Ara

Ara ran a real estate practice for close to twenty years before building Closr. Everything on this blog comes from that book of business, not from a content brief.

Posts

Choosing

Follow Up Boss alternatives: an honest comparison from someone who uses it

I ran a 58,000-contact Follow Up Boss account for years. Here is what it does better than anything else, where it quietly fails, and when switching is a bad idea.

Ara · Sep 2, 2026 · 8 min read
Choosing

How to switch CRMs without losing your database

Your contacts are the easy part. What breaks in a CRM migration is the history, the tags, and the trust you had in your own data. Here is how to move without wrecking it.

Ara · Sep 2, 2026 · 7 min read
Operator

What to do with 2,000 contacts you have never called

Every agent database has a dead zone: hundreds or thousands of people who went in and never came back out. Here is how to work through it without pretending you will call all of them.

Ara · Sep 2, 2026 · 6 min read
Shipped

What shipped: August 2026

Fifty changes went out in August. Phone number porting, bulk tagging, Facebook ad publishing, and a pile of fixes for things we got wrong the first time.

Ara · Sep 2, 2026 · 6 min read
Choosing

The best CRM for real estate agents in 2026 (and why most go unused)

The best CRM is the one you actually open. Here is how to test that before you buy, and where a chat-first CRM is the wrong choice.

Ara · Jun 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Operator

Procedures aren't intuition: almost 20 years on a real estate team, and why I built Closr

I led a real estate team for almost 20 years. The hardest thing to transfer was never the steps. It was knowing which step mattered today.

Ara · Jun 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Operator

The 11pm problem: why CRM follow-up breaks, and how AI fixes it

Follow-up does not break because agents are lazy. It breaks because CRM work lands at 11pm. Here is the fix, and where it still falls short.

Ara · Jun 8, 2026 · 7 min read