The importance of an effective real estate website design cannot be overstated. Your design, being the initial contact with your business a customer has will either draw them in to read what your business is about, or turn them away due to lack of professionalism, clutter, or slow loading pages. Most importantly however, you need to realize that a real estate website is not like other websites. A real estate website needs to be interactive and database driven. Due to these technology complexities, effective real estate websites will be more expensive to host and design than other “business card” style websites.

Real estate websites need to be operated through what is known as a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS will allow you to quickly and effectively manage your properties, send newsletters, let your website users sign up for accounts to be sent automatic notifications when new properties are added, and much more. While many websites are built simply as a glorified business card (i.e. “about us” and “contact us”), a real estate website needs to be so much more.

The fact of the matter is that 80% of people look for homes online before contacting an agent. This is because it’s easy and risk free to look before making the commitment to call the agent or website operator. Similarly, the real estate browser can view hundreds of properties if they wish, sort them into price categories, see countless pictures, figure out mortgage rates (by using a mortgage calculator), and compare home prices against each other. They can also look through the properties of various agents at once without ever making a commitment to anyone. This allows the home shopper or home renter to equip themselves with as much information as possible before picking up the phone and calling an agent.

This also has completive advantages for agents as well. It saves agents a step in the selling process. Before the popularity of real estate websites, agents would have to educate their clients on the market, ask questions about what they wanted, prices, mortgage information and so on. Now, because the home shoppers can educate themselves beforehand, the agents “educational role” has been largely reduced to providing more neighborhood specific information and comparative analysis. Agents now have clients walking in the door with the descriptions and pictures of the properties they want to see, they price range they are looking for and the neighborhood they want to live in. This really streamlines the process for both agents and clients.

Best of all, from an agent’s perspective there should be no fear that real estate websites will take over the selling responsibility. Generally speaking, with the exception of the some less expensive tropical properties, most people will still use an agent to help them chose their home, show them properties and help with the legal work. Real estate websites are just meant to help the client with their real estate research.

As a real estate professional, you must think of the website experience from the user’s perspective. Unfortunately, many real estate agents jump on the internet bandwagon seeing the lead generation potential but they approach the sales process from the wrong angle. They believe having a real estate website is an end in itself. They often don’t update properties, they don’t upload many properties in the first place, they lack information, they let properties expire and they don’t create a sense of community on their sites. Their hopes are that they can do as little work as possible, upload a few ‘sample” properties which might be expired and wait for the phone to ring. If a client calls they say “actually, that property has been sold, but why don’t you come by the office and I can show you similar properties”. They have effectively told the client that they are not interested in their needs. The reason they were on a real estate website in the first place was because they wanted to freedom to find the properties that interested them before going into the agent’s office.

Without debate, one of the most important features of  real estate websites is the depth of properties they offer. Most potential leads will find a link to see your complete listing of properties. If you only have a couple handfuls of outdated listings, they are almost guaranteed to try and find another more up to date, comprehensive site where they can spend some time and find properties. They want the home finding process to be as simple as possible. They don’t want to bookmark two properties on 20 sites. They would rather bookmark 40 on one real estate website. Then when it came time to approach the agent, they would have all of their research, a complete list of their properties and they would only need to visit one company instead of 20. If you are not approaching you real estate website design from the users perspective you are missing out on the majority of your sales leads. Your real estate website needs to be a comprehensive and helpful resource, not a lazy attempt at recruiting new clients.

The rest of this report will be geared towards helping you learn how to properly design an effective, well thought out and aesthetically pleasing website. We will discuss everything from navigation to color scheme psychology. You will learn about lead generation tools and you’ll also learn how to properly integrate search engine optimization features into your design.

After reading this report, you should have the knowledge to turn your static website into a state of the art, lead generating, interactive, web 2.0, aesthetically pleasing, search engine friendly website that sells.

As a real estate webmaster you don’t need too much traffic to operate a successful and profitable company. However, it is important that you take advantage of the traffic you do receive and ensure you have your best foot forward as you try and gain sales leads.

Not only are extensive property listings important for adding website “sticky factor”, but they also help with numerous repeat visits, often being the pages that are re-visited once the site visitor returns on subsequent occasions. A test of website traffic on a real estate website showed the following;

• Search page for all listings - 24% of unique visitors
• Search broker's listings - 17% of unique visitors
• Site Home Page - 16% of unique visitors
• No other page garnered even 5% of unique visitor traffic
• Next three in line were maps, the blog and property sold statistics
• About Me page was 45th at 0.20%

As you can see, property related traffic made up 41%+ of this websites traffic. This is in large part to people bookmarking specific properties to come back to at a later date. People are not just going back to the main page on their second visit and trying to re-find the properties from their first visit. They already have those properties bookmarked making specific property pages very valuable pages within your website. Other important content to add to your real estate website according to the list above are blogs, maps and property statistics and a very strong sales page.

If you liked this article, be sure to check out our real estate website design ebook here.

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