3 Steps to Creating Impactful Real Estate Websites
Effective real estate websites market your firm’s hardworking agents and your current property listings by showcasing their best attributes. Providing websites for each agent and property you represent can help you reach new customers who are looking for exactly what they have to offer.
Every agent on your team should have a personal website that advertises their services and highlights their unique expertise. And each property listing should also have a dedicated site that fully captures its beauty, with stunning imagery and video.
This strategy may sound resource-intensive, but it doesn’t have to be with a website provider designed to help you launch sites at scale. Squarespace Enterprise empowers your team to quickly build best-in-class websites for listings and agents that help them stand out from the competition. It also allows you to provide agents ownership over their own online marketing presence while giving you convenient visibility for tracking and approval.
To help you expand your reach and grow your business, here are some best practices for building real estate websites that spotlight agents and showcase stunning listings.
Use strong copy, stunning imagery, and engaging video
When a customer visits a real estate agent's website, they should get a feel for working with that agent both professionally and personally. Including bios, listing relevant certifications and achievements, connecting their social media accounts, and uploading flattering headshots are all best practices for agents. And once they’re done breaking the ice, they should prominently include their contact information so that visitors can’t miss it.
Since each agent has an entire website to work with, they can create different sections to break up information and allow prospective clients to explore what they’re interested in. Personal information can live on one tab, property listings on another, and client testimonials from recent sales on another.
Learn how Squarespace helps Ylopo build customized real estate websites at scale.
When you’re building a real estate listing website, try to transport clients to that property with visuals. You can publish large images and image galleries. You can customize site styles to bring out the best in each listing. When it comes to design, try to keep things simple and let the property speak for itself—just like it would during an in-person tour.
Add a page for basic listing information, another highlighting neighborhood hotspots, and another dedicated to key visuals, like floorplans and virtual property tours. Your team can even use the Marketing Kit within the Squarespace iOS app to quickly create virtual property tour videos. Most importantly, ensure each listing website has a contact page that helps customers reach the agent representing the listing.
See how Vanguard Properties sells real estate with Squarespace Enterprise.
Get the tools to build best-in-class websites
Building secondary websites for agents and listings is a great way to increase your firm’s marketing reach. But in order to stay competitive, your team needs the means to build those websites quickly and cost-effectively. You need the proper tools.
Enterprise templates are a great time saver and a powerful way to scale your real estate website content. Enterprise templates are templates that only your organization has access to, and you can customize them with branded elements and approved imagery. These plug-and-play templates streamline the design process, helping your team build beautiful, on-brand websites that meet your in-house standards. Simply create a template with your firm’s desired appearance, and share it with your agents to modify with their own content.
You can also streamline the website-building process by duplicating existing content. If you already have one stellar website, there’s no need to rebuild it from scratch; simply duplicate it as a framework for additional listing or agent websites. With Squarespace’s intuitive Fluid Engine, your team can flexibly transform those websites. The drag-and-drop editor expedites the website-production process, so they can build compelling websites without any coding or design experience.
As your team makes changes to existing website content, encourage them to create draft versions of webpages to ensure nothing is published without required approvals. These page drafts are password-protected, so only viewers with the right passwords and links can access them.
Your dashboard will also keep your organization’s websites in one place, so you can get a bird’s-eye view of everything your team is building. From your dashboard, you can check in on different websites and track your team’s progress using tagging and filtering. And when a website is ready to go live, you can activate it straight from your dashboard.
Ensure potential customers can find your real estate websites
If customers are actively searching for agents and listings like yours, you’ll want your websites to rank as close to the top as possible. Investing in SEO (search engine optimization) is imperative.
Squarespace comes with a number of features that optimize your web presence. The platform automatically generates sitemaps, provides free SSL certificates, and more. With Squarespace, your team can readily tackle additional SEO best practices, such as writing clear page titles and adding descriptive alt text to images. Give your team a basic SEO checklist to work from every time they build a webpage, and hone your SEO strategy using Squarespace’s built-in SEO tools.
If you want to further strengthen your SEO strategy, consult with an expert. As a Squarespace Enterprise customer, you can schedule a consultation with an in-house SEO expert. They can help you devise a design and content strategy that maximizes the reach of your websites.
Much of what dictates success in creating real estate websites is, ultimately, your website platform. To make an impact with any real estate website, you need beautiful imagery and compelling copy. It’s much easier to launch new sites and pages with the tools that lower the effort required from your team and optimize your search rankings. With the proper choice, your real estate brand can readily and effectively showcase the teams and properties that clients are looking for.