Real Messenger: Real Estate App Review (2024)

While social media platforms like Meta and the recently-renamed mobile app X have long been valuable marketing tools for real estate players, marketing on these platforms isn’t a smooth ride. As apps primarily designed for casual connections, regular social media platforms often connect users with no inherent buying intent. This translates to the grueling task of marketing real estate on platforms where the audience may not be actively interested. Consequently, it takes ages for results to manifest, even from paid programs like Facebook Ads.

But what if there was a social app specifically designed for real estate? An app where the audience is 100% immersed in real estate discussions and content? Wouldn’t it be great? Well, guess what! Such an app now exists: it’s called Real Messenger. In this Real Messenger review, we’ll dive into the features and benefits this new industry-centric platform offers real estate players.

• What Is Real Messenger?
• Real Messenger Features & Benefits
• Real Messenger vs. Competitors
• Final Thoughts: Is Real Messenger Worth It?

What Is Real Messenger?

Real Messenger is an international social media app exclusively tailored for the real estate industry. The app debuted in 2022 to unite agents, brokers, investors, and buyers on a single platform. You can download it on either your iPhone or Android phone.

Real seeks to revolutionize marketing and lead generation in real estate by eliminating conventional barriers associated with these processes, such as costs tied to listing on traditional real estate market platforms like the MLS and Zillow. It also aims to empower real estate agents by granting them complete control over their listings.

Real Messenger stands out for an Instagram-style social media interface where agents can upload their listings for free and a chat feature similar to Facebook Messenger, fostering seamless communication and networking among agents, buyers, and industry professionals.

With over 350,000 downloads across 35 countries, The Messenger began its transition from a privately owned entity to a publicly traded one following a 150 million merger with Nova Acquisition Corp early in 2023. The proceeds from this merger are set to help Real scale its international reach.

The transaction is set to be completed in the last quarter of the year, after which Real Co will list on NASDAQ under RMSG. The company is based in Costa Mesa, California, but also has employees in Hong Kong.

About the Founders

Real Messenger is the brainchild of two esteemed real estate industry figures: Thomas Ma and Fredrik Eklund. With their combined expertise, Ma and Eklund spearheaded the creation of Real Messenger.

The current CEO, Thomas Ma, is a prominent real estate entrepreneur and broker. He brings a wealth of experience to Real Co.

Ma hails from one of Hong Kong’s most illustrious real estate developer families and boasts a rich track record in PropTech, including creating HOHOJO, an equally renowned rental marketplace and leasing management system. Before Real Messenger, Ma made notable contributions to leading real estate publications, delving into topics such as AI’s potential in the industry.

His associate and Chief Visionary Officer of Real, Fredrik Eklund, is a powerhouse in his own right. Widely recognized for his colorful personality and role in Bravo’s award-winning reality show “Million Dollar Listing, New York,” Eklund is a Swedish real estate broker with significant success in real estate, having closed over five billion in residential real estate sales.

Eklund, a Jack of all trades, is also the author behind The Sell: The Secrets of Selling Anything to Anyone, which was such a hit that it made the New York Times Best Seller List.

Additionally, Eklund is a co-founder of The Eklund, a luxury real estate company he co-founded with his friend, John Gomes. As with everything else he’s associated with, The Eklund | Gomes Team is also a pretty successful company with a track record of over $15 billion in closed sales.

Eklund’s triumphs in real estate have garnered him enduring recognition and rankings in prestigious industry hotlists such as The Hollywood Reporter and Variety’s Real Estate Elite. His achievements with Real Co are set to cement his place as an industry guru further.

Real Messenger Features & Benefits

Although relatively new, Real Messenger has end-to-end features that, if well maximized, could greatly benefit not just real estate agents but also real estate investors such as wholesalers and rehabbers. These features include:

Social Network for Real Estate

Real Messenger is offered as a social app exclusive to the real estate industry. This means it successfully unites the global real estate community under one platform.

This makes it inclusive and potentially one of the most powerful social networks for real estate. By uniting users with one common interest, it promotes networking and allows users to cultivate more meaningful and high-quality connections.

For example, real estate agents can collaborate with other agents or investors to expand their networks. On the other hand, investors, including wholesalers, can evaluate user profiles to swiftly identify agents specializing in their desired locations or property types, leading to mutually beneficial partnerships.

This targeted approach also delivers unique benefits to each stakeholder. For example, agents gain insights into buyer preferences, refining their listings to meet these needs. At the same time, investors like wholesalers can seamlessly keep up with market trends based on insights from other agents and investors, allowing for strategic investments. On the other hand, ordinary property buyers and sellers access a wealth of information from industry experts, aiding them in making informed decisions on the best time to buy or sell a property.

Additionally, while Real is an international app, users can customize the settings so the app only displays and alerts them of listings in specific locations. This allows localized networking as users can connect with active real estate professionals in their regions, leading to more meaningful connections. 

By allowing users to focus on particular locations, Real encourages the formation of virtual communities where real estate professionals, investors, and users from the same regions can share and discover content related to their target markets, creating a more relevant and engaging social experience. Also, users with location-specific preferences can easily keep up with events, opportunities, and developments in their chosen markets, making Real a networking platform and a reliable source of actionable information.

For investors who wholesale real estate, the ability to focus on and receive listing notifications from specific locations deepens their knowledge of those particular markets, fueling informed investment decisions. It also means less time spent sifting through irrelevant listings and more time evaluating properties that meet their investment criteria, enhancing overall efficiency.

Data Collection

Real Messenger is a relatively infant app, but once its user base expands, the data it collects could prove incredibly valuable to investors. The application currently utilizes an AI-powered algorithm to learn and gather data on user behavior, ensuring it displays only relevant content. 

Moreover, the built-in chat feature uses sentiment analysis to collect data to aid agents in understanding client preferences in property buying and communication style.

As the user base grows, the accumulated data has the potential to facilitate optimal agent-user pairings and connections with like-minded users, thereby enhancing overall user experiences.

Redefining Real Estate Content

Besides being a powerful social network for real estate, the messaging app also has features that redefine content delivery in the real estate industry. The platform ditches the heavily formalized database content used by traditional real estate platforms in favor of friendly social media content delivery formats.

For example, unlike traditional platforms that rely on text-heavy listing presentations, Real Messenger adopts an Instagram-style news feed and explore function. Real offers RealMoment, an artificial intelligence video-sharing feature that allows real estate agents to enhance their virtual home showings and share snippets of their lives. 

This approach enables agents and investors to showcase their listings for free through high-quality image and video content formats. Consequently, viewing listings becomes a more visually appealing and engaging experience for other users. 

By allowing users an inside look at their personal lives, features like RealMoment break down the professional barrier, making agents and investors more approachable, thus fostering more personalized connections.

The news-feed style interface also eliminates the monotony of scrolling through static databases, making property discovery organic and enjoyable for the buyer or a real estate investor. The social app features, including likes and shares, encourage user interaction, fostering a sense of community within the real estate industry. These features can also lead to valuable insight sharing, partnerships, and a supportive network.

Furthermore, the platform’s exclusivity to real estate ensures all insights and interactions, content, and discussions are specific to the real estate domain and directly relevant to the interests and needs of users within the real estate industry. This targeted approach ensures users are only exposed to valuable information and professionals to stay informed about industry trends, market developments, and best practices, contributing to continuous learning, improvement, and a satisfying user experience.

Agent Curated Content

Real Messenger was purposefully created to connect real estate professionals and, more importantly, empower agents by placing listing control firmly in their hands.

This empowerment is proven through the platform’s distinct content delivery approach; instead of relying solely on automated content like most media do, the Messenger app employs a proprietary AI-trained tool to push agent-curated content to user news feeds and explore sections.

This strategic move puts real estate agents in control of content displayed on the platform, creating a win-win situation: agents get to showcase their expertise effectively while users enjoy exclusive exposure to highly relevant and accurate content. 

For the users, particularly investors, this translates to seamlessly accessing content that aligns with their goals and requirements, sparing them the tedious task of sifting through vast amounts of unrelated information.

Also, real estate agents are actively engaged in the industry and possess firsthand knowledge of market shifts, trends, and the latest developments. By giving precedence to their content, Real Messenger enables users to tap into the insights, trends, and vast industry knowledge that agents boast, leading to informed decision-making.

Simply put, by prioritizing agent content, Real Messenger empowers agents to market their trade effortlessly and transforms the user experience into one characterized by relevance, accuracy, and a wealth of industry insights.

Real Estate Communication

As noted, Real Messenger ditches the static content formats typical of traditional real estate platforms like Zillow and integrates the familiar social features found on conventional social media apps like user profiles, news feeds, and chat. These features redefine real estate content and streamline communication between professionals, investors, and other app users. 

For instance, with the capability to establish user profiles and share posts, agents and investors can go beyond listings and offer users an inside look into their lives or showcase their personalities and values. This humanizes and makes them more approachable, encouraging communication as users who resonate with the agent’s personal life become more comfortable reaching out.

Real Messenger’s dedicated chat function further streamlines end-to-end communication by facilitating direct, instant, and private text messages for all users. Users can easily reach out to others and share documents in real-time through the app. This streamlined communication accelerates real estate transactions, making it more efficient and responsive than traditional real estate marketplaces.

Real Messenger vs. Competitors

While Real Messenger is genuinely innovative, it’s one in a long string of commercial real estate apps aimed at nurturing connections between real estate professionals and clients. Here’s how it performs against the competition:

Real Messenger vs. 1060

The 1060 app, often called TenSixty, is a social network app incredibly similar to Real Messenger. Like Real Co, the 1060 app employs video-based listings. Agents can capture and instantly upload 60-second-long videos of their listings on the app, providing an immersive viewing experience. It also has a dedicated chat feature enabling users to quickly reach out and communicate with agents and investors whose properties they might be interested in.

However, unlike Real, the app also offers a property search function. It allows users to refine their property search based on price, number of rooms, real estate agent, brokerage, and specific keywords, greatly simplifying the user experience. But even so, Real offers a better user experience with its agent-curated content. Additionally, the Real app features an explore section, while the 1060 app doesn’t.

While both platforms are free, onboarding on the 1060 app is a hassle as agents must go through a vetting process done by the 1060 team. The vetting process is based on the agent’s online listing presence, social media, and website activity. It technically means first time agents or seasoned agents with no social media presence or websites cannot leverage it. However, it's worth noting that Real predominantly caters to high-end listings. In contrast, the 1060 app welcomes properties across various price points.

In summary, both platforms come with their advantages and drawbacks. Your choice should align with the requirements and circumstances that best suit your needs.

Real Messenger vs. Ri.la

Ri.la, is a free real estate app similar to Real Messenger. It enables real estate professionals to share listings through high-quality images and videos. Like Real, Ri.la uses artificial intelligence to enhance and push agent listings to user feeds, enhancing their visibility. 

On the other hand, users can like agent posts, training the app’s AI assistant on their preferences and consequently improving the quality of the content they see on their feeds. 

Ri.la also features a chat function similar to Whatsapp, which helps streamline communication. Ultimately, Real Messenger and Ri.la are identical, except that while the former is available in Android and IoS, Ri.la is only available for iPhone users.

Final Thoughts: Is Real Messenger Worth It?

After deep diving through its founders, features, and competitors during our Real Messenger review, the app emerges as a transformative force in the real estate industry. It adequately addresses the limitations of traditional social media platforms for real estate professionals. For instance, it’s designed exclusively for the real estate community, providing users with relevant, accurate information whenever needed.

The platform’s emphasis on agent-curated content empowers real estate professionals to market themselves better and control their listings for free, while localized networking fosters meaningful connections. However, while it offers an awesome set of features, Real Messenger is still a relatively new app in the market, and it’s hard to recommend in its current state.

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*Disclosure: Real Estate Skills is not responsible for the information provided by Real Messenger or on its respective website. Real Messenger is an independent company which provides real estate services to investors. Real Estate Skills trains on using Real Messenger and the benefits of using the service but is not responsible for the content it provides.