there are best practices that give you a better-than-average chance. Following these best practices now puts you ahead of the curve as AI continues to advance.
Have a clear, consistent business entity (complete, unique, and thorough information about your business) that appears on all your online profiles. If AI doesn’t know who you are or what you do, you won’t appear in AI results.
“Off page” signals are important to AI. Reddit is a great tool for building your off-page presence.

What’s Changed with AI SEO?

The truth is, the rise of AI hasn’t dramatically impacted SEO best practices. Experts agree that key SEO cornerstones like producing high-quality, valuable content still have the biggest impact. Get more details in our June post, How AI is Reshaping SEO for Real Estate Investors: What You Need to Know in 2025.

What we are seeing is that people are moving away from keywords and deeper into the “natural language” style of searching, where they type entire questions. Or in the case of AI search, they may even give AI engines like ChatGPT entire paragraphs worth of instructions to get highly tailored information.

So, what does this mean for you and your online lead generation? First, you shouldn’t sit back and do nothing. AI search is still in its infancy, and if you wait to address it, you’ll find yourself behind in the years to come. What you should do is continue writing high-quality content and answering keyword-focused questions while also incorporating elements that we know AI engines look for.

What do AI engines look for, and how do you get cited in AI search results? Glad you asked!

Website Tweaks to Appear in AI Search Results

Carrot CEO Trevor Mauch recently hosted a comprehensive webinar on Website Tweaks Investors Make to Rank in AI Search to Get Motivated Sellers. He covers what’s changed and how AI works, but most importantly, he gives actionable takeaways you can implement right now to improve your company’s AI visibility.

Here are a few highlights that give you a better chance of appearing in AI results.

Solidify Your Entity

What’s an entity? It’s complete, unique, and thorough information about your business. Who you are, what you do, and the services you offer in clear, consistent language that AI can read and understand.

Start by crafting a clear, compelling bio that defines your business. This can include:

Your company’s mission and core values
Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Your target client/ideal lead and service area
The services you offer or problems you specialize in solving
What makes you different from competitors
Company history

Then make sure this bio is the same everywhere your business appears — your website, Google My Business profile, social media profiles, YouTube, BBB account, etc. Also make sure your company name appears exactly the same across all these platforms. As far as AI is concerned, Home Buyers, home buyers, and Homebuyers are all different.

AI is powered by large language models (LLMs), whose entire job is to take in information. If you’re inconsistent or try to be too “cutesy” with your descriptions, the LLMs can’t process the data consistently and correctly. This means it won’t know when to serve up your information in an AI search. Put simply, if AI doesn’t know who you are or what you do, you won’t appear in AI results.

Include AI-Friendly Elements on Your Website

Remember, LLMs are simply a mechanism to take in data, so you need to make sure the data you give it is easy to understand and stands out. To accomplish this, make sure your website has these key elements that AI loves.

Add FAQs to your key pages

FAQs are one of the most concise ways to directly answer common questions — exactly what AI looks for.

Add well-structured FAQ sections to the bottom of key pages on your site, like your homepage, location-specific pages, and services pages. Don’t repeat the same FAQs on each page. Instead, address common questions that relate directly to that page. For instance, on your homepage you should explain the types of services you offer, who you help, and your experience, while on the services pages you can go into more detail about how that particular service works, who it’s a good solution for, and answer common questions or misconceptions about it.

Make sure your FAQ sections follow the question and answer format. Not sure what questions to answer? Think about what questions you commonly hear from leads or go to Google and start typing in topics to see what auto suggestions appear. Be sure to use the language your leads do. While you might use the term “probate,” your potential leads might use something like “inherited house.” You don’t want to lose a lead just becaue they don’t know the technical jargon.

Finally, ensure the pages FAQs appear on (and any important pages on your site) are indexable by search engines (found in the page’s SEO settings).

A strong “About” page

This is where you sell yourself — highlighting your experience and what makes you different. AI loves originality and uniqueness, so tell everyone why you’re different than other real estate investors. Imagine someone is searching for the best way to sell their home fast. Why should AI recommend you?

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with this. How do you convince someone to work with you when you’re speaking in person? What really resonates with them or inspires confidence? Simply work those talking points onto your About page. Including stats is also good practice. Your numbers are yours, which is exactly the type of unique, original, statistical information AI prefers to surface. Consider including numbers like:

How many deals you’ve done
Your average time to close
Average purchase price you pay for homes
How long you’ve lived/worked in this area
Think of other interesting stats about your business

In the spirit of building a consistent entity, include a “Find me on …” section where you link to your social profiles and other channels. This helps build that web of connections for LLMs, reinforcing the information you share.

Need help writing a stellar About page? Check out our About Page Prompt for Real Estate Investors that makes the whole process painless!

Clear sections with properly structured headers

Put simply, LLMs are machines that scan your website for information. If it can’t process how that information is structured or “understand” what it says, you’ll never show up in AI. So traditional SEO tactics like using clear sections on your pages with proper header tags explaining what each section is about are more important than ever. (AI isn’t changing SEO best practices, it’s just reinforcing them.)

A clear site structure (including a good sitemap, Robots.txt, and LLMs.txt file) makes it easier for AI to parse your information.

Build Authority by Showing Proof

If you want to be viewed as the best option in your area, you need to show that you’re the best. One of the best ways to do this is by showing what you’ve done and the real world results.

Highlight your experience by showing homes you’ve purchased in the past (posting a photo of the home in the condition you bought it in can also give potential clients confidence that you’ll buy their house too). Lean deep into localization by listing street names or neighborhoods you’ve done business in. The more information you can share, the better. A statement like “I’ve bought over 25 houses for cash in the West Colfax area of Denver!” has more weight than simply “I buy houses for cash in the West Colfax area of Denver.”

Add third party proof by telling customer stories about how you’ve helped. Better yet, get a video of them telling their own story. Even if you don’t have a full story to tell, try getting a photo with the person and paint a picture with a good caption like, “Super excited to work with Jenny! We just bought her Boylston St. house in Jamaica Plain as-is!”

Turn your Google My Business and social media profiles into powerful marketing tools by using reviews from those platforms on your website. Take a screenshot of the review (which gives it more authenticity) and post it as an image on your website. To make sure search engines crawl the image properly and understand the context, type whatever the review says plus your company name into the image alt text. Something like “Carrot Homebuyers review from Jenny C.: It was great working with Jamie, we got a fair price and closed in our tight timeline!” LLMs can’t “see” the image; it needs the alt text to know what it is and what it says.

“Off Page” Signals Matter a Lot to AI

All of the onsite tweaks are important to make sure AI knows what your business is and does, but that’s only part of the battle. More so than with traditional SEO, AI doesn’t care what you say about your business, it cares what other people say about your business.

This is where many companies drop the ball. They optimize their website and business profiles, but they’re not engaging in and driving “off page” authority that’s increasingly important to AI. In a follow up webinar, Trevor covers The 3 OFF-PAGE tactics that drive 80% of AI SEO results.

Interested in the challenge mentioned in the webinar recording? Join the next AI SEO Challenge!

What is an “Off Page” source and why does it matter?

An “off page” source is simply any other website or platform that talks about your company but isn’t attached to your domain. This can be everything from YouTube and Reddit to media/press release sites to local business websites. AI search engines rely heavily on these third party sources, so you want to make sure you’re present and part of the conversation.

Here are some of the top off-page sources AI engines turn to for trust signals.

Common off-page signals for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overview results include Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube.

There are several ways to get your brand name out there — the webinar and AI SEO Challenge go into it in more depth. But one key thing to remember is to ensure your business name appears the same way every time to support your unified business entity. So whether you’re filming a video for YouTube, responding to a thread on Reddit, putting out a press release, or getting thanked as a sponsor on a local non-profit’s website, make sure your business name is the exact same every time.

Your secret weapon to search dominance: Reddit

Yes, Reddit, the discussion platform for everything from the latest news to super-niche fandoms.

Reddit is one of the most visited websites in the world, and in recent years, Google has given the platform even more visibility. Even outside of Google search’s AI Overviews, you may have noticed links to Reddit threads appearing higher in search results than blue links to individual websites. This is tied to Google’s “Helpful Content” algorithm adjustment. Google (and now AI search engines) see the real world discussions, insights, and opinions shared on Reddit as helpful to searchers looking for information.

And because there’s a subreddit for just about everything, there are great places for you to engage related to your business or your local community. Search for subs or even individual threads you can add value to. ADDING VALUE is key. Don’t walk into a thread trying to sell your service (that’s a good way to get yourself kicked out). Instead, answer the question with your expertise and insights. Be helpful. Showing off your expertise on Reddit (especially in a way that people find helpful and reward your comment with thumbs up) is a valuable indicator for LLMs that you’re a trusted source.

(Carrot’s AI SEO Challenge dives deep into how to use Reddit to improve search visibility, including sharing a GPT prompt to make the process fast and repeatable!)

Get Ahead with AI Search SEO

AI isn’t going away. More AI search engines will enter the market, and younger generations are even more inclined to use AI search (74% of people under 30 use AI for search, according to the AP/NORC study). Creating a solid foundation of AI SEO best practices now sets you up for future success.

This blog covers a few recommendations, but we go deeper in the actual webinars:

The goal is to get AI to recognize, trust, and recommend you. While AI SEO isn’t terribly different than “traditional” SEO, there are some areas that carry more weight. If you ignore them now, you’ll be further behind as we get deeper into the age of AI. Implement these best practices now and you’ll be in a better position than your competitors who haven’t changed a thing.

November 13, 2025

How Lead Scoring Helps Real Estate Investors Find the Best Leads & Close More Deals

Hey, I’m Jamie! I’ve been a professional digital marketer since 2010 and have spent a ton of time building lead scoring models over my career. So let me tell you all about lead scoring, how it’s useful, why it’s important, and how to set it up in a way that actually works for you. (Plus, I’ll share a template so you can build your own lead scoring matrix!)

Key Takeaways

Lead scoring rates how well new leads fit your ideal customer profile based on their activity and details about the opportunity.
Lead scoring helps you quickly identify the best leads, telling you where to focus your time and resources for the best chance of closing lucrative deals.
Real estate investors should use lead scoring to identify the most motivated sellers. You can do lead scoring manually with a spreadsheet or use an AI lead scoring tool.

Why Real Estate Pros Should Use Lead Scoring

Professional marketers have used lead scoring for years, particularly at B2B companies. It’s one of the ways we decide who the sales team should spend time reaching out to. Put simply, lead scoring is a way to rate how well new leads fit your ideal customer profile based on their activities and details about the opportunity.

Real estate investment teams with high lead volume should definitely use lead scoring to prioritize the most promising leads. Without lead scoring, you’re likely treating each new lead the same when they, quite frankly, are not. This leaves you vulnerable to wasted time and missed opportunities. Not only does lead scoring tell your team which leads to focus on first, it also helps with lead distribution. Give higher score (more promising) leads to your more experienced managers to ensure deals are done quickly before someone else locks it up. Lower score leads can be routed to newer managers or assigned to AI outreach tools that collect additional information for you while your team focuses elsewhere.

Even investors with more manageable lead volume can use lead scoring to decide which leads to follow up with first or more aggressively. If someone isn’t a good fit for your business or isn’t likely to turn into a deal, it’s not wise to spend the same amount of time, energy, and effort trying to close them. A low lead score tells you this quickly,

Lead scores change over time based on the lead’s engagement and the intel you collect. This tells you if a particular lead is turning into a stronger opportunity or is becoming less promising. Working with up-to-date lead scores ensures you stay focused and don’t waste your time. If you’re doing lead scoring manually, be sure to update the score each time you gather new information. If the lead stops responding, this should also negatively impact their score. If you use an AI lead scoring tool, the score automatically updates over time and as new information is added to the opportunity.

Essentially, without lead scoring you’re flying in the dark or spending too much time manually reviewing each opportunity to identify the best ones. Focusing only on the best-fit leads helps you close more deals and stop wasting time.

What Criteria to Use for Real Estate Lead Scoring

Customize your lead scoring algorithm based on what you find most valuable. If you already have a defined Ideal Customer Profile, great! If not, take a second to jot down the attributes your perfect lead would have — the one that is a slam dunk deal that you’d love to see come through your pipeline.

Do you have an ideal:

Seller/buyer motivation
Closing timeline/urgency
Ownership type
Decision maker
Property condition or location
Occupancy status
Lead source (e.g. PPC versus cold calling)

Don’t forget to factor in less concrete criteria that nevertheless impact a lead’s willingness or ability to make a deal, like how responsive they are to your communications and if you know (or suspect) you’re not the only investor they’re speaking to. While these are harder to measure, they can have a big impact on opportunity potential.

These are just some examples of lead scoring criteria you can build into your model. You can make it as complex or as simple as you’d like based on your “buy box.” If you’re practicing manual lead scoring, I recommend keeping things simple so it’s easier to maintain as you gather new information.

Want help planning your lead scoring matrix? This free Real Estate Lead Scoring Template is an interactive worksheet you can use to build your customized manual or AI lead scoring models.

Over time, as you gain a better understanding of what makes a good or bad lead for your business, refine your scoring matrix.

Note: Be cautious of lead scoring programs that decide your scoring criteria for you. They often claim they analyze your deals to identify the most important factors and commonalities. But without full control over your lead scoring algorithm, you can’t ensure leads with a high score are truly a good fit. If you decide to change your business focus, these “smart” AI scoring models need time to adjust, meaning your lead scores are blatantly incorrect until they catch up.

How to Set Up Lead Scoring

In the most manual way, you can use a spreadsheet for lead scoring. Add all your criteria in the first column and define how you’ll score each value (our lead scoring template has this pre-setup for you). You can manually enter the values each time or build dropdown options to keep scoring consistent. Then use the SUM function to add up the individual scores to get a total.

If you’re lead scoring on a spreadsheet, I recommend using a single document to track scores for all your leads. This allows you to easily see which leads have the highest scores for outreach prioritization. You can even set conditional formatting to color-code leads based on their score (this feature is already built into the lead scoring template linked above).

Every time you get a new lead, give them their own column in the spreadsheet and set their initial scores. Whenever you gather more information, adjust the relevant scores. You may want to add an additional row to keep track of their most recent lead score before adjusting any values so you can see if the score goes up or down.

As you can see, this can be a tedious process to do manually and is vulnerable to scoring discrepancies because of user error or forgetfulness.

AI lead scoring takes a little bit of upfront work (and an occasional tweak as you refine your process), but once the setup is done scoring is handled for you. Any time new information is gathered, the score updates. You don’t need to do anything special and there’s no risk of forgetting.

AI lead scoring also allows you to add another layer of nuance to your sources — attribute weight. Does urgency, motivation, or property condition matter more to you than lead source or occupancy status? With AI lead scoring, you can tell the algorithm that some attributes are more important than others and should account for a larger percentage of the overall score.

With manual lead scoring, if you have 10 attributes, each accounts for 1/10th of the total score (unless you want to get into some seriously complicated spreadsheet formulas). But with AI lead scoring, you can tell the algorithm that seller motivation should account for 20% of the overall score while lead source is only 6%. So a high seller motivation score will drive the total score up while a high lead source score won’t have much impact on the total. This allows you to index off what matters most to you.

There’s a worksheet for mapping out your AI lead scoring algorithm in the Lead Scoring Template, or you can build it directly in CarrotCRM’s AI Lead Scoring settings.

Focus Where it Matters

Lead scoring is a tried and true tool that marketing and sales teams have long trusted to identify the most promising leads. It’s not always perfect, but it can be a game changer, especially if you find yourself chasing bad leads.

Sophisticated real estate investors understand this and have adopted lead scoring in their real estate CRMs. The good news is you don’t have to be a high budget investor to use lead scoring! You can do it manually, or you can turn on AI lead scoring with a CarrotCRM account starting at just $69/month. AI usage is pay-as-you-go, so there’s no need to make a high value commitment!

No matter your lead volume, lead scoring keeps you focused and helps flush out the trash early, giving you more time to work better deals. And in the numbers game of real estate investing, time matters.

October 17, 2025

6 Things to Avoid When Choosing a Real Estate Investing CRM

If you’re a real estate investor, having a CRM designed for your needs is important. Generic CRMs don’t have the fields you need for details like property address, condition, asking pricing, etc., features like built-in maps and Zillow integrations, or follow-up tasks designed for real estate deal pipelines.

So if not all CRMs are a good fit for real estate lead management, what should you look for … and what should you avoid? This post goes over six key things to avoid when shopping for a real estate CRM.

Key Takeaways

Real estate investors should choose a CRM designed for real estate. Generic CRMs don’t have the fields or features needed for real estate lead and pipeline management.
Choose a real estate CRM that has the features you need and will grow with your business, but don’t get distracted by too many unrelated features.
When choosing a real estate CRM, make a list of your desired features, ask for recommendations in a way that gives you usable insights, and get live demos from the CRM providers you’re considering.

What is a real estate CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and “a CRM” is software that helps you manage those relationships. CRMs provide a centralized place to store lead details, communication records, and activities, as well as set follow-up tasks and often include built-in options for communicating with leads via email, text message, or even calls. The goal is to help you actively keep track of leads and move them down the pipeline to a closed deal. Salesforce and HubSpot are some of the more well-known CRMs on the market, but they’re not designed for real estate professionals.

A real estate CRM is CRM software built specifically for real estate professionals, particularly investors, agents, and property managers. Popular real estate investing CRMs include CarrotCRM, InvestorFuse, Resimpli, and Left Main REI. These solutions offer information fields and features unique to real estate lead management, such as built-in property data, nearby real estate comps, and follow-up steps like “due diligence” that you won’t find in a generic CRM.

When shopping for a CRM as a real estate investor, here are some key things to avoid to ensure you get a CRM that works well for your business.

1. It’s not designed for real estate

Handling a lead interested in selling their house to a wholesaler is very different than managing leads interested in buying enterprise software. Most CRMs have built-in fields for things like job title, company size, revenue, and buying roles — all fields that don’t make sense for real estate investors dealing with individuals.

While you can customize most CRMs with custom fields, why spend the extra time trying to make something work when it’s not a good fit? Especially since there are CRMs designed out of the box for real estate investors.

A real estate specific CRM has built-in data fields that make more sense for your use case. Fields like:

Property details
Estimated repairs needed
Outstanding mortgage information
Reason for selling
Time to sell
Occupancy details

Think of all the information you (or your lead or acquisition managers) would gather when assessing an opportunity. That information needs a dedicated place to live. Choose a CRM that is already built for that information instead of spending time setting it up manually.

Some real estate CRMs (like CarrotCRM) even pull much of this information into the opportunity for you via Zillow integrations and additional property data reports. This saves you time and gives you a better understanding of the property and potential deal value.

2. It’s difficult to set up or use

Speaking of not spending too much time setting up your CRM, that piece of advice also goes for dedicated real estate CRMs. Some are more complicated than others, and if it’s difficult to set up or use, you likely won’t end up using it.

Choose a CRM that has onboarding assistance, and be mindful of the timeline for launch. Some highly customizable CRMs like Left Main REI and HighLevel require a large amount of expertise and time to implement (which also drives up the price).

Don’t forget to look beyond implementation and consider what the day-to-day usage looks like. For instance, if the CRM relies on complicated workflows for lead nurturing, it could be overwhelming to set-up, use, and get value out of. Trust me, as a professional marketer for more than 15 years, I’ve spent plenty of time setting up automated workflows. It’s not a simple task, and it’s distributingly easy to mess up … meaning the workflow isn’t doing what you think it’s doing. Understanding automation can be full time job. Since marketing isn’t your full time job, look for a CRM with easy-to-use automations.

Consider choosing an action-based CRM that drives activities to make sure deals keep moving. If your CRM is little more than an online to-do list, it’s not any more effective than keeping track of your leads and tasks manually. An action-based CRM helps you set the right follow-up tasks and makes sure you know what to do next, keeping you on track.

For example, CarrotCRM’s action-based system does not allow you to complete an existing task without setting up the next follow-up step. This ensures you never forget what needs to be done or when the deadline is. Every CRM says it helps “keep leads from slipping through the cracks,” but if you forget to set the next follow-up step (or think you’ll do it later), that’s exactly what happens. CarrotCRM prevents that by making sure every lead always has a next step, owner, and due date. Then, these tasks get pulled into your My Dashboard view, ensuring nothing is forgotten

3. It doesn’t have AI features

Smart real estate investors use new AI tools to do more work in less time. Those who aren’t will to be increasingly left behind. With that in mind, don’t invest in a CRM that doesn’t have built-in AI.

Depending on your need and the CRM, AI can do everything from having information gathering conversations with leads, to making sure you’re aware if circumstances change and a lead becomes more or less likely to close, to nurturing cold leads. These tools save investors countless hours and help them focus their time and efforts on the most promising leads. Investors who continue to do everything manually will see themselves closing fewer deals in the months and years to come.

CarrotCRM AI - Must-have features for a real estate CRM & lead follow-up

Many CRMs are adding new AI features fairly often, so ask about features on the company’s roadmap when evaluating your options. If they’re not adding AI features at all, they’re likely to become outdated in the near future. (Be sure you understand the pricing model for any AI features. Some may be included in the base price, but many CRMs treat AI as an add-on with its own price.)

If the CRM doesn’t have a specific AI capability you’re interested in, make sure it supports integrations that allow you to add that feature. Which brings us to our next thing to avoid …

4. It doesn’t support integrations

CRMs can be very feature-rich (sometimes too feature-rich, but more on that in a second), but if it’s a completely closed system that doesn’t allow integrations, you’ll find yourself trapped. Whether you’re integrating a lead source or connecting another tool, your CRM needs to be the hub for your lead management. It can’t be a hub if you can’t connect the data and tools that you need and use.

Allowing integrations lets you use best-in-class solutions that fit your specific needs and preferences. You may want to integrate a tool that the CRM doesn’t have built in or use an alternative that you like better than the included capability. Using your preferred phone system is a great example. You should be allowed to use the tools and software you want, not what the CRM dictates.

This is particularly helpful with AI tools. There’s not a single real estate CRM that offers every common AI capability. AI is too new, and companies are still building out their AI feature suites, focusing first on the capabilities they think are most valuable to their users. Even as CRMs add new AI features, there are some AI tools that dedicated companies will likely be better at. AI voice solutions are the perfect example. It takes a lot to make an artificial voice agent sound real and engaging. Companies that focus only on AI voice are likely to perfect it before a CRM company creating its own in-house version.

That’s another thing to avoid — CRMs that do too much.

5. It has TOO many features

This may sound silly, but hear me out — more features are not always better. All-in-one CRMs promise to let you handle marketing, lead generation, lead follow-up, and deal management all in one platform. That sounds enticing until you start looking more closely.

All-in-one solutions have many potential pitfalls, but the main things to ask yourself are:

Am I paying for features I don’t want or use?
It does a lot of things, but does it do them all well?

Best-in-Class versus All-in-Ones

All in Ones vs Best in Class Real Estate Software

Define what you want to accomplish with a CRM and your overall goals, then look into the features that will help you get there. If your goal is to close more deals, do you really need more leads (i.e. outbound marketing tools) or do you need to better handle the leads you have (i.e. a CRM that hyper focuses on working your lead database)? All the bells and whistles are attractive, but they can also distract you from the main task at hand or leave you with substandard features because a company is stretched too thin.

6. It can’t grow with you

While you don’t want a CRM that’s so feature-rich that it’s distracting, you do want to choose a CRM that has the right features to scale with your business.

Focus on lead management related features like campaign tracking, employee dashboards, and round robin lead distribution. These are in line with the main purpose of a CRM and help you effectively assign, track, and manage leads as your lead sources (marketing campaigns) and acquisition management team grow.

Don’t forget to look at the CRM’s pricing model. While it may be affordable now, it might not always be that way. Does it grow in a sensible way, or does the price make crazy jumps if you need to add more users, contact records, or AI usage? Or worse, is the pricing behind a “Contact Sales” gate, meaning you have no idea what will happen to the cost as you grow?

One of the worst things is having to switch your CRM. Moving to a new system takes a lot of time, effort, and learning, interrupting more important work. It’s better to find a CRM that is affordable and meets your needs when you’re just starting out, but that can grow with you as your business scales.

How to find the right real estate CRM

We’ve talked a lot about what to avoid when choosing a real estate investing CRM, but I don’t want this post to be disheartening! There are amazing CRMs for real estate investors available. Here are some tips on how to find the best one for you.

Make a list of the features you need and rank each one by importance

Just like with any important purchase, make a list of your must-have and nice-to-have features, then rank those in order of importance. Define your goals and work backwards to ensure you’re not distracted.

This gives you a rubric to evaluate potential CRM providers. There may not be a perfect fit, but focusing on your must-have list will ensure your new CRM meets your main requirements.

Download our Software Evaluation Matrix

Be smart about how you ask for recommendations

It’s natural to ask for recommendations from people you trust, especially with so many coaches in the real estate investing industry. Everyone has an opinion. The trick is to understand what you’re looking for and how well their recommendation aligns with your needs.

When asking about real estate CRMs, here are a few key questions to get a real understanding of its fit and functionality:

What were you looking for in a CRM? (Make sure it aligns with what you want to accomplish. It may be a great CRM from the person you’re talking to, but not the right fit for you.)
What features do you use all the time? What are your favorites?
Is there something you thought you’d like, but actually never use?
What don’t you like about it?
Is there anything you feel it’s missing?
What made you choose this CRM? Did you consider any others?

Pro tip: Avoid yes or no questions. These don’t give you the level of insight you need to make your own decision.

Get a live demo

Even the most user-friendly CRMs can seem overwhelming at the start. Before committing, book a live demo to see it in action and ask questions.

Watching video reviews is a good start, but they aren’t interactive. Speaking to a professional who knows the software gives you a better understanding of how you’ll use it and the chance to ask clarifying questions or get a deeper demonstration of certain features.

Armed with this list of things to avoid and a few steps to finding the right solution for you, you’ll have the perfect real estate CRM in no time!

October 9, 2025

Author: Jamie Saine

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Features that Make Agency Life Easier

AI Website Builder

Custom Template

Agency Management Dashboards

Task Management

AI Site Improvements

Built-In Site Maintenance

Bulk Redirect

Your Choice of Business Model & Client Billing

Lead Management CRM

User Management

Sites Built for Modern Online Search

Who is CarrotAgency a Good Fit For?

How much does CarrotAgency cost?

Stop struggling

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

1. A Website Gives You Modern Credibility

2. Show Up in Local Search (SEO) & AI Search

Want help optimizing your website for local AI search? Check out Carrot’s AI Visibility Challenge, built specifically for local services businesses and real estate professionals!

Or want someone to manage SEO for you? We can help!

3. Generate Leads & Get Customers — Even after hours

4. Build Trust

Websites are a must for today’s local businesses

Launching an SEO-optimized website for your local business doesn’t have to cost thousands or require technical know-how. Carrot’s AI website builder walks you through the process in minutes for less than $150/mo.

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Bonus Tip: Match Your Messages!

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 1: The Winning Headline Formula

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 2: Address Visitor’s Fears

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 3: Trust Signals

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 4: Make Your Call-To-Action (Button) Clear & Compelling

Must-Have PPC Landing Page Element 5: Low-Friction Contact Methods

Keep PPC Landing Pages Simple & Focused

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Most Common Problems Hurting Your PPC Ads & Landing Pages

PPC Problem 1: The Homepage Problem

PPC Problem 2: The Writing Problem

PPC Problem 3: The Mobile Blindspot

PPC Problem 4: Google’s Secret Ad Scores

Fixing Your PPC Landing Pages

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Carrot Website Updates

New Ways to Customize Your Site to Stand Out

Examples of the New Carrot Website Designs

“Friendly” Template

“Professional” Template

“Classic” Template

“Simple” Template

Edit Your Auto Location Pages

CarrotCRM Updates

An Easier Way to Tackle Your To-Do List

Kanban View

Better Transaction and Disposition Management

Bulk Add Leads to Drip Campaigns

New Carrot Services

“Done for You” SEO Services

Enhanced CarrotCRM Setup

Coming in 2026 …

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Impacts to real estate investing in 2025

AI has a HUGE Impact on Search Traffic

Growing Real Estate Wholesale Regulation

How the real estate market will change in 2026

Investors need to step up their game in 2026

How to be a successful investor in 2026

AI in 2026

Prep for a Successful 2026

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

What’s Changed with AI SEO?

Website Tweaks to Appear in AI Search Results

Solidify Your Entity

Include AI-Friendly Elements on Your Website