Reno, NV · 14 brokers · switched from Apollo + ZoomInfo + MailshakeWhen Ryan Stenberg took over West Egg Real Estate in late 2024, the brokerage was bleeding cash on three things at once: an Apollo seat per broker, a ZoomInfo enterprise contract, and a Mailshake account that had hit deliverability rock-bottom.
Total monthly outreach spend: $11,200. Total reply rate from those tools: under two percent. The math wasn’t working.
The diagnosis wasn’t copy.
Most consultants would have walked in and rewritten the email templates. Ryan’s hunch was different — and correct. The brokers’ open rates were mid-teens, well below industry. The problem wasn’t what the emails said. It was that they weren’t getting read at all.
“We were sending from a shared IP pool with thousands of other companies. One bad actor and we all eat spam scores.”
Mailshake routes most outbound through shared sending infrastructure. Cheap, easy to onboard — and brutally exposed to the bad behavior of strangers on the same IP block. When the team migrated to BanuMail with a dedicated domain (westegg-cre.com) and a 3-day warmup, inbox placement climbed from 41% to 96% in three weeks.
The numbers, six months in.
Ryan shared the receipts. Apollo and ZoomInfo got cancelled outright; Mailshake followed three weeks after BanuMail warmup completed. The team kept a single tool: Banu. Total monthly cost dropped to $2,200.
The reply rate jump — 1.8% to 6.4% — translated to eleven additional closed deals in the first six months. At West Egg’s average commission, that’s mid-six-figures of revenue from a tool change that pays for itself sixty times over.
West Egg Real Estate is a Banu Growth customer. We don’t pay for testimonials and we don’t gate them; Ryan agreed to share these numbers because, in his words, “I wish someone had told me sooner.”