The Lead Propeller vs Investor Carrot debate has been prevalent in real estate circles for years. But which one is truly better? We put both platforms head to head to bring a close to this debate once and for all.
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LeadPropeller vs Investor Carrot
Both LeadPropeller and Investor Carrot build platforms for property investors to make powerful websites that attract seller leads.
But which one is better? We’re glad you asked. In this review, we’ll try to answer this question by comparing the features, pricing, customer reviews, and more.
Read on to find out who we think wins.
About LeadPropeller
LeadPropeller was created by Danny Johnson, the owner of Flipping Junkie and a real estate investor. LeadPropeller offers customizable websites for real estate investors.
These websites are designed to bring in seller leads and help investors tap into a steady supply of people willing to sell property.
Read our full LeadPropeller review
About Investor Carrot
Investor Carrot (now shortened to Carrot) was founded by a small group of real estate investors that started learning the ins and outs of the investing world in college.
The group pitched in money and invested in properties together in those days. Over the years, they’ve become experts in the field.
Today, Carrot offers top-notch real estate investor websites that draw seller leads in through special lead magnets, a built-in SEO and marketing edge, and products that go beyond the site itself.
Read our full Investor Carrot review
LeadPropeller vs InvestorCarrot — Features
It’s impossible to compare Carrot and LeadPropeller without taking a close-up look at their features. Because their offerings are so similar, we’ll identify the small differences between them to determine a winner.
Templates
LeadPropeller and Investor Carrot both provide built-in templates for you to use as you build your investor lead generation website. These templates lay out a framework for your website design.
This feature enables you to create a great website without web design experience. LeadPropeller’s templates are pretty basic, allowing you to use different color schemes and text boxes, just as most other website builders will.
Real-time previews help you see what your changes will look like before you publish them — this is helpful if you tend to forget to proofread.
Investor Carrot templates are a bit more robust and able to be tweaked and customized. Carrot’s templates allow you to do a lot more with the space on your web page, including listing houses and properties you have under contract or have sold recently.
Dozens of templates are available from Investor Carrot, so you can make sure your website is set up the way you like it.
Domain and Hosting
LeadPropeller and Investor Carrot both offer options for website domains and web hosting. LeadPropeller keeps the rights to your domain name if you leave the platform, but Investor Carrot allows you to keep ownership of your domain as long as you want.
LeadPropeller allows you to pick an available domain name and host it for the length of time you are a customer. The upside of this is that you don’t have to visit another website to find and buy a domain name.
The downside is that you don’t really own the domain — LeadPropeller does. If you end your subscription, you lose the domain as well.
It’s free to host your website on Investor Carrot’s own servers. You’ll just need to pick out a domain name, and Carrot takes care of the rest.
Investor Carrot works closely with Namecheap, a website domain marketplace where you can purchase a domain name for a low price.
We really like this setup because it means the domain name is actually yours. Even if you end your Investor Carrot subscription, you’ll still get to keep your domain name.
Email Addresses
LeadPropeller and Carrot have options for you if you want an email address associated with your domain name (like name@domain.com).
LeadPropeller offers unlimited email addresses connected to your domain. You can set these email addresses up to forward to one email account you regularly use to keep things organized.
Investor Carrot allows you to have unlimited email addresses connected to your domain, but you can’t set them up from inside the platform. Most people use Google Apps or the company the domain name was purchased through to set these up.
Once you have your custom domain email addresses created, just tell Carrot’s customer service, and they’ll make sure it shows and is connected on your website.
Website Content
Starting off with an empty website doesn’t look good to potential leads, so both platforms offer you options to upload content right away.
Be careful with which option you choose – many reviewers have stated that LeadPropeller’s default content caused them to get penalized in search results by Google. This is known as duplicate content.
LeadPropeller advertises free default website content. This content automatically shows up on your pages until you change it or delete it. It will reflect information based on the area you chose when you set up your website.
This helps you avoid duplicate content penalties. It can help push your site up in Google search rank as well as make it look more professional to your prospects who visit.
Landing Pages
Area- and city-specific landing pages are available on both platforms. By choosing a target city, you can change the information and content that shows up across your website.
Both LeadPropeller and Investor Carrot allow you to create as many landing pages as you want. These can help you target prospects in specific cities across the United States.
Adding a Blog
Having a blog is essential not only to give critical information to your prospects who are visiting your site but also to help Google notice your website. Ultimately, this helps it appear in relevant search results.
Both platforms have solutions for adding a blog to your site, but Investor Carrot’s method is more natural.
To add a blog to your LeadPropeller site, you’ll need to create a WordPress account and blog. After you’ve created your blog, you can connect it to your website.
There is an additional service that allows LeadPropeller customers to pay monthly for a blog and content to be published on it.
Because Carrot is built using WordPress, you already have a blog on your website. You just need to add posts to it! The custom content packs that are included with most plans can help you fill out the blog or get started.
The Carrot website gives step-by-step instructions on how to create a new post if you aren’t familiar with WordPress.
Lead Forms
The ability to collect contact information from leads on your website is absolutely essential. Without it, you might get visitors with no way to tell you that they have a question or property you might be interested in!
LeadPropeller and Carrot both make it easy to add lead forms anywhere on your website.
LeadPropeller lets you use short contact forms, which collect a small amount of information from a lead and then notify you that you’ve received a form completion.
The lead gets a notification through a text message or email, letting them know that you’ll be in touch soon. With Investor Carrot, you can customize your lead forms and choose which questions are required and those that are optional.
After filling out the quick, short-form, users are directed to a page that grabs a little more information from them to help you qualify leads before you even speak to them.
You can use the Carrot integrations to connect this process with MailChimp, for example, to send an email after you get a form submission and let the person know you’ve received their message.
You can also have it add their contact information directly to your customer relationship manager or a spreadsheet. MailChimp, Podio, Constant Contact, Aweber, Zoho CRM, Zapier, and iContact are all possible integrations on Carrot.
We like Carrot’s contact forms better because they seem to be cleaner and include a little more detail than those from LeadPropeller.
Text Notifications
After a lead fills out one of your website forms, you need to know right away so you can contact them before they get in touch with another investor or change their minds.
Both platforms feature text notifications that can give you a heads-up the moment a lead submits your form.
CRM for Lead Management
You can manage the leads you generate through your website with a CRM. If you’re using LeadPropeller, it includes a very simple CRM that you access through their backend.
All your leads will be sent here. That can be a good thing if you haven’t yet found the right CRM that you like working with.
If you’re using Carrot, you can easily integrate your preferred CRM with your website to funnel every lead and contact you collect right into your database.
We like this option simply because you get to choose your CRM and don’t have to use one just because it came with the website.
Search Engine Optimization
Without Search Engine Optimization, most people will never have the opportunity to come across your website, no matter how great it is.
For this reason, both platforms offer some kind of help with SEO to get your site off the ground and help it begin ranking.
LeadPropeller does it through a plugin that shows you how many words need to be on a page, which keywords you need to use, etc. You won’t get personalized, expert advice.
Still, it’s nice to have this information right at your fingertips if you’re doing most of the site management yourself.
Investor Carrot, on the other hand, offers help with SEO through its full-service SEO add-on. This feature gives you the expertise of Investor Carrot Pros, who handle your SEO tasks and activities every month for an additional fee.
You can also purchase Managed Paid Traffic Generation services from Carrot, which guarantee higher rates of traffic and help you get more eyes on your site immediately.
Downloadable Guides and Training
These two platforms differ a bit on the types of guides and training they offer. LeadPropeller guides are for you — the user. Investor Carrot guides are lead magnets available to your website visitors in exchange for their contact information.
LeadPropeller offers guides to different parts of running a website in the form of blog posts and short videos on their website. These blog posts are available for anyone to read, so they are not considered exclusive content.
Investor Carrot offers a range of downloadable guides to help drive traffic to your site. When they see a guide they are interested in (they show up automatically on your website as the user browses), they can enter their name and email address to download the guide quickly.
This information then goes into the CRM you have connected so you can begin reaching out to them with relevant information. Investor Carrot also offers training courses on Facebook marketing and Craigslist marketing.
Features Winner: Investor Carrot
Overall, Carrot comes out on top in the features category thanks to more robust features that are similar to LeadPropeller but pack a little more function into each one.
From additional lead magnets that draw in sellers to a more straightforward landing page and blog post creation, Carrot is the winner here.
LeadPropeller vs InvestorCarrot — Pricing
LeadPropeller and Carrot pricing, like their features, is comparable. The essential factor in determining which platform is the winner in the pricing category are the included features with each subscription level.
Starter (LeadPropeller) vs. Core (Carrot)
The LeadPropeller Starter plan includes:
- 1 website
- 1 content pack (8-10 articles)
- PRICE: $49/month
The Carrot Core plan includes:
- 1 website
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) foundation
- User support from Investor Carrot
- Lead manager
- 2 campaign tracking links
- PRICE: $49/month
Professional (LeadPropeller) vs. Content Pro (Carrot)
The LeadPropeller Professional plan includes:
- 3 websites
- 3 content packs (24-30 articles)
- In-house phone support
- PRICE: $79/month
The Carrot Content Pro package includes:
- 3 websites
- Lead gen magnets and SEO tools
- Lead manager
- User support from Carrot
- 15 campaign tracking links
- Track 3 SEO rankings per website
- 12 unique content pro posts
- PRICE: $99/month
Franchiser (LeadPropeller) vs. Advanced Marketer (Carrot)
The LeadPropeller Franchiser plan includes:
- 15 websites
- 5 content packs with 40-50 articles
- In-house phone support
- PRICE: $299/month
The Carrot Advanced Marketer package includes:
- 3 Websites
- Lead gen magnets and SEO tools
- Access premium support
- Lead manager
- Weekly coaching calls with Carrot Pros
- Unlimited campaign tracking links
- Quarterly strategy calls
- 20 SEO rankings per site
- First access to new site designs
- 12 premium blog posts per month
- 10% off other in-house services (SEO, ads, etc.)
- PRICE: $149/Month
Setup Fees
Investor Carrot doesn’t do setup fees, and they feel pretty strongly about it. Here’s an excerpt from their website:
We couldn’t find any information about setup fees for LeadPropeller.
Pricing Winner: InvestorCarrot
Carrot’s pricing is very close to LeadPropeller. Still, the real tie-breaker is the number of features included at each subscription level. Carrot just offers more features for the price at the first two subscription levels.
At the highest-level subscription (Enterprise and Advanced Marketer), there is a big difference in what you’re actually getting with each plan.
LeadPropeller’s $299/month plan has 15 websites compared to 3 with Carrot’s Advanced Marketer plan, so your choice as an investor should be based on the number of sites you actually need.
LeadPropeller vs InvestorCarrot — Customer Reviews
It can be difficult to find reviews from real users online with so much information available about both LeadPropeller and Carrot. We dug through forums to find some of the most honest reviews from real users of each platform. Some have experience using both. Let’s compare!
+1 IC (Content, Simplicity)
“I’ve used both. Currently, I’m on IC. I love their content packs. If you’re not design inclined the click and go functionality is nice. I’ve spent HOURS changing my sites so they look less template like. I have organically generated leads with my IC site. I didn’t get any organic leads with my LP. Both have fantastic support.” -Ryan Dossey, real estate broker
-1 LP (Tech Incompetency)
“Lead Propeller – The incompetency of their technicians cost me tens of thousands of dollars! They updated my (their) website and Google and Google PPC tagged it as malicious and I got delisted. Lead Propeller gave me excuses again and again for months while my business was crippled. They never did get it working and I had to move to another provider. Think twice before utilizing Lead Propeller!” -Harry Ridge, real estate professional
+1 IC (Simplicity)
“I love my Carrot site – very easy to navigate back end. Very user friendly.” -Alan L., real estate investor
+1 IC (Simplicity, SEO Tools)
“I have tried both and must say that Carrot provides better results overall. Also, it is very simple to edit and change your content and there are built in SEO tools to help make your site more searchable. I was on page 1 in a super competitive market and averaged 2-5 hot leads every few days in a Seller’s market. Not too bad.” -Matt Pierce, flipper/rehabber
-1 LP (Ineffective Ads)
“Leadpropeller is absolute garbage. I purchased their Google AdWords program for $997 and in 2 weeks they spent over $1300 of my money. I didn’t get a single call or web form filled in that time. I basically flushed $2300+ dollars down the toilet.” -Collin Tilbe, flipper/rehabber
+1 IC (Effective Ads
“We use Carrot and like it.You will still need paid traffic unless you’re just looking for a few good leads per month. When we don’t do paid traffic, we still get 1-2 leads per WEEK, but when we do paid ads driving the traffic to our site, we get 1-2 per DAY…I’ve found that the higher our cost of customer is, the better the leads, the less time we waste. I’d rather have 1 very solid lead per day instead of 10-20 that waste an entire day.” -Jeff Filali, rental property investor
+1 LP (Customizable, Support)
“Lead propeller has been very solid to work with over the last few years… very responsive in the support section. You can do a great deal of customizing with the site… and it really complements the other marketing you would do in order to build a brand overtime.” -Robert Wilson, real estate agent
+1 IC (Lead Pipeline)
“Investor Carrot for sure. I close 1 to 4 deals a month with organic SEO. My closing rate per lead is about 1 deal for every 20 to 23 leads I get. Have really focused on organic Google SEO rankings for my local market. Have not spent a dime on PPC. Carrot works if you put the time into content and backlinks. You have to be patient. It does time some time but will pay off if you put in the work. Now really focused on consistent content and increase # of quality backlinks. Just closed on 2 deals yesterday that were online organic SEO leads that have about $35K in wholesale profit that we will turn by year-end. ” -Tyler Ford, real estate agent
Reviews Winner: InvestorCarrot
There are so many positive reviews online for Carrot. We struggled to find many for LeadPropeller. Most of the LP reviews we did find were distinctly negative.
Reviews are one of the most important factors in determining which platform is really the winner here – excellent features and fair pricing don’t get results on their own.
Knowing how investors who have actually used the platforms look back on their experience (and how many stay with the platform long-term) is essential. In this case, Carrot was the clear winner.
LeadPropeller vs InvestorCarrot — Who Wins?
In the above article, we dove into both platforms’ backgrounds, features, pricing, and online user reviews. In every category, InvestorCarrot comes out on top as the winner.
Users cite the more robust features, better pricing, excellent customer support, and simplicity of use. For this reason, we think InvestorCarrot is the better choice.
After all, the platform helps investors create a lead generation website without investing thousands of dollars or hours of their time
