Factors to look while Developing A Real Estate Website

Although more and more real estate digital platforms are being launched as mobile apps, having a web platform is still vital. More than 90 percent of real estate firms have web portals according to the NAR (National Association of Realtors).

Buying and selling real-estate are big decisions. So, usually, people don’t make decisions by swiping right on their mobile phones. They sit down and thoroughly search on their laptops. The statistics collected by the NAR shows that over 95 percent of homebuyers are searching online. Unsurprisingly, this method makes it very much organized and efficient to check out all the features and compare them.

A website adds on to the credibility of a real estate business. It is the first impression to any potential clients of a real estate agency. As a potential buyer, you are more viable to check out the web portal of a real-estate firm than downloading the app unless and until you already know and trust the agency. So, for making a splendid first impression, a real estate web platform should work flawlessly and be handy for agents, brokers, home sellers, and home buyers.

Core features of any real estate web platform

Developing a real estate web platform is not the same as creating a website with a ton of available houses. The platform should offer more than that to attract customers again. We analyzed the five popular real estate platforms currently in the US and the UK and here’s what we found:

The platforms are Trulia, Rightmove, Zillow, and Zoopla. Interestingly, all of them have almost the same core features:

Registration Panel

Generally, real estate platforms offer registration via email and/or social login (like Fb, Twitter, or Google). You can provide both choices to let users choose while also creating separate login dashboards for real estate agents and potential customers to personalize what they see.

Custom search filters

Search filters mean ease of searching houses with a sense of clarity. Think about how you could make the search for the perfect house as comfortable as possible. Think about both realtors and buyers. We looked through real estate platforms Zillow, Trulia, and Rightmove to gain insights on essential filters. They have included:

• Property listing type (buying, selling, renting)

• Location Filter

• Price Filter

• Bedroom Filters

• Type of Home

To make your platform very easy to use, find out the main problems with real estate services in your local area. Based on that, consider adding other useful filters as well.

Listings along with photos/videos

We think it goes without saying that photos and videos are a crucial part of a digital real estate platform. It makes the process for customers a lot simpler, if you like the photos, you are likely to be interested in buying.

Map Integration

Imagine a real estate platform with integrated Map APIs to let customers view the houses through a map provider such as Google Maps. They could even lookup the Google Street View feature to actually look at how the property is via a satellite view.

Favorites/Marked Houses

A very time saving and vital feature for both real estate agents and prospective buyers. With this feature, they can add the houses they want to sell (agents) or interested in buying(customers). It saves them the process of having to search for the property again and again while visiting your web platform.

Payment Integration

An integrated payment system is a key functionality of a real estate platform. Consider services like PayPal, Braintree, or Stripe. You could even think of the payment platform your local residents use in general and add it instead. Having this will take responsibility for the data security of the credit cards during payments to boost trust with consumers.

Chat section

A real estate business is mostly about communication, so, integrating a chat or messenger section is very logical. This should be simple and convenient for everybody to use. Real-time messaging is a good choice to enable instant communication between buyers and sellers.

Crucial points to focus on real estate web development

There shall be a lot of things to tackle during real estate web development. We created a list of the most common issues that real estate platforms face to make your development process hassle-free.

Website speed

The longer a page takes to load, the less time is actually spent on the page. A website’s speed impacts user engagement traffic and user engagement.

Optimizing Images

One of the major factors in speeding up your website is through optimizing images. Due to the significance of photos in choosing houses, do not decrease the resolution of images, rather, compress images so the quality is preserved.

Adding the IDX listings feed

The IDX, also known as Internet Data Exchange is essential for any real estate platform. Almost 95 percent of real estate websites use IDX listings. It lets you pull all the listing data from a Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and integrate the listings into your website.

Customer Relationship Management System

Being equipped with a solid real estate CRM is a key factor in the success of your business, as this industry is all about communications and relationships.

A Responsive Website

Your real estate website should be a responsive mobile website because the number of home buyers using smartphones for property searching is constantly increasing.

Wrapping Up

We hope this article helped you in understanding a lot more about real estate web development. If you are looking at a website design firm, we have immense experience in helping out businesses in the real estate sector to digitize their services, globally.

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