Many have asked; which is better, texting for real estate agents. Both offer distinct advantages and it really depends on what your desired, end result is. Fact is, they are similar but remarkably different in the way they work. We will discuss the benefits of text marketing and how you can implement texting in to your real estate career.

How a real estate agent/broker can use text marketing. Within the dashboard of a text marketing account you configure your text auto-response to send out a text immediately upon someone texting in the keyword you choose. In that text you embed the link to that property. What I did was I created a YouTube channel then created a slide show of the property, uploaded to YouTube then copied the URL in to the auto-responder text. That way when someone text'd "Len1″ to 41242 it automatically sent to them the link to view the property. Pretty handy hey? With QR codes you can’t do that. If a person scans the QR code then they are redirected to the QR code providers site where the profile/information on your property resides. Also, with QR codes you can’t capture the inquirer’s cell phone info.

What service to choose? There are a lot of text messaging services out there. Most are fairly competitive and basically do the same thing as the others. There really is no great difference. The texting service I have used is called Yep Text.

Pricing: Depending on how many texts you want to send each month determines the plan you want to choose. Prices range from $9 a month to $149 a month and there are additional, higher volume packages as well. The $9 a month package allows you 150 texts per month + one yep word and $149 package allows 4000 messages a month + 3 yep words. Additional Yep words can be purchased and added to any package for $8.

Billing: You are only billed for outgoing texts and that rate is about 5.3 cents per text.

What is a keyword for texting? Texting services have a dedicated 5 digit number associated with their service. For example, Yep Text’s designated number is 41242. You don’t own the number, they do. What you would own is what they call the "keyword" or "Yep Word". Essentially, your Yep word is your keyword. So, let’s say you have a listing on East Broadway. Then you would enter that "yep word" in to the dashboard and see if that keyword is available. If so, then you now own "East Broadway" for the 41242 number.

What keyword do you choose? We’ve all seen something like this before: "text the word Subway to 41242 to receive our weekly specials". You create your key word and add the word to your website, business cards and, what I did was that I even created a sticker to attach to my signs. I wouldn’t recommend using a specific name or number associated with each property. I would use something like "YourName1″, "YourName2″, etc., for each of your properties and here is why. Once that property sells you want to reassign that Yep word to your next property. And, if your keyword is something like "East Broadway1" and your property is on East Broadway then once you sell that property and reassign the keyword to a property say, on 7th Street, then you'll be stuck with the sticker on your sign saying "Test East Broadway1" to 41242. That may become confusing to your potential buyers.

Benefits: Text marketing allows you to capture the inquirer’s cell phone number so that you can re-solicit to them a property that meets their criteria at a later date. Much like an email data base, you are creating a "text data base" which is the most important thing in real estate; a list. QR codes, at this point, do not allow you to capture information.

So, the jury is out on this one. Really depends if you want to create a list and re-solicit later or if you want to just offer QR codes so that the customer can gain access to the relevant information for the property.