How to stand out from your competitors using web development solutions in the Real Estate sector

Being involved in the real estate industry and not having a thoughtful website means losing a fight to competitors. Over 90% of real estate firms have websites. Therefore, it’s no longer enough just to create a real estate website to win the competition.

At present Web Development is a crucial and important role for any business because the website is a medium through you advertise your products or services, vision and mission statement or many things that are essential for potential customers.

The Web is just like your virtual salesman, and Web makes real estate business so inexpensive that now companies are startup their business first by designing with the business website.

The Web development allows generating More Leads.

This is a no-brainer.  Gone are the days of paying thousands of dollars for Yellow Pages ads and highway billboards, hoping enough people will see it and maybe call your office.  Do you also want to pay someone just to answer the phone for you full-time, and rely on methods that the average client no longer uses? Your real estate website is like your modern-day “head office”.  This should be the first and most important place your potential clients find you, and if you use an online form to collect client info, then the real estate leads are immediate, free, and warm. A website can also serve as the place that you direct clients to your social media, or vice versa, and have the public sign up for your impactful newsletter for regular announcements.

Make sure that the website that you create should be simple and easy for a visitor such that while clicking any relevant option they search out anything else that is important to them.

I’d like to share the core real estate website features, that helps to improve business processes.

  1. Listings and mapping
  2. Mobile-friendly design
  3. Thoughtful search with filters
  4. High fidelity photos
  5. Calculators
  6. CRM system
  7. Blog
  8. Others

So to build your own real estate website that’d succeed, you should consider adding those features. The same concerns website improvements. Consider adding/modernizing those features.

Let’s now take a closer look at each of them.

Listings and Mapping

It’s barely possible to imagine a real estate website or platform without lots of properties for sale or rent.

It typically contains the following data:

  1. Photos of a property
  2. Description of facilities
  3. Location
  4. Price
  5. Area

Mobile-Friendly Design

Real-estate website development implies you should care not only about functionality but for design as well. Especially if you’re looking into ways to improve an existing product.

Before jumping into mobile-friendliness, I’d like to say that the desktop design shouldn’t be ignored either. An average user hangs out on a web page for 15 seconds. That’s how much time you’ve got to draw the attention of potential clients. In other words, if a website is poorly designed, you’ll be losing clients with or without responsive layouts.

Normally, web developers write responsive code only. This means the website can fit any screen size and change its layout depending on resolutions. In case you hired a vendor to build your own real estate website, the company’s business analysts may ask whether you need a responsive or adaptive layout before they start.

Why responsiveness is such a big deal? There are at least two reasons for this:

User experience. It’s needless to say how many users prefer surfing the web on mobile devices over desktops. The rule is simple here: no support, fewer conversions.

SEO. Remember how we talked about marketing? Google moved to mobile-first indexing. Meaning if you intend to optimize a non-responsive website for search engines, you may still rank lower than others. Respectively, chances for conversion are lower as well.

Thoughtful Search With Filters

Well, you already have lots of listings and care about clients browsing from different devices. It’s time to think about search and filters — features which probably affects conversion rates most of all.

Just to compare, here are some of the filtering options:

  1. Address, neighborhood, or ZIP
  2. Year built
  3. Listing type
  4. Home type
  5. Price
  6. Square feet

High Fidelity Photos

Professional photos are definitely one of the success factors. The logic is simple: the more clients like how a house on photos, the more likely they are to book a tour, contact the company or do any other interactions.

This means conversions may also depend on how good the property looks on photos.

Calculators

Calculators of different kinds are also great helpers in increasing conversions. They keep prospective buyers notified about the cost of a house and allow making informed decisions assisting with financial issues related to mortgage and other challenges.

Underneath, I’ve listed several common reality calculators:

  1. Mortgage
  2. Affordability
  3. Rent vs. buy
  4. Debt-to-income
  5. Refinance

CRM System

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are vital for most businesses. A robust real estate CRM can help you manage clients and communications way more effectively due to the automated tracking of interactions with customers.

Depending on your needs, you may want to order software development services to build CRM from scratch.

Here you can look at our CRM systems:

ACICO is CRM for builders that gives a possibility to monitor the way the objects are built.

SAVO — CRM  system that automates all the processes of the development company, starting with the customer’s call and ending with the formation of a real estate purchase contract and payment fixation.

Blog

If you’d like to make use of search engine marketing and share useful insights with your clients the blog is a must-have. It generates both traffic and conversions as you can write posts with target keywords.

Some topics you can write on:

  1. Latest news in real estate
  2. Pieces of advice on buying and selling houses
  3. Reviews and guide
  4. Legal issues of buying and selling property

For example, here you can look at the blog of one’s our real estate website:

Other Features

Those were the core features you should consider to design a real estate website. Of course, it’s up to you as a product owner which ones to include to the final feature set.

Based on our experience, I can suggest several more complementary features:

  1. Online chats
  2. Live market analytics
  3. Calendars
  4. Maps

Taking into consideration an ever-rising number of real estate websites and platforms, it may take some effort and time to build a competitive website.

Either way, you need to find a strong experienced tech partner to make that happen. You may contact our managers to learn more about AMgrade. We offer free consultation as well as dev time and cost estimation of your project.

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