Here in this article we will be discussing how to create a real estate website that is easy to manage and relatively quick to complete, with little investment, no coding experience and best of all a website that works for your business needs.
The tools necessary to create your online property business is easily accessible and low cost.
First, we will explain a couple of important points to start with, basic steps and definitions in a beginner friendly manner.
What is a real estate website?
Yes, this question may seem basic to you, but there are many people who lose focus, therefore, they have not just created the portal they want and their business is not going as it should.
To be clear, a real estate website is (or has to be) the first point of contact with your clients. If you do not focus this part properly, it will not do the basic function of a website: to sell.
Property web portals are specifically dedicated to the exhibition of Real Estate for sale or rent and are the ideal tool for a real estate company, real estate or real estate agents, but there is also the possibility of having an online business type: real estate at home.
Property Agent Showcase:
One of our favorite property website projects built on WordPress is a site for an estate agent in Spain. More specifically ThePropertyAgent.es - a property agent in Costa del Sol selling luxury real estate, listing hundreds of new developments along the sunny coastal area of South Spain and featuring golf and beachfront villas and fabulous apartments. This Spanish property agents’ website makes great use of high-quality imagery of the local area and off-plan property developments. The navigation is easy to use and the features and location of each offer is well presented with easy to find information throughout the site that ensures the best user experience.
Characteristics of a quality real estate website?
To create a real estate portal you must present some fundamental characteristics.
Property search engine:
We must help users find what they need. If they have to navigate property by property, they will get bored and leave.
A suitable search engine should consider the following filtering characteristics:
type of property (house, apartment, commercial premises, etc.), type of negotiation (sale, rent, temporary rent), Country, City, Zone, price range, number of rooms, size, number of bathrooms, parking, etc. ..
Property details and features:
Fields that allow reporting details such as the area where the property is located, accompanied by an image gallery of the 3D floor-pan designs or photographs of the different environments of the property.
Virtual property tours (optional):
It is an interactive 180 or 360 degree panoramic type image that allows you to move in the area shown giving the feeling that the person is on the site, with horizontal and vertical movements depending on the level of increase or decrease in the image.
Google maps with satellite view and custom pins
It can also be road, and serves to locate or show the exact indication of the same (due to its latitude and longitude of location). This will help your users to get to the site if they want to visit it.
Mortgage calculator
Let’s be reasonable. 98% of your potential clients will ask for a mortgage to buy the house of their dreams.
If you have a Mortgage Calculator through which it is possible to make preliminary calculations of the Loan Term, Income Qualifier, Loan Fee and / or Amount of the Loan, many will be able to get the idea of whether the option is viable for them.
Management of property agent profiles:
If you are going to have several real estate agents working for your business, they must be able to publish their properties based on the criteria established by the owner of the portal.
This can be used by the employees of the real estate company themselves or by the associated agents who could pay a monthly fee for the publication service of their real estate portfolio.
User profile registration to save favorites
It will be very useful to send value-added services, such as: saving searches for desired properties, creating a customer database that will allow you to later manage your marketing, as well as send by mail, offers to your visitors
As you can see, a clear approach can make your portal “classic”, or a directory of other businesses that allows you to publish on a real estate portal .
How to create a functional real estate agency site
I think everything has already become clear to you and you want to create a real estate agency on the web.
You need a domain and a hosting (and not just any but a fast one)
Your domain name is crucial for both branding and search engine visibility perspective. It’s ideal to use your company name or find a local keyword that serves you well in search engines. It’s always beneficial to get the .com or if it’s not available try your country domain extension.
To host your site you are going to need a server hosting package - the place on the Internet where your website will be available to the world, must be fast, secure and reliable.
We recommend SiteGround.
Why SiteGround?:
- It is a fast and very well optimized hosting for WordPress
- It has excellent technical support, 24 hours and 365 days a year, chat and email
- outstanding security - the servers are frequently updated and well configured (backups included in every package)
- Provides free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates (many hosts charge extra for SSL)
- Reasonable price (especially if you purchase long term)
Any serious real estate business deserves a high performance host.
Installing WordPress
Once contracted a Hosting service you must install WordPress.
I’m not going to get too entangled with this point, since the best hosting have an application installer called Softcatulous (it may have another name), which with a couple of clicks you have WordPress.
And if you already have your domain, hosting and WordPress…next step is to choose the best WordPress templates to create your real estate portal.
With a solid premium real estate WP theme, you can build your real estate site with WordPress, quickly and with a lot of possibilities.
Best WordPress theme to create a property agent site
Our pick is Real Homes. Real Homes is a premium WordPress theme for real estate. Flexible and innovative, Real Homes requires no prior coding knowledge, making it easy to create elegant and easy-to-use websites. With this theme the administrator can manage all properties and users (agents) in the backend, use options to allow users to submit their properties for free or for a pre-configured packet-based fee.
In Summary
Once you have installed your perfect WordPress template, all you have to do is upload your logo, configure basic settings and start uploading your properties.
Whether you want to create a real estate portal for professionals, a real estate portal for investors or a real estate portal for real estate agents, you can do so with the above mentioned WordPress theme.
Installing a template is extremely easy and the configuration will not take you long, so with a little hard work, in a few days you will have a very professional looking real estate portal which has a lot of useful functionality.
Now it’s time to start building SEO friendly content, create a social presence and promote yourself online and hopefully you can watch the qualified property leads flowing in to your inbox shortly.
That information is really good. Because some time developer feel difficulty for that to make perfect WordPress website.
Totally agree, RealHomes is an excellent theme, I sued it myself for a project and was completely satisfied with the features and the author’s support.