A real estate website should be the core of agents’ marketing efforts. However, making an efficient and effective website can be time-consuming and costly. And you will want to have a plan. During the design process, the key is knowing what features should be included on the website to meet visitors’ needs effectively. In this article, we will discuss all the must-have real estate website features that every agent should include on their website.
Qualities of a Great Real Estate Website
A real estate website should leave a good impression on visitors. To do so, it needs to have great form and function. It should look good and fit the needs of visitors without confusing them. The most successful websites have mastered a balance between these two critical factors. Given its value, spending resources, time, and energy to build the most effective website possible makes sense. Here are the characteristics of a great real estate website:
Easy Navigation
A real estate website’s ultimate goal is to generate leads. Getting users to your website is one thing; keeping them on it is another. It would be a pity to lose visitors because your website confuses them. One of the biggest mistakes agents can make while designing their website is not having it be very easy because they think it looks professional.
Visitors are not typically patient. If they cannot figure out where to find the information they need, they will be gone, looking for a site that is easier to navigate. Your website should be simple. It should allow users to find necessary information without complications through menus quickly. Always put yourself in the shoes of your visitors. What would you like to see?
Simplicity
Agents might assume a website with many menus and options indicates how professional the agent is. On the contrary, while a complicated website might attract visitors, it will immediately scare them away. Make your home page clean and tidy, eliminating unnecessary clutter. Only include essential features like your listings, contact information, testimonials, etc.
Great Visuals
Gone are the days when websites used text with basic graphics and visuals. Thanks to new technologies and developments in web design, it is easy to make stunning and eye-catching websites. While the primary function of a real estate website is informative content, making the most of website design doesn’t hurt. It is quite surprising that some agents still use a website design that looks like a restored version from the 90s. First impressions are usually the impressions that last.
A modern design demands crisp and relevant visuals. Like the content of your website, the visuals should be related to real estate and serve your marketing efforts. If your farming area is a small town with detached homes, do not use images of skyscrapers in a big city. Additionally, images and visuals should trigger the emotions of your visitors.
High-Quality Photos
The more visual your website is, the better. Compared to text, images can convey more with less. Furthermore, what you use as images also makes a massive difference in the general feel of your website. You will use photos in different website sections, including listings, headshots, cover images, etc. As these will fulfill a significant part of your website, ensuring they are all high-quality photos and images is vital. It would be disappointing if one of your listings had a blurry photo taken by a phone or if it is too small and is upscaled to fit the frame.
There are a lot of professional services out there that offer high-quality photography of your listings. With high-quality images, you ensure the property is shown at its best with all the positive features showcased. These are not as expensive as they used to be. And the outcome outweighs the cost.
Easy Website Management
Unfortunately, a website will not run, and you must update content regularly. As it will be a fixed part of your marketing efforts, having a backend system that is convenient to use and does not require you to go through the complicated data entry process is a must. Apart from having essential features needed to run your business online, it should be easy to use these features. Unless you are interested in website design, you will not like the idea of figuring out how to show a listing on your website if it is a complicated process.
Fortunately, these days, there are a lot of great real estate website platforms. Take roomvu’s agent profile; it offers seamless and easy data entry and use. Entering your data on different sections like testimonials, listings, specializations, etc., can be done with a few clicks.
Automated Content
As a real estate agent, you will be very busy facilitating the buying and selling of property. However, marketing and providing the customer with great content are essential. It proves your knowledge and experience in the field and helps build trust. This is where automatically generated and branded content comes into play. A great real estate website should allow agents to generate automated content and share it easily with their audience.
Automated Marketing / Emails
A great real estate website will allow agents to do most of their marketing automatically. For instance, sending out mass emails should be as easy as uploading your contact list. Sample templates that allow modification facilitate the process of sending emails considerably. Your website should do the job for you, not vice versa.
Niche-Centered
Before starting your marketing efforts, you must have defined your target market as a part of your strategy—the part of the population that needs your services. After defining your niche, you must focus on their needs and concerns and what solutions you offer. Ensure your website demonstrates that you are the best fit for their needs.
Brand Promotion
This one is sometimes misunderstood. Promoting your brand is not about bragging about how great you think you are, and it’s not bombarding the audience with direct promotional messages. Promoting your brand includes letting your audience know how you stand apart from the competition and what you offer.
Your audience does not care about who you are or who you think you are. The audience does not care about you at all. They focus on their needs and if they are a good fit for them. Consequently, it would be best to focus on how you will arrive at outcomes that benefit them. This is the only way to promote your brand. The rest does not matter. An agent who does not have a unique value proposition is just another face in the crowd.
Responsive Design
A significant part of our online experience is taking place on mobile devices. Therefore, all websites must use a responsive design to show correctly on mobile devices. Otherwise, they will lose audience members as a lack of responsive design makes browsing challenging. No responsive design means no browsing. As simple as that. Make sure your website shows well on mobile screens as well as computer screens.
Fast Loading Speed
The loading speed of your website may not sound particularly important. But, if your website takes too long to load, your audience may leave before it does. If the image takes too long to load or the page struggles with different sections before showing up correctly, the audience will likely judge it as broken. Furthermore, the website’s loading speed affects its search engine ranking. Search engines favor faster sites as they try to create the best user experience for the visitors.
CTAs
CTAs or calls to action are among the best real estate website features that encourage visitors to act. Imagine a visitor likes you and wants to talk to you but does not know how because your contact information is hidden in the footer. There is a good chance the visitor will forget about it and leave.
Including a “Contact Us” button that takes the audience to a page where they can quickly contact you helps avoid such a scenario. Try to include multiple CTAs on different website pages, but remember not to confuse the visitor with more than one CTA for every section.
SEO
Yes, you can buy ads to get your targeted audience into your website, but that will cost you money, and there is another way. People will be searching for many real estate-related questions and topics using search engines. Search engines will go through their database and pick the websites they think are the best options for users’ search phrases.
It would help if you tried to be listed in search results without resorting to ads. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of configuring the content of your website in a way that fits the criteria and standards of search engines. Search engines are updated frequently, but their essential standards are almost identical. Make sure your content includes your audience’s search keywords inherently.
Social Media Integration
Social media can not be ignored. People spend a lot of time daily on social media, and chances are you are no exception. The primary marketing principles require you to be where your audience is: social media.
Additionally, businesses use social media to increase brand awareness and directly interact with customers and clients. On social media, your customers can easily voice their needs and questions, and you can conveniently get back to them and offer help or answers. Doing this correctly will increase audience satisfaction, showing them that you care.
Therefore, ensure you have links to your social media channels on your website so visitors can find you easily across different platforms. It is a good idea to put the link on your home page for better accessibility. Also, ask your audience to follow you. They may not do it themselves.
Social Media Sharing
Engagement is the key to success in real estate. The more your content and services are shared, the more people you will reach, which means more leads. Therefore, making it as easy as possible for your audience to share your content is a great idea. For every piece of content you post on your website, including listings, blog posts, videos, etc., provide an option by which users can send a link to their friends and family so that others can see them, too.
Real Estate Website Features
Your Bio
As one of the most basic real estate website features, your bio or your “About” page provides the audience with an opportunity to get to know you. It would be best if you used this chance to introduce yourself and briefly and effectively tell them why you are the best realtor for them. A great bio:
- Includes your professional and high-quality headshot
- Shows your skills and qualifications
- Describes your real estate niche and the area you cover
- Demonstrates your value proposition
- Has your contact information
- Can include your achievements and awards
Valuable and Compelling Content
Your website is not just an advertising platform. You need to share great content on your website for quite a lot of reasons:
- As many visitors do not know you, you should introduce yourself to them by showing your knowledge and experience. A website with just promotional listings is not very indicative of the qualifications of the agent behind it. How can they trust you to know what you are doing?
- Search engines like Google use crawlers to determine the content and topic of websites. Sharing real estate-related content on your website helps rank your website on search engines.
Evergreen Content
As a real estate agent, one of the critical goals in your marketing efforts is to gain your audience’s trust. There are a lot of agents out there repeating what everybody has claimed. The need for proof is even more critical when the competition is this tough. One class of content you should share is the type that can be consistently used. Evergreen content does not expire and acts as a good source of information. It is a valuable feature.
Content like tips on real estate that are always true or are so for a long time until a new development. Such content is published once but attracts fresh audience members for a long time. Try to include a great deal of evergreen content to make your website a good source of information for prospects.
Fresh Content
Fresh content keeps your audience updated. New developments in the market, current trends, price changes, and other stats are all fresh content that need to be updated continually. Always keep your website updated, as expired content will not leave a great impression on new visitors. Your current audience will also be disappointed that the last market update you have goes back to July 2019.
Advanced Search
Your audience must search on your website to find what they want. Therefore, you need to make it easy for them to search. Most web platforms provide basic searching options, but the more advanced, the better. Advanced and filtered search options will provide more accurate results and make visitors happier. Make sure you do not forget about this real estate website feature.
Categories for Properties
Visitors love it when they can directly go and browse properties they are interested in. As a result, categorizing properties in different areas, cities, or neighborhoods is one of the real estate website features you need to bear in mind. The more you make it easier for visitors to browse your website, the more leads you will get.
Contact Information Everywhere
People find you and then do business with you. Therefore, you should make it easy for them to contact you. Put your contact information everywhere on your website so finding it does not require going through menus or combing through the footer.
Contact Forms
Further to the point above, another great real estate website feature to contact visitors and at the same time get their contact information is a contact form. A contact form asks the audience for their information and can be used on different sections of your website.
Lead Capturing Landing Pages
Of course, such a form can also be used on other pages of your website, particularly landing pages. Landing pages serve as single-purpose pages designed to direct the visitors in a specific sales funnel, driving them to take a particular action. Lead generation landing pages are designed to get visitors’ contact information; therefore, contact forms are used often.
For the lead-capturing landing pages to work, you must offer a valuable service like Home Valuation or some valuable content. But ask the visitors to submit their contact information to get access. This will generate some quality leads as people looking for information and services are already thinking about doing business in real estate.
Market Updates
Offer detailed and up-to-date market update reports, giving your professional input to guide your audience to make the best decision regarding real estate. There are many ways to share market updates, including text and infographics, but market update videos are the best. They convey easy-to-understand information conveniently. However, making videos by yourself might be challenging. Roomvu offers a service that offers branded and automated market updates that can be shared easily.
Testimonials
People tend to trust their peers, so most people go down to the review section before paying for a product or service. Testimonials are essential in giving your visitors an idea of what your previous clients think of working with you. Ensure your website has a testimonial section on the home page so that your new visitors see them within the first few seconds of visiting your website.
Hot or Latest Listings
Apart from the basic listings sections that every real estate website should have, it is advisable to think of space on the home page and assign your top listings. You should feature those listings that are strategically more important to you and that you would like to sell faster. The primary listings section does not do the job of showing how important these listings are.
Neighborhood Guides
People first choose the neighborhood, then the property itself. Also, you are not just promoting listings as a real estate agent. You are also promoting your farming area. This can consist of one or many neighborhoods. As a result, to get people from other areas to grow an interest in your area and consequently your listings. Also, to get your niche to consider properties in other neighborhoods you cover, sharing neighborhood guides on your website is a great idea.
Moreover, sharing neighborhood guides with your audience’s real estate website features will introduce you as an agent who is an expert in the area and knows a lot about the amenities and facilities available in the region. This can create trust and make your new audience more likely to give you a shot.
Videos
Images promote the listings well and are one of the most effective real estate website features. However, the real estate process depends heavily on emotional elements. Emotions make the audience grow interested in the property and make a buying decision. Videos allow the audience to feel they are at the property. During this global pandemic, videos can be useful as people stay home. Open houses may not be the best option these days.
Virtual Tours
As one of the latest real estate website features, virtual tours are the new game-changer in the real estate market. They are designed as an alternative to listing videos and are doing well. They allow the audience to browse listings in the comfort of their home and at their own pace. Unlike open houses, virtual tours are made once and can be used by many people. Furthermore, they allow the audience to take their time and browse the property thoroughly whenever they like. Once quite expensive, virtual tours are relatively affordable and can be ordered easily.
Real Estate Website Features: Takeaways
A real estate website is a must for all realtors. However, the quality of the website and its features are equally important. Many real estate website features can improve a real estate marketing plan. However, designing a website from scratch can be pretty time-consuming and expensive. But the good news is that some services offer branded real estate websites at an affordable price. Roomvu’s agent profile includes all the necessary features every real estate agent needs, and it is free to try!