How to Create Best Real Estate Website Design? How much will it Cost?

Remember the days when an open house was actually an amazing marketing and sales idea? When printing and distributing pamphlets about house sales used to get good leads? Well gone are those days, now real estate owners and realtors are relying on digital platforms for better sales and marketing.

As per the recent statistics by the National Association of Realtors ; 70 percent of brokers or broker associations have their own website. Also, 69 percent of sales agents have their own website.

A well-designed and feature-rich website can save your money in printing and distributing pamphlets and booklets. All you have to do is add the listing of the latest property on your website and the interested parties will get in touch with you directly.

This blog is dedicated to helping you understand and adopt the latest trends for real estate website development.

7 Main Elements for Real Estate Website Development

As per the recent report, There are more than 2 million real estate agents in the USA in the year 2021. This is enough to talk about the rising competition in the real estate industry.

List of elements for real estate website design & development process:

1. Market Research to validate your idea
2. Interactive website design to stand out from the competition
3. Website Development to make sure it works smoothly on all devices and platforms
4. Timely Maintenance and Upgrade of the website
5. Improve Online Visibility via various Digital Marketing
6. How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Real Estate Website?
7. 3 Mistakes To Avoid While Real Estate Website Development

A website for any company, business, or industry is made by combining elements that are required as per their target audience or clients. These elements will define the look and feel of your website and the success rate of converting your website visitors to your customers. 

Moreover; our team of business analysts and marketing experts have created this list by combining the elements to build the website and generate revenue from it. In short; this list contains every information that you need to succeed in this increasing competition in the real estate industry.

Market Research to validate Your Idea

Market research is one of the most important process for any business, especially when we are planning to invest our hard-earned money. It will help you analyze and understand the requirement of your idea in the market among your target audience.

• Check out the existing websites of your competitors or the companies where you want to reach one day. Try to understand the features of their websites and their USPs.
• Before you jump into the designing part of your website, you need to have a strategy for website content. This will include a solid plan on how and what you will cover and showcase on your website. A rough plan will be required for what information do you want to show on the home page and what types of service pages do you need.
• Based on this plan you can create a content strategy that will portray your business and brand clearly to every website visit. This will avoid communication gaps and the web design team will be able to understand your objective clearly.

What is required in an Intuitive Real Estate Web Design?

The design of a website plays the most important role in the retention of clients or customers. People might visit your website via ads or references but if they are not connecting with the website then they will close the tab instantly. This will only increase your bounce rate and nothing else.

Hence; It is important to keep the design of the website up to date and intuitive to build a connection between you and your audience. You will need an experienced web design company that can build an intuitive design for your business.

Here are a things that you need to keep in mind to create one of the best real estate company web designs:

• Better Property Search
  We all are busy in today’s fast world and we try to save as much time as possible. Hence adding features that can save the time of our website visitors and serve them what they exactly need is necessary. Adding a search option will allow the visitors to search for a certain type of property in a certain area. 
• Filters
  Filter options like locality, amenities, number of bedrooms, and square foot area of the house will add another layer of the feature. This will help the visitors to get what exactly they need in a short period of time and hence they will spend more time checking the property they like the most.
• Detailed Property Listing
  Your customers are visiting your website to buy their dream house or office and they will be interested in knowing everything related to that property. You can add multiple images, videos, descriptions, and additional information like pricing and amenities.
• Animations and Effect
  A plain website with basic content and images will not help you to stand out in the competition. Your website is the first impression of your business, a smooth functioning website with effects and animations will be more pleasing.
• Easy Social Login
  Every person has a Facebook or Gmail account on their phone or computer. A social login option will fetch all the necessary information from the social media website directly. This will save time and effort for your potential clients.
• Smooth Communication Options
  An easy chat option on the website will help users to get in touch with you directly without sharing their contact details. This will create trust and once the client is sure about the property you can ask for its contact information.

Top 2 Things To Keep In Mind During Real Estate Website Development

During the development process, there are certain things that we can keep in mind to make sure our website is representing our business effectively.

• The technology stack is the root of any website and it can vary to a huge extent from website to website. Yes, Real estate websites can also have a different technology stack i.e. PHP, MySQL, jQuery, JavaScript, Bootstrap etc. How? Well, each website has its own requirements and based on that the technology stack is decided.
• Secondly; every business needs a content management system (CMS) to keep a track of everything that is going on to your website. There are a lot of options available for every website type but the most reliable is WordPress. 

Do You Know? 39.5 % of all websites around the world use WordPress CMS. Along with WordPress, companies rely on Wix, Weebly, Square Space, and custom development for their websites.

You can get in touch with an experienced reliable WordPress development company to build your own real estate website. Make sure to hire proficient developers who have experience in the real estate industry.

Types of Real Estate Websites

Real estate is experiencing a significant transformation in the next few years, and technology is the primary driver of this process. There are various types of real estate websites based on necessity and audience. Websites assist in focusing on buyer searches for low-cost properties online and to real estate service providers in finding clients.

8 Features to Add on Your Real Estate Website

Now that we are aware of how to make your website stand out with a unique and user-friendly design, let’s talk about development. Just like real estate website design; website development also plays an important role in retaining website visitors. And there are some elements that affect the way your website visitors respond to your website. 

Here is the list of all the major elements you need to make sure the website development is up to the mark as per the expectation of your customers:

• Smart Interest Rate Calculators:
  Your clients will love to check things like a gross rental multiplier, gross potential income, cash flow before and after tac, gross and net operating income, and other related information.
• GPS Integration:
  A location-based property searching solution will add extra stars to your website. Your prospective clients will get an enhanced navigation and mapping feature to check out the area of the property.
• 360 Virtual Property Tour:
  Checking out the entire property inside and outside from anywhere can be a major element in the success of your real estate business. A 3D view of the property will help your clients to visit the property from their home, office, or anywhere.
• High loading speed:
  Think about all the times when you have closed a website or an app because it was too slow. The speed of the website also affects the branding of your company. Make sure the website load time is within microseconds.
• Efficient algorithms for data input & output:
  The algorithm of a website is responsible for all the processes on the website. When we expect to generate leads, inquiries, or revenue from our website we need a reliable algorithm to handle the data. We need a website that can store our data efficiently and keep it safe from cyber-attacks, hence make sure the algorithm in your website is efficient to manage the input and output data.
• Security:
  The security of the data of your customers is your responsibility. As a result; make sure the website you are developing is secured with an SSL certificate and high-end security system. The news of data leakage can destroy your brand completely and hence it can be a big loss for your business. 
• Responsiveness:
  Today most of us are using mobile devices to search for our queries online. The same goes for searching for property. If your website looks wonderful on a desktop but not readable on a mobile phone then the website visitors will close the tab instantly. Hence we have to make sure our website works smoothly on all types of devices and on all types of platforms. For that, you will have to ask your development company to build a responsive real estate website.

>>Related Read: How to Optimize Your WordPress Website for Mobile Users

Timely Maintenance and Upgrade of the website

Real estate website development is just a part of taking your business online. Just like your offline office; your website also needs timely maintenance and upgrade.

Every year you will witness some advanced technology features that your competitors are adding to their website to attract new customers. This will increase your competition and hence you will also have to add new features to the website.

Along with that; your website visitors will also increase with time. Hence you will need to upgrade the website accordingly.

Why You Should Consult A Digital Marketing Company?

And here is the most important question for every real estate business owner: How to generate revenue from a real estate website?

Have you ever tried searching for properties in your area? What do you type on Google or any other search engine platform? You must have tried searching for “4 BHK houses in XYZ area” or “Best Houses in XYZ area”. 

Now when you see the website of your competitors in the search result, do you feel like you are missing a major part of marketing? Yes. search engine optimization is helping different businesses from around the world to grow rapidly and serve their target audience.

An effective SEO consultation will rank your website on the top result for the keywords that your target audience will search about property buying and selling. So your website is ready to enter the competition but how exactly are you going to grab the attention of your target audience? You need a bridge between your website and your target customers.

Digital marketing campaigns will play the role of that bridge. With the right planning and management, you can generate 200 percent more revenue with digital marketing.

How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Real Estate Website?

The cost to build a real estate website depends on a lot of factors that affect the time and effort required in the development. These factors include:

• Features of the website
• The technology stack 
• The type of website
• Design of a website
• The time required to build the website and many more.

But, there is one more major factor!

Another major factor that plays one of the most essential roles is the size of your business.

1. Yes, if you are a startup or small business, the cost will be less as compared to a big brand or enterprise. Wondering the reason behind the difference in the cost for different sizes of the businesses? The simple answer is; the data. When we are at a startup stage we know that the number of customers per day on our website will not be much higher. Plus the number of properties that we will showcase will also be limited.
2. Large scale / enterprise level businesses have big teams and big portfolios along with a greater number of clients. Here, we know that our client base is in thousands or even millions. We can estimate that the number of per-day visits on the website will be in the thousands. Hence we need a strong website that can handle all the traffic and still deliver the best results to every user.

To help you understand the pricing structure of real estate website development, here is a detailed table with the approximate amount:

Parameters	Small Business	Medium Business	Large Business
Website UI/UX Design	$700+	$1,800+	$2,500+
Website Development	$750+	$1,400+	$7,000+
Digital Marketing / SEO	$200+	$400+	$700+
Support and Maintenance	Custom	Custom	Custom
Mobile App Development	–	–	Custom
Total Cost	$1,700+	$3,600+	$10,200+

3 Mistakes to avoid while Real Estate Company Website Development

1. Doing market research after launching the website
   We have met a lot of real estate companies who have launched the website and then after the market research, they upgrade it again. This will take a lot of your time and money. Always do deep market research before deciding what type of website you need.
2. Not spending enough time on real estate company website design and features
   Most of the companies are so eager to launch the website that they just go with any design and any feature. Website is the face of your brand, it has to be perfect and attractive. Make sure to spend some time designing the website.
3. Avoiding SEO and Competitors Analysis during development
   During the development of your website, there are a lot of SEO elements that you will have to keep in mind. Ignoring these elements will result in wasting time and effort. Some of these elements are; Meta title and description of each page, the Keyword of each page of the website, content in the website, ALT Text in the images, and many more.

 Time to take your real estate business online!

In 2020; 52 percent of buyers have adopted the online method of purchasing a house. If you are still calculating the cost of real estate website development then you might lose some good clients.

Buyers are busier today than 5 or even 10 years back. They prefer finalizing the properties remotely and then go for a visit. To show them all the property options you have for them, you need a reliable source to represent. We know what it takes to build an interactive and feature-rich website in your budget. At Samarpan Infotech; our team has extensive experience of working with leading real estate companies from across the globe.

Get in touch with us today and let’s get started on journey of digitization for your real estate business.