According to the National Association of Realtors, 41% of recent home buyers started their search online while only 19% chose to contact a real estate agent first. Having a well-designed, high-functioning website is essential for your real estate business.
There’s nothing easy about creating an effective real estate website design, but with the proper knowledge and dedication, you can make one that entices home buyers and sellers alike. Following the right SEO trends, web building practices, and content creation methods, you can bring your site straight to the top in no time at all.
In this post, we’re going to help you out by giving you some tips for building real estate websites. Read on and you’ll see why it pays to invest in your own website instead of using a brokerage website.
How to Build Real Estate Websites
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of real estate website design? Property listings.
Make sure that you’ve got IDX integration on your website so that you can have updated local property listings from the MLS right on your website. Essentially, IDX allows different realtors to share property listings on each other’s sites so your visitors get a broad scope of what’s available.
Put the property listings portion of your website directly on the front landing page. This is what people are coming to see, so give them what they want without any effort and your site will become a go-to.
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Use Visuals to Enhance Your Real Estate Web Design
With real estate websites, it’s all about providing great visuals of the properties you’re trying to sell. If you’re a builder, developer, or realtor with access to the properties make sure to get yourself a high-quality camera and take lots of pictures to use for each listing.
Something else you can do to set your website apart is to focus specifically on videos. Whether you do videos of the listed properties, interview Q and A’s with former clients, or video tours of the neighborhoods, this can be a great way to build a brand on your site.
Craft Effective Website Content
Creating quality content creates trust with your visitors and helps to build a brand and a voice for your real estate company. When it comes to real estate, there’ll never be any shortage of things to write about.
The other thing that content really helps with is SEO and more specifically, local SEO. Since you’re a real estate website with local listings, creating lots of localized content about events or local businesses can really drive your website up the search listings.
Developing a real estate website for your business can be beneficial to:
- Strengthen Your Brand: Establishing a personal brand has become more essential than ever for real estate agents. Having a personal website establishes professional credibility, allows you to showcase your listings in detail, and can serve as a portal for your clients to access information and documents.
- Get More Leads: Having a website helps you to be found on Google by prospective buyers and sellers. Instead of directing to a general website hosted by your franchise or brokerage where a potential client would see very basic information about you at best, having your own website allows you to showcase your skills allowing you to stand out and differentiate yourself from other agents.
- The Environment: Real estate industry veterans will remember the days of printing off a multi-page listing presentation for their clients and going through stacks and stacks of papers for appointments that never convert to clients. Creating a personal real estate website allows you to share listing presentations, sell sheets, market data, and any other information you’d like with prospective or current clients.
5 Must Haves for an Outstanding Real Estate Website Design
Many brokerages offer real estate agents a standard bio page on the company website, but for agents who are looking to stand out and create a strong personal brand, having a website is a great way to take your real estate business to the next level.
These are the top five must haves for an outstanding real estate website.
1. A Fantastic Footer
It’s a good idea to put important, non-changing information in the footer of web pages. It offers a way to include important info on every page without interfering with the website design. Make sure you have your phone number, email address, and other contact details easy to find. If you have a newsletter, podcast, or another form of marketing, this is a great place to collect contact info for that.
There are a lot of technicalities and differences among states, most require some brokerage affiliation and license number on all marketing pieces or one click away from marketing pieces. The easiest and safest way to know that you are in compliance is to put your state-required licensing information in the footer of your site.
2. A Way to Capture Info
Websites need to be optimized to capture information from potential clients. In addition to having your contact information readily available, make sure to have a form on your website that can collect contact details from visitors to prefer for you to reach out. These forms can automatically forward the information to you via email making sure you never miss a lead.
3. Your Bio & Experience
Your website serves as a digital resume where potential clients can learn more about you and the experience you bring. Brand-building real estate websites include testimonials and reviews, social media links, and information about your community involvement or past work history.
Showcasing your customer reviews and testimonials creates a sense of trustworthiness and experience that can help to convince new clients. Whether you use a Google Business Profile page, your business Facebook page, or an industry-specific page like a Zillow profile, it’s important to collect reviews and leverage them on your site.
Social media allows real estate agents to connect with buyers and sellers in a different, more personal way than a website. From showing properties to meeting with sellers or arranging inspections, the day-to-day of an agent can vary a lot. This variety makes great content for social media and agents can see a boost to both their website rankings and social followings by having links to their social media accounts on their website. Add links to your social media on your website to allow visitors to follow along on your professional adventures.
It’s also good to have a general bio on your website. Real estate agents come from a variety of backgrounds. Many agents have ventures outside of real estate and many are business and community leaders. Your website is a great place to communicate your business principles and values to your potential clients as well as showcasing the experience you bring to the table.
4. Your Industry & Specific Market Info
Even if you don’t have your own listings, you can leverage other local listings to generate buyer leads for yourself. Check to see if your MLS offers a free or low cost way to embed your local listings on your personal website. If you do have your own listings, your website is a great place to create landing pages for property marketing.
You should also create a page or pages that detail the specific real estate services you offer. Specific terms like “luxury agent”, “relocation specialist”, or “distressed properties” will help search engines to connect you to searchers looking for those keywords.
Additionally, sharing market information for your local area helps to establish you as a pro in your field and increase the location-specific keywords on your website — important for reaching clients in your area. Check your MLS or real estate industry sources (like Redfin) for easily embeddable tools that offer a great starting point for sharing this info.
5. Your Unique Perspective
Having a blog is a great way to establish a local brand and improve the SEO of your website. Blogs should be updated regularly and make great content for newsletters to easily keep in contact with prospects or past clients. Blogs can take a variety of shapes from text articles to photo galleries. You can even repurpose material you created for other purposes — like embedding a YouTube video of your property. Your blog can be as general or niche as you’d like, and is a great way to be found by potential clients.
If you’re looking to establish yourself as a local expert, you should have a list of preferred providers. Offering recommendations on your website for the best local goods and service providers gives value to your website visitors and clients and offers SEO benefits, especially if you are linked back by your preferred providers. This page can be a great reference for newcomers to your city and is a great opportunity to offer unique value to relocating buyers.
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The National Association of Realtors reports that there are currently over 106,548 real estate brokerage firms in the United States. In 2020, over 5.65 million existing homes were sold, highlighting how active this market is.
In such a competitive market, your real estate website must follow the latest trends to meet the expectations of potential
- Rapid Page Loading Times: We live in an impatient world where people choose convenience and accessibility over everything else! Think about other areas of life: movies can’t buffer on streaming services and deliveries need to be same day or the next day.
If your website’s pages are taking too long to load, people won’t be impressed. They may view this as an indication of unreliability or a lack of professionalism. And they’ll quickly move to another website.
You can speed up loading times by reducing image size, turning off auto-play, and limiting the number of videos per page. - Videos Over Photos: Gone are the days where trick photography could be used to sell a property. Making a house appear cleaner, newer, and more spacious with clever camera angles won’t work on the modern buyer.
Before viewing a property in person, the customer will want to see a video tour! And listings with videos get 403% more inquiries.
Videos can include music, commentary, and additional information about the property. When done well, they can highlight all the selling points that may be missed with photographs alone, while also allowing the customer to feel like they’ve seen every inch of the property from different angles.
Use social media to spread these videos and advertise the properties. - Interactive Google Maps: One element that your real estate web design should include is an interactive map, preferably from Google Maps.
While many real estate agents will provide the address of the property or a screenshot from Google Maps, customers prefer something interactive. They want to be able to zoom in and out to see what landmarks the property is near.
How far is it from the city center or their current location? Are there parks or schools nearby?
Forcing them to open another tab to access a map to search for this information themselves is going to feel like an effort. By making things easier for them, they will be more likely to stay on your website. - VR Is the Future: As a real estate agent, would your job be easier if you could offer clients a tour of a property from the comfort of their own homes? Virtual reality may sound like science fiction, but VR technology is improving and becoming more accessible every day.
Pictures are good and videos are better, but virtual reality is undoubtedly the best. If your website can provide this option, it will certainly attract customers and hold their attention.
What to Consider When Hiring Someone to Handle Your Real Estate Web Design
So what do you need to add to your real estate site?
Things to include to provide the best service for your clients are:
- Virtual tours
- Instant customer support
- Live search
- Map integration
- Quality images
These items can make or break your clients’ experiences on your site. For example, if your site is difficult to navigate, your client will find it frustrating and move on to your competitors.
Experience and References
The first thing you should consider is checking out the company’s experience. You can ask the company for a portfolio, client reviews, or do your own research online.
A company that offers web design is likely capable of creating a generic website, but are they experts in real estate? Do they understand what you need as a real estate agent? And do they specialize in real estate digital marketing?
Don’t be afraid to ask these questions in the initial interview. Their customer service, ongoing support, and technical expertise all need to line up.
Website Design and Performance
Not all web design is equal, and to a certain extent, it is subjective. Design is indeed a form of art, so if what the designer produces does not work with your brand, it is best to move on.
However, the most important part of real estate marketing solutions is the performance of your website. SEO, website speed, and an authoritative presence are all key to ranking high on search engines.
Don’t be afraid to shop around for digital marketing specialists for realtors. In addition to the questions above, don’t be afraid to ask for their portfolio.
Conclusion
Website design can feel like a complex arena to navigate for real estate agents. But by making use of these real estate web design tips, you can keep up with the latest trends and hold the attention of potential customers. Having a personal real estate website can be a great way to expand your real estate business.
Ready to create your site and build your brand?
We help real estate companies grow their brand with great websites, SEO management services, PPC, and social media marketing, so if you need marketing help, contact us today to find out what we can do for you
