Six rentals in a rural county, quoted $2,400 to set up a CRM, do I need one

Take the two pieces of that quote separately, because they do different work.

The first piece is a place where 48 conversations a year live with a date, a note, and a next action. At that volume a free CRM tier or even a shared spreadsheet with a "contact again on" column does this. Your legal pad already holds the information. What it lacks is a way to sort by date, which is exactly why you found the nine month callback by luck.

The second piece is the follow-up firing without you. That is the part that changes outcomes for rural sellers, because the gap between first call and readiness is often measured in seasons, not weeks. If a text or a letter goes out on day 30, day 90, and month six whether or not you remember, you stop depending on flipping back through pages.

On the money. $2,400 plus $180 a month is $4,560 in year one. Against a $22k to $30k spread, one incremental deal covers it several times. That math only holds if the follow-up actually produces an additional conversation you would have lost, and nobody can promise you that it will. What you can check is whether it happens: count how many of your 48 conversations got a second touch last year without you initiating it.

One caution. Automated texting to people who called your sign has consent rules that vary and change, including carrier registration requirements. Ask the consultant in writing how he handles opt-outs and registration, and confirm the current requirements with the platform rather than taking his word.

hollow, six months of research and no deals here, so take the tool comment for what it's worth. Every free tier I looked at will hold 1,000 contacts and send a scheduled email, and two of them do text for a small per-message fee. If your worry is spending $2,400 to find out you won't use it, spend a Saturday building the dumbest version yourself first. If you find yourself living in it for a month, then pay the guy to make it good and he'll be building on top of something you already understand.

The value is in the sequence, not the software, and rural sellers are the clearest case I've seen for that. Somebody calling about grandma's place on 12 acres is going to think about it for a year and talk to two people. Being the one who calls in month seven is most of the game.

But I'd push back on pike a bit. Building it yourself is free in dollars and expensive in the thing you're short of. You bought a house in October, you're managing six properties, and you're going to spend six Saturdays reading help articles about automation triggers. That's the trade, hollow, and only you know what your Saturdays cost.