The Realworks newsletter has been discontinued. What are your options?

Realworks discontinued its newsletter module on 1 September 2025. You have three options: a general email platform such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign or Laposta, a lead tool built for estate agents, or a layer that decides which contact receives which email and leaves the sending to an email platform. The right choice depends on how many sources you have.

What exactly has changed

Since 1 September 2025, Realworks no longer has a newsletter module. For a recurring newsletter you now need a different system. Your contacts and their details are still in Realworks. The newsletter opt-in remains as well: it sits in the Realworks Relatie API (contacts API), alongside private individuals, companies, contact persons and attributes.

That is the starting point for every solution. The question of who you may email is still recorded in Realworks. Only the sending now has to happen somewhere else.

Realworks has been wholly owned by the NVM (the largest Dutch association of estate agents) since 2015. According to its own CRM page, 2,550 offices and 19,000 daily users work with it. So a great many agencies had to find a new home for their newsletter at the same time.

Option 1: a general email platform

A general email platform is the quickest replacement. Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign and Laposta send newsletters, manage subscriptions and unsubscriptions, and show open and click rates. Laposta is Dutch; the other two are American.

These platforms were not built for estate agents. They have no concept of a property, of an address as a home, or of a valuation. Want to send a newsletter to everyone searching in a particular neighbourhood? Then you first have to add that data to the platform yourself as fields or tags, and keep it up to date.

Watch the price, too. ActiveCampaign charges by number of contacts. An agency with a large contact database therefore pays for every contact held in the platform, even one that rarely receives an email.

Disclosure: KeyVue is an official ActiveCampaign partner.

This option suits an agency that mainly sends a general newsletter and updates the list with an export from Realworks.

Option 2: a lead tool for estate agents

A lead tool for estate agents combines capturing leads with following them up by email. BNDL lists a newsletter module and marketing automation in its offering. NexxtMove has marketing automation with triggers on Funda (the dominant Dutch property portal) enquiries, forms and website behaviour. HousApp Grow provides a lead widget, forms, an automated valuation and follow-up flows for €9 per agent per month (price according to HousApp, September 2026).

The advantage is that these tools speak the language of estate agents. A valuation or a Funda enquiry is a standard event, and there are integrations with the common agency software.

The drawback lies in breadth. A lead tool mainly knows the leads that arrive through its own widget or form. If your leads also come from other channels, you need to check how they end up in the same follow-up.

This option suits an agency that uses its newsletter mainly to keep leads from one main source warm. The differences between vendors are set out in the comparison of lead management software.

Option 3: a layer that decides who gets what

The third option separates two tasks. A separate layer decides which contact receives which email, and an email platform sends it. The layer pulls contacts and opt-ins from Realworks, adds leads from other sources and places each contact in the right list or flow in the email platform.

That takes one more integration, but it solves two problems. You segment on data the email platform does not hold itself, such as branch, lead score or type of enquiry. And the source of every lead stays on record, so you can later see which newsletter readers gave you a sales instruction.

This option suits an agency with several branches and leads from more than two or three channels.

The options side by side

The opt-in is the most important field

Whichever option you choose, make sure there is one place that records who gave consent. If a contact unsubscribes in the email platform but is still marked as subscribed in Realworks, you will email them again at the next import.

So agree which system is leading, and let unsubscribes flow back to it. The Relatie API makes that technically possible. Before a vendor may use that API, your agency must subscribe to the API itself in the Realworks Marketplace and release the contacts one by one. What that involves in practice is covered in connecting the Realworks API.

How to make the choice

Start with your sources, not with the newsletter. Count how many channels produce leads: Funda, the contact form, a valuation, social media campaigns, viewings. Then consider which questions you want to be able to answer about the newsletter.

If you only want to know how many people opened the email, a general platform will do. If you want to know which readers later gave a sales instruction, and at which branch, then the source of every contact has to travel into the email platform and back again.

KeyVue is an example of the third option: it pulls contacts and properties from Realworks, collects leads from other sources and passes the leads you select on to your marketing platform, which sends the emails. See the product page for the details.

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