Real Estate Website Development:
Why Your Brokerage Needs a Custom-Coded Portal (Not a Template)
Each year, many real estate brands create webpages that work well when you first see them but fall to pieces as soon as any real visitors come along. A photo gallery of properties that loads in six seconds. An IDX search page that crashes whenever a user tries to filter it using three filters simultaneously. A mobile site that makes a $2 million listing difficult to read.
All of this does not happen by chance. This is the inevitable consequence of creating a real estate company based on a template filled with plugins rather than through proper real estate website development. In a market where the buyer makes an opinion about a product within a couple of seconds, such an approach is not only an embarrassment but a direct strike to your sales funnel.
In this article, we are going to describe what real estate website development is about, how cooperation with a specialized real estate website development company affects the result, and why the design of a real estate developer website depends on the type of client.
The Real Cost of a Slow Real Estate Website
Intentful property buyers are not your regular Internet users. They will have open several tabs with various listings, switching between maps, filters for school districts, prices, square footages and more, often using their mobile device while standing right in the parking lot. Each additional second of loading time gives them an opportunity to switch to the competition’s listing.
This is where most companies fail to succeed. They give the broker a cookie-cutter theme, throw in a bunch of third-party plugins for map integration, search capabilities, and lead forms, and they think they’ve succeeded. In reality, this will end up being a website that “does everything” but will collapse under actual use cases, particularly when there is high traffic from new development launches.
Real estate websites need to be created from a whole new perspective: custom coding for properties, mapping, and media management.
What Real Estate Website Development Actually Requires
A property portal is not a blog. It is not an e-commerce shop. There are certain technological requirements that a property portal needs to meet, and therefore, there is a need to consider them while creating a website for real estate.
Live IDX/MLS Database Integration
Interactive Maps and Filters
Conversion-Driven Lead Generation
Quick via Server Side Rendering
All of these components need to operate as one system. Something that cannot be done by simply buying a template along with some additional plugins to it. It's only possible with a development team who knows the transaction process in real estate.
Why You Need a Specialized Real Estate Website Development Company
General website design companies can create an aesthetically pleasing website. However, there is a clear distinction between creating an aesthetically pleasing website and one that is designed to convert high-value real estate buyers.
Real estate website design companies possess what general web design companies lack – experience in solving the technical issues that arise in handling property data. These include:
Real Estate Developer Website Design: Not a One-Size-Fits-All Approach
Here is what most of these organizations do not consider: a solo realtor and a big property developer are going to have different requirements for a website.
The independent real estate agent, who launches hyper-local marketing campaigns, will definitely need a quick, personalized, conversion-oriented website which can win users’ trust instantly, show current listings, and make scheduling a consultation effortless.
The developer of large residential or commercial complexes will require a completely different thing: a programmatic website which will allow filtering through scores of apartments/units, manage phased launching schedules, compare floor plans and much more.
That is precisely why real estate developer web design has to be considered a discipline all on its own. Using the wrong template means forcing your complicated inventory into a system designed for one-on-one listings – or even worse, making a boutique realtor operate in an inefficient, impersonal enterprise system.
Data Infrastructure: The Part Most Agencies Skip
This is where the majority of real estate websites fail — despite those that have good design and performance. The reason? After delivering the website, they just leave without giving any chance for your real estate brokerage to understand what happens on the website through the eyes of actual buyers.
Your properly constructed website should be able to collect data and analyze behavior of your visitors. It should provide:
Analytics of events that happen on server side — filling out the forms, viewing the maps, opening listings, booking tours
Data flows to dashboards showing you what listings, webpages, marketing campaigns actually bring conversions
Predictive models allowing to know what kind of traffic actually converts so your sales team will chase only warm leads
Without proper implementation of analytics, brokerages are bound to make decisions in marketing based on assumptions. With the proper implementation, each penny spent on ads and any piece of content will give you valuable insights about how your audience really behaves.
What This Looks Like in Practice
- When all of this is considered, a good real estate website should be capable of:
- Loading key pages within two seconds, even with extensive picture galleries
- Being accessible and active during high traffic real estate launches
- Having its listings sync automatically with live MLS/IDX information without having to manually update anything
- Allowing buyers to browse neighborhood options through visual representation, rather than just a list format
- Converting visitors via carefully placed and fast lead capturing methods
- Providing all user activity statistics to analytics for improved marketing decisions over time