“Purchasing properties from real estate websites is now a digital comfort that suits both the buyer and seller.”
A real estate website designing task is not like designing any other eCommerce website. It intakes a few added elements, features, and functionalities that should give its best to fulfill every user’s search intent.
You can design a real estate website as an agent, broker, and so on by putting up properties in an optimized manner to influence a purchase decision using the best practices.
Must Have Features Of A Fully Functional Real Estate Website
Given below are the best practices that make your real estate website a fully functional, aesthetic, and optimized one influencing your property business.
Detailed Property Listings
When it comes to property listings, you must put up all the details on your real estate website. The online buyers are assured by checking out all the necessary detailing of your properties or units online.
Putting up all this information on your website as given below is necessary to ensure your buyers are fully aware of-
- The number of rooms – bedrooms, bathrooms, terrace, etc.
- The square footage that is the living space and the areas of the rooms in it
- Different systems- electrical, water, heating
- Floor coverings
- Common areas, places, and services offered like in condominiums
- Appliances and furniture included
- Remodeling opportunities like the garage, basement, backyard, etc.
Every minute detail helps your online buyers to visualize the property, thus engaging them further in making a purchase decision.
High-Resolution Property Images
Include proper property images to help your online buyers visualize what exactly they are looking forward to. The property images should be taken from every angle so that they capture every detail of the property.
There should be photos of every room, yard, outside view, etc so that your potential buyers are aware of the neighborhood. Even drone footage of the property giving an aerial view of the property will immediately impact the buyers. The clearer the pictures, the faster the purchase decision.
Powerful Internal Search Tools and Interactive Filters
As a user, when your prospect is to purchase real estate, you have a finite set of criteria in your mind. This specific set of criteria can be targeted as soon as you have a web visitor. You can respond to their needs and present the properties that they are looking for in the first place.
This internal search in your real estate website plays a crucial role in generating leads. The placement of this feature with added filters allows you to distinguish and categorize your real estate properties. You can implement the following filters to match your user’s search intent-
- Region
- Type of land
- Price
- Structure
- Square footage
- Number of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc
- Floors in the building
- The size of the lot
- Characteristics like- Garage, Fireplace, Pool, etc
There are other details, characteristics, and elements like the style of the real estate, the nearest hospital, school, etc, near the region. You need to expand the filtering details so that your buyers can pin down exactly what they want with the search results.
Enable Sharing Feature
While going through a real estate website, sharing your property with your buyers on different platforms can help you to target a broader audience. You can enable sharing of your properties on different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. Adding trackable links on these social apps will land users on your real estate website thereby boosting your engagement rate and sales.
You can offer shared media of these properties to your buyers with several other options apart from social media- like through emails or via text message.
Adding the sharing feature below your property listing like the ‘Share’ or ‘Send to a Friend button or form is an effective move. This captures their email address and a list of interested buyers looking for real estate.
Home Valuation Tools
Integrating your real estate website with home valuation tools can improve the quality of your business as well as help out your users. You can add mortgage calculations, property square foot calculations with current market price, EMIs, and so on with precision.
The automated valuation tools will not provide your prospective buyers with correct rates but also provide insight into the market value of all properties. The users can enjoy onsite property valuations and analysis without leaving your site. Thus improving your user experience and site’s rankings considerately.
Easily Accessible Contact Information
In every real estate web design, contact information is always crucial to seal the deal. Driving traffic is good but it is of no use until a purchase decision is made. Most of the time buyers are hesitant to reach out to the agents or brokers. By adding the name, phone number, a photo of your agent, and a personalized message beside, the inquiry will be an easy conversation.
Include a form with your property listing or on each of the web pages of your website. This helps your buyers as well as the sellers to enquire about the estates and get their queries answered. Reach out to them easily, research the property and pursue a purchasing conversation with them via the forms.
Intuitive User Navigation
With intuitive user navigation and a simple menu, your target users are more comfortable going through your web page. Studies have shown that 94% of the first impressions are related to seamless navigation structure and simple visual elements.
Seamless navigation flow helps in multiple areas like-
- To find out necessary information quickly
- Makes it very easy to interact with a web page
- Focuses on the user’s needs and preferences more clearly
You can check if your navigation is as simple as the three-click rule. The three-click rule helps to check out the contents of the web page in three clicks. This further justifies that your website’s menu navigation and sitemap are user-friendly.
Easily improve your navigation flow better through these elements mentioned below –
- Sticky menus at the top of each page while scrolling down helps the users to move forward and backwards at ease.
- Breadcrumbs are very useful in identifying the user’s position while browsing.
- Bold buttons are attention-seeking elements that attract the users to engage and take action. Buttons with bold fonts serve as the call to action buttons, are appealing, have consistency, and should be placed across the whole website.
- Distinct titles in the menu sections and across the web pages are a traditional but very effective way to improve navigation. This way web visitors know what to expect.
- The logo is the most important feature in any website as it is used as a link to the Home page.
- The footer should be placed on every web page of your website as the user usually looks into it for address, phone number, directions, contact form, etc.
- The “About Us” Page is very crucial for generating leads as it explains your objectives and goals. You can add your social media links, CTAs, testimonials, images, and videos with custom typography to spark interaction with your user.
All these help you to generate quality leads and drive traffic to your real estate website.
Mobile- friendly
Mobile responsive real estate websites should be your priority due to the rapid shift of audiences using smartphones to check out everything. You need to ease the accessibility of your site by segmenting your –
- mobile search
- visitor flow
- form data
All these data are acquired via mobile visits ensuring a user-friendly and appealing customer experience. A mobile-first approach while designing your real estate website will surely boost your search engine rankings by improving visibility. This way your buyers increase thus putting you in the spotlight of the real estate industry.
Focusing on Usability
Your real estate website should not be overloaded with flashy elements but should focus on proper usability. Including lots of animation usually leads to disappointment in fulfilling the actual goal of the website.
While focusing on your target demographic, most website design service providers forget that visual effects will not engage the audience, but real information will. Most of the audience who visits the page is looking for property information.
Some specific elements define your website usability, and others help in website position digitally. This significantly reduces your bounce rate and optimizes the web pages.
Ensure that these common mistakes of putting aesthetics before usability are avoided while designing a real estate website-
- Complex user navigation
- Non-responsive (non-mobile friendly) website layout
- Slow website loading speed
- Appalling menu designs
- Broken links in the content and bugs
With minimal design and website layout focused on the user, usability should be every property website’s objective
Analytics and Tracking Visitors
Every real estate website needs to collect data and information about its web visitors. You need your website design service provider to include this in your project as a marketing strategy. Capturing the analytics from your web page can help to improve the user experience as well as the performance of your site.
Depending on the budget, priorities, resources, and management tools you have at hand, you can track your visitors. You can collect all the information about your site’s performance and visitors in two ways-
1. Lead Capture Forms
You can capture all the valuable information about your site visitors through these forms and generate potential leads. Position these buttons or forms as popups, or side-ins, or place them in the footer of each web page.
The primary objective of these forms should be to-
- Gather information on potential customers
- Avoid vague contests or promotions
- Encourage unqualified visitors to register
- Capture potential buyers
- Discriminate among visitors who are not interested in making a purchase.
You can convince your users through these various methods to influence the sale of property-
- Private tours
- Open house opportunities
- Promotions
- Contests
- Information requests
- Price drops for VIPs
- Property tips and advice from the same region
- Announcement of new properties
2. Trackable Landing Pages
Creating specific landing pages can categorize your users and manage traffic on your website. By not directing all your marketing traffic to your site’s home page, you can engage more with your users on different aspects.
Create a landing page for each medium or channel like-
- Newspaper
- Advertisement
- Billboard
- Social media
This helps you to track all your users and site visitors effectively. Thus, helping you in marketing and personalizing information along with property listings.
Different scopes for creating landing pages are for-
- New real estate property announcement
- Open house day
- Private tour booking
- Downloading the guide for buying home
- Questionnaire to help with a property purchase
- Offers and promotional discounts on certain condos
Updates & Insights
Daily updates are crucial for every online business to track their success and give them a scope to improve. This is an integral part of developing any website for your business and real estate websites are not an exception in this matter.
The website with improved designs, updates, and daily insights has its benefits-
- Generates more leads
- Increases sales and revenue inflow
- Enhances overall accessibility and usability of the website
- Makes the web design more consistent and seamless
- Improves the search engine rankings and looks into the SEO aspect of the web design
- Makes the content of your website more engaging
To conclude,
Property management on the digital platform can be quite a task at hand. Purchasing residential and commercial real estate digitally needs a higher-quality website design that includes interactive features, and higher functionalities, and bodes well for your target audience.
Just keep in mind that a real estate web design that is user-friendly, mobile responsive, has search filters, and provides daily insights and analytics about your users, will help you establish your real estate business. It will help you make your business more accessible to your clients.