Are you a Realtor and want to attract more sellers & buyers? This article will help you to create your own Real Estate Website for your customers. Real estate industry has drastically changed in past few years. Since, the technology has evolved and consumers can access all the information from their phones and computers, It is surely a wise idea to start delivering services online. Earlier, buyers & sellers used to visit the Realtor at some location to discuss about the business opportunity, but now things have changed.
The advancement of newer technologies makes it easy for real estate agents and the companies to develop a website that belongs to them.
Developing real estate websites are becoming incredibly easy and you’ll realize that there are lots of property directories that you may have to compete with. To stand apart from the crowd, you have to make a website that is certainly feature rich and simple to use.
So, how do we do it?
This article will help you understand the points you should consider while developing your Real Estate Website. There are mainly 2 types of Real Estate Websites and you have to decide, which one is the right fit for you.
- Individual Website: This website is owned by an individual real estate agent who wants to showcase the properties on his site. Customers can view the property details and can send the request to agent.
- Real Estate Portal: This type of site serves to all Realtors and customers. It’s a platform where Realtors can create an account, post all the listings and receives the customer’s leads. Real Estate Agents have to pay a certain fee to post listings on the site. This kind of website will be a revenue generation model for a company. Zillow, Trulia, Homes.com are good examples of such websites.
It’s up to you to decide, which way you want to proceed but both type of sites have common features that can’t be ignored. So, let’s discuss those features to make a really useful Real Estate Website for customers.
1. Real Estate Website Design
For a successful Real Estate Website, it is very important to have professional yet user friendly design. Style and design requires more than just graphic features. It’s a complete package that includes features like the content and entire buyer experience that customers encounter on your real estate website.
Make use of brilliant design to create your brand’s identity using your agent website. A fully personalized design that delivers optimum buyer experience gives you an excellent reputation being a leading real estate agent.
A lot of real estate agents think that even an outdated website of property is sufficient for their business. Well, they’re absolutely wrong.
Design is not merely a way of visualization but a highly effective tool to reach consumers’ minds. Therefore, there are many established trends of how one digital product or any other need to look. For instance, web products must be neat, stunning, and insightful. Humanity has managed to get familiar with these trends in quite a short time frame. A plethora of studies claims that better graphical user interface results in increased sales.
Statistics claim that most customers stick around a website under 59 seconds and in case nothing catches their interest – they leave. You’ve got only 59 seconds!
2. User-Friendly Search Features
Essential feature for any successful real estate website is it’s search function. Buyers comes to your site to find the right property that satisfies their needs. So, why not to make it easier for them? Buyers should be able to search based on the location, Type of Property, Bed rooms & Bathrooms and extra amenities. These days a lot of websites offer GEO Located services that allows buyers to share their current location to find the right type of property. Self suggested location search, results in making the search easy for your customers.
Professionals claim, good quality of search outweighs the total number of offerings, that makes filtering important to a site. Create a real estate website with related and easy-to-navigate search filters to offer your clients a robust tool.
You could make your search relevant – by permitting for customization
Initially, decide the ‘must-have’ fields. That’s where understanding your customer’s priorities will come in useful. We’d suggest understanding local search stats to find out what your web visitors seek out most and outline the minimum list of default filters – like location, property type, the total number of bedrooms, min/max price for residential estate as well as other significant parameters in your niche.
3. Featured Property Display
If you have a real estate portal, then showcasing the Featured Property on home and internal pages is a good source of revenue. Apart from being a member of your site, Realtors pay an extra amount to showcase their property as Featured to get more customers. Customers attract on something that is shown as “Featured”. The Featured Properties offers an excellent consumer experience. Viewing professional pictures is pleasing to the eye and hence increases the user engagement on the site.
The information to be showcased in the Featured property should be:
- Property Title (Bold & Nicely presented)
- Short Description
- Property Location
- High Quality Pictures (Image Scroller will be great to use)
- Bedrooms, Bathrooms, Parking icons
4. Live Video streaming
In the case of apartment selection, the question that interests buyers primarily is definitely the property’s exterior and interior.
Sadly, pictures cannot cover all of the points required to choose something immediately. Live streaming enables you to involve your clients deeper into the approach along with spark their interests towards buying.
What makes it work? The properties for sale are published on your house selling website. To take a closer look at the chosen property, anyone willing can fill in the ‘Live’ form to get the invitation of the live broadcast. So, everyone is able to see it using any device.
Subsequently, the representative of the agency or else you personally with the assistance of the smartphone’s camera can carryout this translation featuring the house to audiences and have feedbacks over the live chat.
5. Property worth Estimation
Buyers and sellers alike are interested to know exactly how much a property is worth. Nobody wants to leave funds on the table – so professional opinion is really what reconciles each party. Skilled realtors are aware that property cost is not a constant, especially since purchases aren’t frequent. It’s dependant on many factors, like location, condition, industry state, as well as others. So what can make a Real Estate website more reliable than being able to offer adequate property worth?
It’s an advisable investment to choose a tool or make your own web-based “product”. Take Zillow, for one. It makes a unique point of calculating property’s ‘worth’. It uses Zestimate – an AI based calculator. “Zestimates” are projected home values based upon 7.5 million statistical and machine learning models that evaluate numerous data points on every property. And, by constantly enhancing the median margin of error (from 14% at the onset to 5% today), Zillow has since become recognized among the largest, most reliable marketplaces for real estate information in the U.S.
There are many other property valuation tools available for you to integrate on your site. Mostly, called Mortgage Calculators. Using Mortgage Calculators customers can easily understand the true worth of the property without taking a professional advice.
6. Generate More Leads
The main objective of creating a Real Estate Website is to find potential customers. A customer, interested in a property listed should be able to connect with the owner/realtor easily. To make it easy for Buyers, you must have a lead form located at the right sidebar of each property showcased. The form placed can ask for the information of the Buyer like Full Name, Phone Number, Email Address and comments.
Realtors/Sellers must be able to access these leads through their dashboard. To match the accurate information of the buyer and stop spamming, most of the real estate websites verifies the phone number or email but sending a unique link. Realtors should also be able to export all the leads into a CSV or Excel format to contact buyers.
7. Premier Agent Listing
Among the most effective methods to make buyer leads without having listings, Premier Agent Listing ads are certainly widely used. Here’s how this works. After the Realtor, signup as a Premier Agent of your sites, he/she can create a profile with all the information including the picture, location, area zip code, contact information etc.
On the property page of the Realtor who has posted the ad, is shown above these Premier Agents. These agents are chosen based on the location they are serving in. Obviously, some leads will contact the listing agent immediately, a few will contact everyone listed, or some will simply select the agent with the highest ratings plus a headshot they will think looks reliable.
8. Paid Services
As soon as your services and tools are remarkably good and popular, you could possibly limit free usage of some features or introduce paid solutions. A typical practice is to try to give a combination of free and paid services – a freemium type of payment. Striking a balance between the two permits to help keep leads making a profit.
For sellers
A few options popular with sellers could get partially or fully paid, e.g., valuation, submit listings, feature listings, lift up listings, slide-show listings.
For customers
By putting a mortgage calculator/loan applications, you may get a paid quote request (per lead). If buyers want to contact the agent directly, they can always purchase the paid services.
For realtors
Realtors may choose paid services like ‘show photo’ or ‘featured realtors (agencies)’. You could make bundled packages of services for agents. For instance, You can have a CRM platform for agents to advertise their listings to get new customers. Zillow provides a freemium model for listings placement, this means you are able to do it at no cost alternatively you can upgrade to the paid premium plan. The second choice offers you two benefits:
- exclusivity. You feature as an only agent marketing your seller’s house. With regards to a successful closure, the entire commission payment is yours. Or else, you contend with other premium agents, who may reap benefits of your listing.
- wider reach. Being a Premier Agent, you also get to promote on the local listings added by non-Premier Agents. A great strategy to generate buyer leads even though you don’t have a listing of your own to market.
Conclusion
Each of the features we’ve talked above aren’t compulsory, however if you focus on them, they could be very useful for your website. Besides them, a number of other factors such as the quality of content you submit on your own website, the scope or maybe the area the listings cover, the SEO, your competition, etc play their role in the success of your online real estate website.
Developing and handling such website consumes lots of hardwork, dedication and persistence. To understand more, you can always learn The Website Design Process in 7 easy Steps.
Flexus Solutions is one of the Top Website Design & Development companies in Indianapolis, Indiana. We can help you with Real Estate Website Design & Development at very affordable cost. Request for a Free Quote now and get 10% off on final cost.