Essential Features for a Real Estate Website

When designing a real estate website, it's important to consider that this industry, like any other, is characterized by the unique needs of its target audience, goals, and tasks. Therefore, in addition to understanding the nuances of web development and being proficient with cutting-edge technologies and tools, your development team should be well-versed in the specifics of the real estate market.

Below, we outline the aspects you should consider in your project to meet the end users' needs and help you achieve your business objectives.

Why Your Real Estate Business Needs a Custom-Developed Website

In the era of no-code and low-code development, it would be strange not to consider choosing a simple and quick way to implement a website using a ready-made solution.

So, if your first idea was to choose a website builder for your project, you are on the wrong path. The fact is that such solutions are good only for single-page websites (such as promo sites) and small online stores. For more serious tasks, their capabilities are too limited. Of course, you can always resort to developing a custom plugin or API to solve unique problems. However, constantly increasing the functionality of a website in this way creates many vulnerabilities and makes it poorly suited for updates.

Especially if we are talking about solutions requiring rich and sometimes unique functionality typical for the real estate niche, it makes sense to focus on finding specialists for custom development from the very beginning.

This way, you will not only be able to implement the desired features (exceeding the capabilities of a website builder) but also achieve the necessary level of personalization and user-friendliness, which is almost impossible with ready-made solutions.

Finally, custom development will provide your website with a solid foundation for future scalability since developers will initially design an architecture that is easy to update, optimize, and expand. Thus, you will avoid situations where, at a certain stage of your business development, you have to completely abandon the solution based on a website builder and create a new one that meets your current business needs.

In the long run, a custom project increases customer satisfaction and saves you money by not forcing you to develop it from scratch.

Your Website as the Best Way to Interact with Users

When evaluating the need for web development for your business, you must understand that having a website today is not just another trend of the digital age but an excellent opportunity to find new ways to interact with potential customers, especially remotely.

Overall, a website and any other digital platforms, such as social media and media advertising, can, if used correctly, give your business the desired image and attract new customers. Here, you can present your company in a favorable light and expand your target audience beyond a specific region.

Main Types of Real Estate Websites

Formally, there are four main types of websites in the real estate industry. At the same time, you can create a universal web platform that provides various functionalities depending on the user's role. So, let's find out what these four types are.

Real Estate Listings Websites: These websites bring together tenants and landlords in one place. They are usually adapted for any device (desktop, mobile). Note that to launch such a platform, you will likely need the help of a real estate agency if your business does not provide such services.

Real Estate Marketplaces: Real estate marketplaces act as a kind of digital intermediary between property owners and buyers. Such sites often have functionality for conducting transactions, which can be an excellent source of monetization for their owners.

Real Estate Aggregators: This type of web resource aggregates listings from third-party real estate websites. Thus, it provides end users with an extensive catalog of current offers with the ability to filter and sort by numerous parameters.

Property Management Websites: Property owners use such sites to manage the occupancy of their properties and track and process utility payments. More advanced systems can also connect to IoT devices within smart home systems and thus remotely manage their settings.

Key Features of Real Estate Websites

Regardless of the type of website you are going to create, there is a general set of characteristics it should have to be competitive, useful, and user-friendly for customers. We are talking about the following:

- Clear navigation based on a well-thought-out structure

- Responsiveness for any type of device

- Data security for users

- Social media integration

Speaking of specific features for a real estate website, the following six can help you achieve all these goals:

Access to Multiple Listings

The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system simplifies the transaction process between real estate brokers, helping listing brokers find cooperative brokers who directly work with buyers. Practically, MLS is a private database, and if you do not provide rental/sale services yourself but need access to it, you will have to make additional efforts. Specifically, you can either find a private realtor's website and contact them directly, find someone online who can provide access (usually a paid option), or turn to a real estate agent.

Search with Filters

Since dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of new listings enter the real estate market daily (depending on the size of the region you cover), finding the best option for clients can be a daunting task without auxiliary tools. Specifically, you can narrow their search using filters built into the search bar. This way, instead of browsing through hundreds of listings, your users can focus on just a dozen or two options.

You can also optimize the search on your site by integrating interactive maps with property tagging. For example, integration with Google Maps can help you with this. Thanks to this integration, you can limit the search for your users to the region that suits them best.

Image Gallery for Each Property

Obviously, even the work of an experienced copywriter will not make any listing truly attractive to potential clients if it does not contain detailed and high-quality images. Therefore, when creating a real estate website, you should enrich it with a section that includes certain requirements for uploaded media files.

Video or Virtual Tours

Virtual tours of properties can eliminate the need for your clients to personally visit specific properties. Thus, you can speed up transactions and increase their success rate. Usually, this feature is implemented using 3D technologies.

Messaging

When creating a real estate website, it also makes sense to implement a messaging option on your platform to ensure instant and easy communication between landlords/property owners and tenants/buyers.

Blog

Finally, for effective SEO of your site, it makes sense to create a section with articles on relevant topics. This way, you can increase the conversion rate through organic search.

In general, SEO prospects should be carefully considered at the design stage of your website - otherwise, it will likely contain web pages that are either impossible or very difficult to promote in search engines.

Current Trends in Real Estate Website Development

To create a real estate website that will not only be useful to end users but also competitive, viable, and meet your business goals, you need to implement at least one of the market trends. For example, the following technological concepts have every chance to make your website successful.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: One of the main problems of real estate websites is the search process. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help solve this problem by analyzing large amounts of data in seconds. AI can also eliminate inefficient processes associated with paperwork and real estate transactions. As for machine learning, it can be used to analyze potential buyers' preferences and offer the best property options. This will allow each of your clients to quickly and efficiently find ideal housing options. Moreover, "smart" data analysis will help you determine the optimal pricing policy for properties, leading to fair housing costs for all your website users.

Internet of Things: The Internet of Things (IoT) can move home security tasks into the digital realm through your website. For example, access control, monitoring, and protection systems can be implemented with its help within your web solution. Moreover, IoT can be used for diagnosing and preventing emergencies, ensuring the safety of residents, and monitoring the energy efficiency of buildings. Finally, it can automatically manage heating and air conditioning systems, reducing energy costs and saving resources while maintaining comfortable living conditions.

Big Data: Big data will help you create a personalized experience for your users, providing them with the best balance between prices and listing conditions that meet their individual requirements. Usually, big data is not a standalone technology and is used in combination with one (or both) of the above-mentioned technologies.

Augmented and Virtual Reality: Using virtual reality technologies, you can integrate 3D tours of properties into your site, providing complete immersion for your clients without the need to personally visit these properties. As for augmented reality, it can optimize your users' experience by providing detailed information and property parameters during their viewing.

Fractional Ownership: Fractional ownership is a scheme where several owners buy shares in one or several properties. At the same time, the care and maintenance of the property fall on the shoulders of a professional management company. If your website represents the services of such a company, you need to implement functionality for automatically calculating the cost of each share.

How to Create a Real Estate Website: 5 Key Steps

Having a well-thought-out plan for developing a real estate website will help you avoid pitfalls and create a competitive and scalable solution. Let's consider five main steps of this plan.

Design and Development of the Website

The first step in developing a real estate website is design. Of course, at this stage, it is assumed that you already have a list of ready-made business requirements and tools that can implement them. A prototype is essentially a visualized structure for each web page that your site should include. A detailed prototype gradually turns into the website's wireframe, which you will use to create a full-fledged design.

As for the style, it should be completely unique and not only distinguish your site from hundreds of others but also reflect the culture and values of your company (brand).

Integration with Third-Party Solutions

We have already mentioned the importance of integrating your website with third-party solutions above. Indeed, synchronization with social media and MLS will be particularly useful. Thanks to this, your users will have access to up-to-date data and can safely and quickly log in to the platform without having to create a new password.

Setting Up a Content Management System

Since the volume of information your site will operate with will gradually increase, you will need to set up a content management system. This way, you will ensure the attractiveness of your web resource for the target audience and simplify the uploading of new information, such as blog articles.

Creating a CRM System

If you provide real estate services, you will need to integrate your site with a CRM system that ensures the necessary level of customer experience. Specifically, this system will be responsible for automating and simplifying your recurring business tasks, maximizing customer satisfaction. With its help, you can also optimize interaction processes with your clients, providing them with new digital tools for real-time communication (e.g., company chat, phone calls, etc.).

Testing

Finally, you will need to test your website for errors and vulnerabilities using manual and automated tools. You should also ensure that your web resource meets generally accepted usability requirements and, in particular, has an optimal level of performance and content loading speed.

WebMedia's Experience in Developing Real Estate Platforms

If you are looking for an outsourcing company to develop a real estate website, you are already in the right place. Specifically, over the years, the WebMedia team has implemented more than a dozen solutions for this business niche and continues to improve skills and knowledge through updating and scaling already launched projects.

We always carefully analyze our clients' business goals and the market as a whole to create not just competitive solutions but ones that cover the maximum number of regular work processes of the client. Thus, our clients can move to a new stage of business development in the first few months after the release without expanding the existing staff.

Moreover, by choosing us, you will be confident that your project will be implemented using the latest technologies and tools. This means it will fully meet current market requirements, regardless of how tough the competition is.

Furthermore, we always take care of the security of the solutions we create. Along with meeting your unique business requirements, we ensure compliance with generally accepted standards and policies.

Conclusion

Now you know how to create a real estate website and can even make a winning plan for this. However, when you get down to practice, you may realize that this process is much more complex than you initially thought and requires both an understanding of the real estate niche and excellent web development skills.

Therefore, you will likely need a team of specialists who will align your business requirements with their professional experience and be able to implement them in a web format. For example, you can contact us. We always offer our clients an optimal balance between technological advancement and project cost, so the result is not just a trend-inspired solution but one that won't strain their budget. WebMedia