RealEZState Website and Lead Funnel

RealEZState is my own brand. It sells AI tools to real estate investors, out of Bradenton, Florida. Nobody hired me to build it. I built the product, the website and the system that delivers it, and I run it on infrastructure I own.

Visit the live site →

This page covers one part of it: the website and the lead capture funnel behind it. Someone lands on the page, types in a first name and an email address, and a few seconds later a PDF of five free AI prompts arrives in their inbox with a short welcome note. Below is how it works and what it took to make it reliable.

What RealEZState sells

• Five free AI prompts for short term rental investors. A PDF delivered by email. The lead magnet, and the reason anyone fills in the form.
• The STR Playbook, $27. One hundred AI prompts on Gumroad.
• The AI Real Estate Automation Pack, $97. Five ready made n8n workflows, also on Gumroad.

The free PDF is the entry point, the welcome email carrying it introduces the $27 playbook, and the site cross sells the $97 pack.

The site itself

A single page written by hand: HTML with inline CSS and JavaScript, no framework, no build step, no dependency tree. The palette is dark navy (#0D1117) with electric blue (#0047FF) and vivid orange (#FF6B00) on white text. It runs navigation, hero, lead capture card, a “What’s Inside” section previewing the five free prompts, social proof, then a footer linking both paid products. The form posts a first name and an email to an API path on the same origin and shows a success or failure message. No third state, no spinner that lies.

nginx serves the page from a dedicated container on a self hosted Proxmox host. Public access goes through a Cloudflare Tunnel, so there is no port forwarding, no exposed addresses and no TLS certificates to renew. HTTPS comes from Cloudflare Universal SSL, and both the apex domain and www serve the page. It is the approach I use on client work through my website development service.

What happens after the form is submitted

nginx proxies the submission to a webhook on a self hosted n8n instance in a separate container. That workflow does four things:

• Validates the email format and rejects anything malformed.
• Writes the lead to a SharePoint list, the record of who signed up.
• Sends a branded welcome email with the free PDF attached, via the Microsoft Graph API.
• Returns a success response so the page can confirm it worked.

Mail goes from a shared mailbox on the brand’s own domain, which needs no extra license and keeps running cost at zero beyond hardware I own. The email is written, not generated: a subject line, a greeting by first name, an instruction on which prompt to try first, a reply hook, a call to action for the $27 playbook, and a footer. It signs off as “The RealEZState Team” rather than as me, because the brand is what is being built.

One decision that looks wrong and is not

The workflow reads the lead magnet PDF from local disk rather than over HTTP. On paper an HTTP fetch is tidier. In practice, rewiring it that way has broken the attachment before. So it stays local on purpose, documented, so a future version of me does not helpfully improve it into a broken state.

What is in the $97 Automation Pack

Five n8n workflows bundled as a ZIP that a buyer imports into their own n8n. They run against locally hosted open models, Llama 3.1 8B and Qwen2.5 14B, on the same infrastructure, so inference has no per token cost.

Workflow	What it does
Daily Deal Finder	Runs at 7 AM daily, scans configured property sources, scores on cap rate, cash flow and occupancy, emails the top five.
Offer Letter Generator	Takes property, terms and buyer information, returns a professional offer letter in about sixty seconds.
Tenant Application Scorer	Takes application fields including income, employment and references, computes income to rent ratio and a 3x rule flag, returns a scored decision.
MLS Listing Writer	Takes property details, produces headline, description and amenity highlights using three model calls with different personas.
Weekly Market Report Bot	Runs Monday at 8 AM, pulls configured market data, emails a formatted weekly summary.

200 OK is not success

This one applies well beyond real estate. A webhook returning HTTP 200 with an empty body has told you almost nothing. It has told you something answered. It has not told you the email validated, the lead reached SharePoint, the Graph API accepted the message, or the PDF attached. All of those can fail quietly behind a 200.

So I treat “it returned 200” as unproven. The only verification I accept is end to end: post a real submission through the live form, confirm the response body contains a success flag rather than nothing, then open the inbox and confirm the welcome email landed with the PDF attached. All three, or it is not working.

That is a habit rather than a tool. It costs two minutes per deployment and it separates a funnel that works from one that only appears to.

Other things that went wrong

• An nginx config built inline broke the site. I wrote it through a chained SSH and heredoc pipeline and one directive got shell expanded to an empty string, producing a redirect loop. The fix was not cleverer quoting, it was to push the config as a file instead of building it inline.
• Old DNS records compete with a tunnel. A records left by the previous registrar fight a Cloudflare Tunnel CNAME until they are deleted. The www record needs pointing at the tunnel too, not just the apex.
• Windows PowerShell strips inner quotes. Administering a container over SSH from PowerShell mangles embedded quotes inconsistently. Anything with quotes inside needs single quoted outer strings, a payload piped through stdin, or a here string.

SEO groundwork

The page ships with a title tag, meta description, canonical and robots tags, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags with a 1200×630 image, JSON-LD structured data covering Organization and Product, a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml. Primary keyword target: “AI prompts for real estate investors”.

Where it actually stands

Working now: the site serves over HTTPS on apex and www, the tunnel is healthy, and the funnel runs end to end from form submission to SharePoint entry to welcome email with the PDF attached. Both Gumroad products are listed, the SharePoint list is receiving entries, and one real lead has been captured.

Not done, stated plainly: no marketing or SEO push has started, so the funnel is built but not yet driving traffic. There is no analytics telemetry beyond nginx access logs, so I can see requests but not behavior. I would rather say that than imply numbers I do not have.

Visit the live site →