If you are a real estate agent or agency looking to establish an online presence, having a well-designed website is crucial. An effective real estate website allows you to showcase your listings, provide information about your services, and connect with potential clients. Follow this guide to steps to building a high-quality real estate website.

Determine Your Goals

The first step in building your real estate website is clearly defining what you want it to achieve for your business. Having specific goals will guide your strategy and design when creating your real estate website.

Some common goals real estate agents and agencies have for their websites include:

• Generating more leads and buyer/seller inquiries – A key purpose for most real estate websites is driving new leads. Optimizing your site for lead generation means including call-to-action buttons, email signup forms, and strong calls to contact agents. This enables you to capture inquiries from motivated buyers and sellers.
• Promoting current property listings to attract potential buyers/renters – Your website is a 24/7 listing marketing machine. Dedicate prime real estate to showcasing your active listings with appealing photos, videos, and descriptions. Promote special listings to drive traffic.
• Establishing yourself or your agents as experts in the local real estate market – Build trust by creating content that demonstrates your market knowledge. Publish market reports, neighbourhood guides, and blogs on local trends. Position your team as go-to experts in your area.
• Providing detailed information about your real estate services and expertise – Use your website to explain exactly how you can help clients sell, buy, or rent properties. Share agent bios and credentials to showcase your experience. The more informative your site, the more confidence it instils.
• Allowing clients to easily search, view, and compare property listings on your site – A robust search functionality is a must. Enable visitors to filter and browse listings that match their criteria. The better your site search, the longer visitors will stay.
• Showcasing your real estate brand, culture, and unique value proposition – Your website represents your brand digitally 24/7. Leverage it to share your company personality and why clients should choose you over competitors.

Defining your real estate website goals upfront ensures you build a site optimized to support your intended purposes whether it be lead generation, listing promotion, or showcasing expertise. With clear goals, you can align features, design, and content accordingly for maximum impact.

Choose a Domain Name For Your Real Estate Website

Picking the perfect domain name is an important decision when building your real estate website. The domain should align with your brand identity while being short, easy to remember, and communicating what your site is about.

Ideally, you’ll want to choose a domain name that is short and simple to spell to make it easy for people to remember and tell others. Incorporate relevant keywords like “real estate” or your city name to reinforce what your website covers. If possible, align your domain with your agency name or brand to create instant recognition amongst visitors.

Avoid using hyphens, numbers or other punctuation which can sometimes confuse people or make it harder to communicate the domain name verbally.

If your first choice of domain is already taken, get creative with other options. Try different extensions like .com, .net or .realestate to open up more possibilities. Add your city name, neighbourhood or other real estate keywords relevant to your market as needed. Shorten longer names by removing unnecessary filler words.

Change up the word order or use rhymes or alliteration to make it more unique and memorable. You can also add your team name to the domain or even make up a new word that embodies your brand identity. Be open to using both .com and .co versions as well.

Select a Website Platform 

Popular platforms like WordPress and SquareSpace offer themes and plugins tailored for real estate websites. Alternatively, hire a web developer to build a custom site to your specifications. Ensure your platform is mobile-friendly, provides SEO options, and allows integration with MLS listings.

Property Webmasters AgentPlus Solution

Creating an effective real estate website is easy with Property Webmasters’ AgentPlus platform and website templates. Our professionally designed Estate Agent Website Templates provide an eye-catching, contemporary website design optimized for promoting your real estate brand and listings without compromising on functionality.

AgentPlus is designed with results and user experience as top priorities. It includes a variety of premium template solutions intended to help real estate agents generate more leads and sales through their websites.

Create a Real Estate Website Optimised for Search 

Estate agent search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for improving your website’s visibility and traffic. When building your real estate site, incorporate these SEO best practices:

• Research relevant keywords and natural search queries for your market and target audience. Identify terms related to buying, selling, renting, location, property types, pricing and more.
• Incorporate targeted keywords naturally throughout your site content. This includes pages, titles, headings, image alt text, meta descriptions and anywhere else text appears. Never over-optimize.
• Create locally-optimized content focusing on your city and specific neighborhoods. Hyperlocal SEO establishes you as an authority in your geographic region.
• Structure your pages thoughtfully with semantic HTML elements like headers, paragraphs, lists and strong text for important points. This improves on-page SEO.
• Write compelling meta descriptions for each page that make searchers click. Include keywords when crafting your digestible snippets.
• Optimize page load speeds by compressing images, enabling caching, minimizing redirects and eliminating render-blocking elements. Faster sites rank better.
• Include alt text for every image to improve accessibility and give search engines more signals on your content. Be descriptive.
• Build internal links between relevant pages to spread authority and page rank around your site. Link to deep content.
• Produce fresh and relevant content regularly to give search engines new pages with quality signals. Engage visitors.

By keeping search engine optimization principles in mind throughout website development, you can organically increase your local visibility and traffic over time through high rankings. SEO is an ongoing process, but early optimization sets you up for success.

Design an Intuitive Interface

When designing your real estate website, simpler is often better in terms of site navigation and layout. The goal is to make it easy for visitors to find what they need quickly.

Some tips for an intuitive real estate site interface:

• Use clear and descriptive navigation menus and page titles so visitors immediately understand what each page contains. Group-related content.
• Allow visitors to easily access key pages like property search, listings, agent bios, and contact forms from any other page with global navigation.
• Organize listings in a visually appealing grid, list or map interface with thumbnail images, prices and addresses prominently displayed.
• Integrate search bars and property filters on listing pages to help visitors narrow down options efficiently.
• Ensure forms and calls-to-action buttons are noticeable with solid contrasting colours. Remove unnecessary fields.
• Optimize page load speeds by minimizing large files, enabling compression, caching, and eliminating render-blocking code. Faster sites improve the experience.
• Use iconography and graphics to enhance understanding and aesthetics but don’t overcrowd the interface. White space is good.
• Pay close attention to site responsiveness across devices. Mobile visitors should have an equally intuitive experience.
• Ask for feedback and observe where visitors struggle. Identify pain points and iterate to simplify navigation.
• Include breadcrumbs and wayfinding cues like page transition animations to aid movement through the site.

By focusing on simplicity and ease of use, your real estate website interface removes friction from the visitor experience. This encourages visitors to engage further and convert as leads or clients.

Display Listings Attractively 

Showcasing your property listings is one of the most important parts of your real estate website. To do this effectively, high-quality listing photos and videos are essential – be sure to hire a professional real estate photographer to capture properties in the best light with wide angles to showcase the spaces.

Organize listings clearly on pages with eye-catching thumbnail images, addresses, prices, number of beds/baths and other essential details prominently displayed so visitors can easily skim and click on listings that pique their interest.

Allow visitors to filter and search your listings based on attributes like property type, price range, location, amenities and more so they can narrow down options specific to their needs.

On individual listing pages, including photo galleries, virtual tours, detailed descriptions, zoning details, neighbourhood guides and information on nearby schools to provide comprehensive information about each property. Use clear calls-to-action to schedule showings or contact agents to streamline inquiries. You can also feature special listings on homepage banners to draw attention to new inventory or promotions.

Appealing listing presentation paired with robust search and filtering functionality makes it easy for visitors to your real estate website to find their ideal properties amongst your listings. Focus on showcasing each property in its best light while enabling customized browsing.

Promote Your Site

Launching a new real estate website is only the first step – you need an ongoing promotion strategy and fresh content updates to build authority and keep visitors coming back.

Start by promoting your website across all of your real estate marketing channels, including social media, email signatures, print materials, and any online ads. Share the link regularly and highlight different sections of the site through social posts – new listings, agent spotlights, market reports, etc. Use visual content from the website to attract clicks.

Also, submit your website URL to online directories and real estate review sites relevant to your local market so people can find and recommend you more easily.

Enable social sharing buttons on listings and pages so visitors can spread the word about properties they like. Make sure to register the site with search engines and submit sitemaps to facilitate crawling and indexing. Claim and optimize local business listings as well.

Analyze your traffic metrics to see which website pages perform best as entry points, then double down on promoting those access points. Keep visitors coming back by updating your site regularly with new listings, market insights, and other fresh content.

Send email newsletters and run targeted ad campaigns to direct subscribers to relevant website content. Ongoing optimization through promotion, content creation, and analytics monitoring is crucial after launching your new real estate website.

Why Choose Property Webmasters?

We start by understanding why people are looking for an estate agent. Seems simple but what customers are inputting into Google? Once we carry that research out we can then begin the SEO work for the property market you work in. Finding high search volume areas helps increase web traffic to estate agents.

Contact us today!