Whether you’re just starting your real estate career, or you’re a seasoned Realtor, every agent should have a professional website. These days, having a professional agent website is as expected as having a business card, phone number, and email address. It’s just one of those things you should create when first start your real estate career…and it’s always there 24/7, as a reliable resource for existing & prospective clients learn more about you and your business.
When we designed our real estate agent website templates for Propopen, we sought to really understand what home buyers and sellers are looking for when looking to work with a local real estate agent. By understanding what potential real estate clients want, we believe we’ve created the perfect real estate agent websites. Whether you decide to use our Propopen agent website platform or opt to hire a developer and build your own agent website, we’re happy to share the critical website elements we believe will help agents attract more customers with their realtor websites.
Our design philosophy was to keep the information simple so that it doesn’t confuse or overwhelm your potential clients, but with enough information that gives potential clients the confidence to engage with you.
Core Elements of The Perfect Real Estate Agent Website
Agent Contact Information
Just like your business card, make sure your contact info is available, clear, and easy to find. You may have read online articles about not publically publishing your email address or phone number, but in our industry, it’s critical that potential clients have a way to contact you directly with any of those 2 channels. Don’t make the customer hunt too much for this info, and don’t have several options for different email addresses and phone numbers for different purposes. We recommend having one email and one phone number…and not overcomplicate it for the customer, or else they’re just a click away from finding another real estate agent to work with.
Contact forms are good too, especially if your contact form is logging every new contact into a CRM that helps you manage all your customer contacts and builds your leads list.
Local Expertise
Potential clients want to know that you’re an expert in their local neighborhood. Whether they’re a potential seller or buyer, they want reassurance that you have deep knowledge of their local real estate market and trends. This should be stated somewhere prominently on your agent website, and we recommend even putting it up in the main header section. Then it should even be reiterated in your bio or about section, to reinforce your expertise in a local area.
How large the relative neighborhood you serve is totally on a case-by-case basis. If you serve an entire large city and have deep knowledge of all the niche neighborhoods within that city, we might recommend stating the overarching city/locale in the header, and list out all the neighborhoods in your bio. Or maybe 90% of your business is serving a group of high rise condos in a downtown waterfront, we’d recommend being very specific in calling out that exact neighborhood in your top header section.
Client Testimonials
By featuring several client testimonials, you’re leveraging this psychological phenomenon called “social proof”. Customers want to see that you’ve successfully helped other customer just like them, achieve their real estate goals. By seeing some social proof from your past customers, you’re giving your potential customer some confidence that you’re reputable and have had some track record of success.
Listings
Whether a potential client is a seller or a buyer, they want to see some listings on your site. For potential sellers, they want to see that you have experience dealing with properties just like theirs. For example, if you’re targeting condo owners, you’ll want to showcase in your current or past portfolio that you deal with a good amount of condo properties. Similarly, for potential buyers, they want to see you have past and current experience with the types of properties they’re looking for.
We see most agents post their current listings somewhere on their website. If featuring your current listings scares you because you have a very limited supply (or no supply) of current listings, then consider showcasing a portfolio of past deals closed. We rarely see agents showcase their portfolio of past sales, but we think potential clients will see this as a positive signal. Showcasing past deals also shows your level of activity as a real estate agent. When you have an ample portfolio of past deals, potential clients can gain confidence in your level of experience and expertise.
Let’s say you’re pretty new to the industry, and you don’t have any current listing or past listings, consider posting some featured listings you think your target clientele might be interested in. By featuring active listings on your website, potential clients can see the types of properties you’re on the lookout for, which just might match the types of listings they’re interested.
Showcasing listings, past or current, can subtly show that you’re an active agent with a healthy flow of business.
Team
So many agent websites we see give off the impression of a 1 person show. Put yourself in the shoes of your potential client. Buying or selling a home will be one of the biggest transactions they will make in their lives. They don’t want to put their real estate goals in the hands of 1 person…they want to know they have a team of experts available to help them achieve their goals.
It helps when you show prospective clients you have a team of professionals working alongside you to help make your client’s dreams come true. This team doesn’t even have to be people you employ. They might be a great mortgage loan agent you work with…or a professional home stager…or a market analyst. You’ll want to show that as a real estate professional, you can call on a team of associates that can help with your client’s unique needs.
Mobile Friendly
More than ever, people are turning to their mobile phones for real estate lookups and searches. If your clients are looking at your sites and listings on their mobile phones, they expect any links you send them to be mobile-friendly. When you create your website outside of Propopen, make sure it’s “mobile-friendly”. Here’s a pretty convenient tool made by Google to test if your site passes their test for mobile-friendly: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. Even Google takes this seriously, cause if they think your site isn’t mobile-friendly, they’ll dock your site for SEO rankings.