To prove it, we’ll walk you through the basics of IDX real estate websites and how to build your own. We’ll cover terminology, strategy, themes, IDX plugins, and step-by-step instructions to build your own IDX real estate website in just a few hours. Important note: This guide covers how to build an IDX website using WordPress. If you’d rather use a real estate website builder like Real Geeks, check out our guide here: The 6 Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2022.

What Is IDX?

IDX, short for Internet Data Exchange, is the technology that allows Realtors and brokerages to display updated real estate listings from their MLS on their websites. 

Here’s how it works: Multiple times per day, third-party IDX providers take the raw listing data from your MLS and send it to the hundreds (or thousands) of real estate websites that have permission to display MLS listings. Whenever a listing is updated in your MLS, it is automatically updated on all the websites that display MLS listings through IDX. In 2022, most IDX listings are updated every 15 minutes. 

What’s an IDX Website?

An IDX website is any website that receives an automatically updated feed of listings from your MLS through a third-party IDX provider. That means that an IDX website will have listings just as fresh as your MLS’ website.

Potential buyers will have a very similar experience browsing an IDX website for new listings as your MLS’ site since the listings are updated with data from the MLS automatically. 

While many IDX real estate websites are focused solely on listings, others are full agent or brokerage websites with landing pages, About Us pages, agent profiles, mortgage calculators, a blog, videos, and everything else an agent, team, or brokerage might have on their website.

Do I Need to Use WordPress to Build an IDX Real Estate Website?

Absolutely not. There are many ways to build an IDX website, including coding it yourself or using another content management system (CMS) like Joomla or Drupal. Some third-party IDX providers can even send listings to Squarespace sites.

That said, WordPress is far and away the most popular CMS system on the market and has the most tutorials, support, and updates. This is why we strongly recommend that agents and brokerages use WordPress for their IDX website. Of course, if any of this starts to give you a headache or you just want help from the pros, Placester will build a full IDX real estate websitefor you starting at just $64 per month.

I give up, take me to Placester

How to Build an IDX Website in an Afternoon

Now that you know the basics, let’s go through the best way to build an IDX real estate website with WordPress.

Step 1: The Planning Phase

The most important (and most often avoided) stage in building a website is sitting down and figuring out exactly what you want from your IDX real estate website. While this might seem obvious at first (leads!!), you’d be surprised at what you can forget until you’re halfway through building your site. This will also make it easier to pick the right WordPress theme (more on this later) and IDX provider (ditto).

So take 10 minutes and write out what you want from your IDX real estate website. Think of features you’ve seen on other sites, like map search, video backgrounds, blogs, sliders, lead capture, home valuation pages, pop-ups, and the general aesthetic you want for your site. What would you like to offer your site visitors that will turn them into leads?

You don’t need to go crazy here; you can (and should) update and upgrade your site many times over the next few years. So don’t feel pressured to include absolutely everything now. Just take a few minutes to outline the big stuff before you commit to anything.

Study the Websites of the REAL Trends 500 & Take Notes

Before you dig in and invest the time and effort to build your own IDX website, take some time to research what it is you like about other real estate websites. To help speed up the process, we put together this comprehensive overview and ranking of the websites of the top 25 agents by volume for 2022 according to RealTrends (below).

What is it specifically about a top producer’s website that you like? Is it the overall look and feel, or something else? Does the site look great because they already had great branding they just plugged into a stock site, or is the overall design unique?

Navigation is another crucial element to consider. As you might imagine, most top producers’ websites have minimal navigation that leads visitors on a customer journey, so notice where and why you click on sites you like.

Step 2: Choose a Web Hosting Company & Domain Name

Before you even think about building a page for your website, you need to set up an account with a web hosting company. A web hosting company will provide a home for your website online and ensure it always loads quickly and reliably from any device.

For WordPress IDX websites, Bluehost is pretty hard to beat. Here’s why. First, at less than $3 per month, it is incredibly affordable, and second, it has a tool that lets you install WordPress with the click of a button. You also get five email addresses for you, your team, and maybe a few inside sales agents (ISAs), all for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month.

You can set up a quick account at Bluehost here and join us again later. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Choose & Purchase Your Domain Name(s)

Luckily, choosing a great domain name is pretty straightforward. Just make sure it’s memorable, short enough to yell across a crowded restaurant, and ideally matches your name or personal brand. Unless you think you’re going to spend your entire career at your current brokerage, it’s probably best to avoid including your brokerage name in your domain name. After all, you’re an independent contractor, right? Be independent.

Generally speaking, .com is better than the alternatives, but if you have the perfect name, just can’t get the .com domain name you want, and no one else in your farm area is using it, then, by all means, go for another top-level domain (TLD) like .net, .bix, and so on.

Step 3: Install WordPress on Your New Domain

Now that you have a fresh new domain and web host, the next step to building an IDX website is to install WordPress. Since WordPress is open-source, it’s free to install and free to use. Not bad, right?

To install WordPress on your Bluehost account, log in to your Bluehost cPanel, click on the Website section, and then click on “Install WordPress.”

Next, click on “Marketplace” and find WordPress.

Then click on Install.

Next, you’ll be prompted to choose the domain name on which you want to install WordPress. Choose the domain name you purchased in the previous step, read through and accept the license and service agreements, and finally, click on “install now” to install WordPress on your site.

Congratulations! You now have your very own WordPress website ready to rock! Pretty easy, right?

Next, follow the prompts to connect to WordPress.com and create an account. Now that you have WordPress up and running on your web host, let’s move on to making your website look great and adding IDX so you can get MLS listings on your site.

Step 4: Choose Your Third-party IDX Plugin for WordPress

Before you get started building your WordPress IDX site, you’re going to want to pick out your IDX plugin—or at least research some good options. Luckily, with only a few IDX providers to choose from, your decision will come down to price, features, and compatibility.

What Is an IDX Plugin?

In WordPress, plugins are small add-ons that you can use to change how your WordPress theme looks or behaves. An IDX plugin translates the raw listing data from your MLS into code that WordPress can turn into attractive listings for your website. IDX plugins can also provide features like listings search, map search, widgets, lead capture, and more.

How Much Do IDX Plugins Cost?

IDX is a pretty inexpensive plugin for your IDX website. Generally speaking, you’ll pay between $50 and $99 per month for an IDX plugin. Most IDX providers offer much more than just a simple connection between your MLS and your website, so the cost is well worth it.

How to Choose the Right IDX Plugin

Since there is a lot of competition in this space, and only a handful of providers, take a quick run through the features each provides and then sign up for the one that suits your needs best. Here are the four most popular IDX providers for WordPress, along with some information to help you choose the best one for your needs:

IDX Provider Comparison Table 2022

Step 5: Choose & Install an IDX-ready WordPress Theme

Now it’s time to pick a WordPress theme that looks great, provides the features you want, and can work with your chosen IDX provider.

What Is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress theme is a template or collection of templates that control how your WordPress site looks and acts for site visitors. If you’ve ever used a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Google Slides template, a WordPress theme is pretty similar except that it’s far more powerful. Themes also generally include many different templates for everything from pages, headers, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and even lead capture and other advanced features.

How Much Do Real Estate WordPress Themes Cost?

Unlike your IDX provider, you don’t have to pay a monthly fee for your WordPress theme. Instead, you can just buy them. Good themes can run from $20 to $99. However, since this is a one-time fee, I would highly recommend not skimping here to save a few bucks. An extra $20 or $30 spent on your theme can make a massive difference in the quality and user experience of your website.

How to Choose the Perfect WordPress Theme for Your IDX Real Estate Website

Remember that back-of-the-napkin list of features and bells and whistles you want for your website? Well, here’s where it comes into play. Use the list of features you want to help you narrow down your choices when picking out a WordPress theme.

Here are a few critical (and not so critical) criteria to keep in mind when choosing a WordPress theme for your IDX real estate website:

1. Is It Compatible With Your IDX Plugins?

While most modern themes will be compatible with your chosen IDX plugin, it’s always a good idea to check.

2. Does It Offer Enough Customization Options?

One of the coolest features WordPress themes offer is templates with multiple page layouts and styles for different parts of your website. For example, a template might have four or more unique page designs just for the homepage, three for the About Us page, and three for the Contact Us page.

3. Which Plugins Come With the Theme?

While the vast majority of the plugins you’ll end up using for your IDX real estate website will be free apart from your IDX provider, it’s nice to get a bunch of useful plugins along with your theme. Visual Composer, Yoast, Mailchimp, Contact Form 7, and Slider Revolution are standard plugins commonly bundled with real estate WordPress themes.

4. Is It a Real Estate-specific Theme?

This one is less important than many people think. While real estate themes will commonly have agent pages, listings pages, and ways to set up listings, those listings will need to be manually added and will more than likely NOT work with your IDX provider. So don’t choose a theme based on whether or not it’s an actual estate-specific theme or not.

5. Check Out Reviews & Updates on Envato

Generally speaking, a great theme will have a good number of great reviews on the Envato market. It should also have a log of recent updates to ensure your site is always up to date.

Where to Buy Real Estate WordPress Themes

Here are a few places to check out and buy real estate WordPress themes.

Envato Market

Elegant Themes

Template Monster

Once you’ve picked out a theme you like with the features you want that support your IDX plugin, buy it, and then download the ZIP files for the theme.

Step 6: Install Your New WordPress Theme

Next, you need to install your new theme into your WordPress account. Here’s how to install it:

First, log in to WordPress, and then click on “Appearance” in the left column of your WordPress dashboard. Then click on “Themes.”

You should see the default WordPress 2022 theme already installed here. This is what The Close’s “Themes” page on WordPress looks like. Note that since we have multiple themes installed, there are a few other themes here besides the default WordPress theme:

To install your new theme, click on the “add new theme” button on the lower right side of the page. Then, navigate to the WordPress theme ZIP file you downloaded and install it.

Step 7: Install Your WordPress Plugins & IDX Plugin

Next, head back over to your WordPress dashboard and click on “plugins” on the left side menu, then click on “installed plugins” to check which plugins may have been installed with your new theme.

Make a note of which plugins are already installed, then click on “add new.”

Here you can search for and install any plugins that you want for your site.

A word of caution here: Since thousands of plugins are available for WordPress, it can be very tempting to load up on plugins. After all, more is better, right? Well, for WordPress, the opposite can be true. More plugins can = more problems.

Don’t worry; you’ll have plenty of time to find and experiment with plugins later on. This is half the fun of using WordPress. For now, here is a quick list of plugins you might want to consider that are useful for IDX real estate websites.

Yoast SEO (SEO Checker for Blog Articles)

With over 5 million downloads, Yoast is the most popular (and arguably the best) search engine optimization (SEO) checker for WordPress. Yoast reads the blog posts you’ve created and checks them for SEO best practices like keyword count, keyword usage, readability, and more. There is a limited free version of the plugin and a premium version for $89. Unless you’re very serious about SEO, you should be OK with the free version.

Download the Yoast Plugin (free)

Akismet (Anti-spam Plugin)

Akismet is a great anti-spam plugin for WordPress that protects against brute force attacks, and more importantly, spam in your blog’s comment section.

Download Akismet Anti-Spam (Free)

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a simple and easy-to-use contact form plugin that lets you create and edit contact forms on your website. You can use it to create lead capture forms for landing pages or general contact forms on your website.

Download Contact Form 7 (Free)

Mailchimp (or Whatever Email Marketing Service You Use)

Email marketing plugins allow you to use certain features of your email marketing software on your website. For example, you can include an email sign-up form right on your website to enroll site visitors to receive your drip campaigns.

Download Mailchimp (free-$17 per month)

Your IDX Plugin

Depending on what IDX provider you chose, you may or may not be able to install the plugin via the WordPress plugin manager simply. You will more than likely already have instructions from your IDX provider, but if you don’t, give them a call.

Step 8: Start Customizing Your WordPress Theme

OK, now you have a pretty-looking website set up, but it’s filled with dummy copy and stock imagery. The next step to building out your IDX website is to customize how your theme looks and behaves.

Unfortunately, most of these customization options are going to vary depending on what theme you chose. Here are a few basic things you can change with any advanced WordPress theme to get you started.

Your Logo

Once you add your logo to your WordPress theme, it automatically shows up on multiple pages on your website, and at the top of any new page you create.

Your Site Navigation

Like your logo, your site navigation will show up on every page you want it to and will also show up automatically on every new page you create. Even better, since you edit your site navigation in a single place, the changes you make there also get changed on every page on your site.

Your Footer

The footer area of your site will generally have social media contact information, phone numbers, and a sitemap, which is a list of all the pages available on your site. Like your navigation, your footer is universal and will show up on every page and any new pages you create.

Widgets

Widgets are small pieces of code that let you drag-and-drop site features like search bars, listings by price range, email capture, navigation menus, recent articles, and many more onto any page of your website.

Installing Demos

Most WordPress themes will come with multiple layouts called demos. Demos are fully finished design and layout variations available for your theme. Each one will make your website look very different. For example, the popular Houzez theme has 16 various demos with 16 unique layouts for your site.

Here’s a quick rundown of how to install a demo to change how your site looks. Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on “Tools,” then “Import.” Next, click on “WordPress” and navigate to the XML of the demo you want to install.

Change Hero Images, Slider Images, Logo & Contact Information

Once you’ve chosen a demo to install, you can start customizing it. You can change all of these site elements by going to your WordPress dashboard and clicking on “Appearance,” then “Customize.” Some themes might have different ways to customize site elements, so be sure to read the instructions that came with the theme.

Step 9: Start Building the Main Pages of Your Website

Now we’re getting somewhere. At this point, you should have a site that looks like you want it to and has your logo, images, and contact information ready to go. Next, we’ll start building the pages of your site.

Before we start, you need to understand the difference between pages and posts. Pages are the main pages of your site that don’t change very often. Things like about us, contact us, for sale, for rent, blog, and so on could be pages on your site.

On the blog page, you will have posts. Posts are the individual articles that are on your blog. For the most part, once you have your pages built, you shouldn’t have to change them very often. You should be adding new blog posts as often as you can. WordPress treats pages and posts differently, and you can set different navigation, sidebars, and other features for each.

Pages Every Real Estate IDX Website Should Have

Step 10: Write Copy for Your Website

Step 11: Set up Your Blog & Create a Content Runway

Step 12: Promote Your New IDX Real Estate Website

How to Use Your New IDX Real Estate Website to Get & Convert More Leads

Your website is the most powerful tool in your arsenal to both attract and convert leads. Even if you promote it all over your social media profiles, that’s still not going to be enough to get a decent flow of traffic to your new site.

In reality, you’re going to have to work hard to get people to visit your site and ideally leave you their contact information or reach out and call you. While we could write a book on all the ways to drive traffic to your site, just keep in mind that you now have a miniature Zillow with all the listings in your farm area. This is something that most people want to visit, so you’re really starting on second base.

Advertise New Listings on Facebook

Once you have your website with landing pages, it opens tons of new possibilities to advertise on Facebook. For example, you might advertise new or underpriced listings on Facebook and then send them to your search page or a landing page with your lead capture form on it.

Advertise Free Home Valuations on Facebook or Google

The best way to get seller leads on your own is to advertise free home valuations on Facebook or Google. You can then send the leads to your landing page with your lead capture form or sign up with a free automated home valuation service like Home Value Leads.

Advertise Free First-time Homebuyer E-books on Social Media

First-time homebuyers, especially millennials, are always looking for great educational content to help them navigate the homebuying process. To generate buyer leads, you can write an educational e-book or private blog post and then advertise it on social media. When buyers come to your page, they will be prompted to enter their contact information to download the content.

Over to You

What did you think of our guide on IDX real estate websites? Naturally, we had to leave a ton of information out—otherwise, this would have been longer than “War and Peace.” What are the topics that we missed that you think we need more coverage of? Let us know in the comments.

The post How to Build an IDX Real Estate Website in an Afternoon (2022) appeared first on The Close.

In this article, we offer a host of great tools to help you write a new bio, including our exclusive, mad-libs-style bio generator, three free real estate bio templates, nine bio examples that we love, plus a list of industry buzzwords to help spice up your writing. Use our exclusive real estate bio generator as a starting point.

Real Estate Bio Templates

Our three free real estate bio templates were designed exclusively for our readers. Download these templates or copy them to your clipboard to make them your own.

New Real Estate Agent Bio Template

This template is perfect for new real estate agents without a lot of experience to lean on. Focus on your community ties, your excitement, and your enthusiasm, and show your potential clients who you are.

copy to clipboard

[Real estate agent name] has been an active member of his/her real community for [years of experience] now, and is so excited to be turning that community focus toward real estate.

With a passion for service in the [your community name] area, [real estate agent name] is ready to help with your homebuying and selling needs. As a proud member of the [brokerage name] family, [real estate agent name] carries the values of hard work, integrity, and outstanding client service into everything he/she does.

When [real estate agent name] isn’t making homeownership dreams come true for his/her clients, he/she enjoys spending time [leisure activity 1] and [leisure activity 2]. [Real estate agent name] lives in [locality of residence] with [family members].

Successful Real Estate Agent Bio Template

Your bio isn’t written in stone; you should revisit it at least once a year to see what sort of tweaks you can make to sharpen your message. Here’s a real estate bio template perfect for those of you who are coming off a very successful year and want to further that momentum.

copy to clipboard

[Your locality] and [your broader regional locality] are great places to live and work, which is why [real estate agent name] chose to call it home. With roots in [hometown], [real estate agent name] came to [your locality] in [date you arrived]. Real estate is a passion for [real estate agent name], and with his/her background in [former career or education], it is easy to see why more than [clients serviced last year] families in [year] called [real estate agent name] for help buying and selling.

[Real estate agent name] has been a part of the [brokerage name] family for [amount of time with the brokerage] years, but he/she isn’t just passionate about helping families find their next home. [Real estate agent name] has served on his/her local [charity organization] and loves being a part of other [your locality] community events.

A passionate [hobby], when [real estate agent name] isn’t in the office or volunteering, you’ll often find him/her at [location where the hobby takes place], enjoying time with his/her friends and [family members].

Long-form Real Estate Agent Bio Template

Sometimes you’ve got a little more room to write, but that extra space can be intimidating. Here’s a good bio template for times when you have room to really express yourself.

copy to clipboard

[Real estate agent name], of [brokerage name], based in [your locality], is a [years in the business] veteran of the real estate industry and has represented clients all over [larger regional locality] in over [number of transactions] real estate transactions. [Real estate agent name] has built a solid foundation of clients in this community through her/his professionalism, attention to detail, and commitment to always put his/her client’s needs first.

He/She studied [academic focus] at [school name], and afterward began work in [previous industry or “real estate”]. Passionate about [a particular aspect of real estate], [real estate agent name] has continued to leverage his/her know-how and experience to exceed his/her client’s expectations.

Active in the community, [real estate agent name] is a proud part of the [nonprofit organization]’s effort to [community initiative]. [Quote from real estate agent about their nonprofit community work.]

In his/her free time, [real estate agent name] is an avid [hobby] and [another hobby]. Spending time in the [location one of the hobbies takes place] together with his/her friends and [family unit] as well as his/her [pet name and type] is never something [real estate agent name] takes for granted. [Quote from real estate agent about how lucky they are to have the chance to do their hobby in this place.]

Download Your Free Real Estate Agent Bio Templates

9 Real Estate Bios We Love

Before you dive headfirst into writing (or rewriting) your bio, take a look at these examples of real estate bios from rock star agents and brokers from around the country. Find ways to incorporate their savvy strategies into your new bio.

Connecting on a Personal Level

1. Gentry Todd Radwanski, Realtor, The Boulevard Company

I’ve sold $40+ million in property the last three years, received sales awards, and grown my business’ metrics each year, but the number I focus on every day is the exact number of clients who have homes and investments currently in Charleston. My approach is deeply analytical and I work tirelessly to ensure my clients are up to date on their home and/or their investment.

Prior to real estate, I spent the first part of my career (and most of my life) in my family’s business, commercial construction, primarily building schools, hotels, and municipal buildings in eastern PA. Having been part of a building family, home flips and investment property came naturally. My career in general brokerage began by helping a few friends with their investment properties and snowballed from there into helping many more on my way to becoming a top-producing agent in Charleston.

Like everyone who falls hard for Charleston, I am a total foodie, outdoors enthusiast, and history nut. When I’m not hustling houses, you’ll find me around Charleston kayaking, biking, jogging, boating, exploring our nation’s best food scene, or at one of our dog parks or beach side. It’s easy to sell something when you have an absurd passion for it. It’s why many of my out-of-town clients get an itinerary to explore as many parks, restaurants, beaches, and historic sites as they do neighborhoods and houses. Along with my sidekick (my dog Brutus), I spend most of my free time reinforcing all the reasons Charleston is home!

What We Love About Gentry’s Bio

Gentry does a great job of talking about how his background prepared him for success in real estate. His real estate agent bio is laid-back but professional. He shares the activities that he enjoys and reasons why he loves his community. He also offers insight into what it’s like to work with him and what clients can expect.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Buyers and sellers want to work with a person, not a robot. Make sure your bio reflects who you are, your interests, and something unique about you. More prospects will turn into new clients if they can connect the dots between what’s important to them and what’s important to you.

Demonstrating Leadership

2. Brendan Bartic, CEO of the Bartic Group, Keller Williams Realty

As a Colorado native and a seasoned real estate professional, I recognize and value the trust my clients place in me, and I strive every day to exceed their expectations.

I have been a leading top producer for over 18 years. My sales consistently rank in the top 1% of all Keller Williams Teams internationally.

Prior to entering real estate, I served my country in the United States Army Infantry with multiple tours in Iraq and Kuwait. These experiences instilled in me the discipline it takes to build the most powerful real estate team in Colorado.

Outside of real estate, I take pride in giving back to the community and serve as a Board Member of Third Way Center, which helps high-risk, disadvantaged youth become successful adults.

What We Love About Brendan’s Bio

Most real estate agents write their bio in the third person, but Brendan takes a more personal approach by writing in the first person. His bio comes across as strong and effective—we can feel Brendan’s leadership qualities from reading his profile.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Leadership is an essential trait for any real estate professional. Your clients depend on you to lead them through one of the most important financial decisions of their lives, so make sure your bio communicates your leadership abilities.

Connecting to the Community

3. Suzi Farajiani, Realtor, Douglas Elliman

Coming from three generations of Realtors, Suzi grew up in a family of real estate developers. She specializes in residential buying and selling with an emphasis on marketing properties as well as consulting for investing purposes.

Suzi’s achievements include working with her family on buying and selling properties, renovating homes with her husband, and collaborating with developers to create new and unique construction projects.

When it comes to Los Angeles real estate, Suzi admires the city’s landscape and how it interacts with its architecture.

Suzi says, “I am certain that Los Angeles has everything that anybody could ever need in a home, and that’s what I love about the city—its abundance in style and neighborhoods.”

When it concerns her clients, Suzi believes in a philosophy of transparency. She says, “I feel creating something of value has to lead first with integrity, which then creates a solid foundation to do great business together.”

During her spare time, Suzi can be found soaking up the sun on the beaches of Malibu where she was raised. Organizations that Suzi has worked closely with include Habitat for Humanity, UNICEF, The Boy & Girls Club, Alzheimer’s Association, Manna Worldwide, and Break the Cycle.

What We Love About Suzy’s Bio

Suzy does a great job of underscoring her knowledge and familiarity with her community and also why she loves living there. Her attention to detail lets local buyers and sellers know that she’s deeply connected to the community that matters to them.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Real estate is a local business. When writing your bio, remember that your audience is made up of residents of your local community. Make sure you’re identifying yourself as both a subject matter expert and an enthusiastic advocate for the place where you live and work.

Showcasing Expertise

4. Shannon McNulty, Realtor, McNulty Levac Realty Group

Shannon McNulty has been passionate about real estate since her earliest years growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Shannon always knew that she wanted to chart a path helping others and found her true calling in real estate serving her clients and guiding them through one of the biggest investments of their lives. Over the past decade, Shannon has been involved in the sales and marketing of $1 billion of real estate in Western Canada and has won awards including the President’s Club Award (representing the Top 1% of all Vancouver Realtors) and the Medallion Club Award. Shannon feels incredibly blessed to work with amazing clients who become her friends and a strong part of her network.

Passionate about real estate investment, Shannon is an active investor in Western Canada’s emerging real estate markets and shares this knowledge and experience to assist and educate aspiring investors with their goals. A long-term resident of the North Shore, Shannon enjoys spending her weekends in the forest with her Sheepadoodle Smudge.

What We Love About Shannon’s Bio

Shannon does a great job of keeping her agent bio local while at the same time trumpeting her accomplishments that span the region. The professional, third-person narrative adds sophistication and success while still sounding approachable.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Experienced and successful realtors can level up their bio by demonstrating proof of their success and positioning themselves as subject matter experts. There’s a fine line between sharing your successful track record and bragging, so tread lightly here, but if you’ve got accomplishments that are worthy of noting, note them.

Leveraging Past Experience

5. Stephanie Weitzner, Realtor, Realty Austin

As a child of real estate investors, Stephanie has been excited about real estate since she was a kid but took the long route when turning her passion into her profession. Stephanie’s interest in advocating for clients initially led her to law school, after which she spent years as a litigator in New York City, working for firms both large and small.

Moving to Austin and finding inspiration in this phenomenal city led Stephanie to realize that she wanted a career that was more connected to her new hometown. When purchasing her first Austin home, she found that she wasn’t ready to let go of the experience. Although she had already taken (and passed!) the Texas Bar Exam, she was hooked on real estate, and there was no turning back.

Stephanie feels fortunate to have discovered, through the peers and mentors who guided her, a unique way of working in real estate that aligns with her personal and professional values; working by referral means that she focuses on her clients and their needs with a long-term perspective, helping clients with real estate issues or questions wherever and whenever they arise. Moreover, she views herself not just as a Realtor but as an adviser, helping clients not only to buy or sell but to strategize toward long-term wealth building with real estate.

When she’s not running around town, you can find Stephanie at home with her husband, Sujan, and their super-cute kiddo, Zoe. Stephanie loves languages (help her practice her French, Spanish, German, or Turkish!) and aspires to someday learn to juggle.

What We Love About Stephanie’s Bio

Stephanie is a relatively new agent, but you don’t even notice because she’s given us so much rich background about her life and how she ended up in real estate. We’re hooked because she has fantastic life experiences, not because she has a certain number of years in the business.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: While we think this bio is a tad long, it offers us reasons to trust this agent with our business. Don’t be afraid to admit that you’re new to real estate, but include all of the ways you’re qualified, dedicated, professional, and whip-smart.

Engaging & Enthusiastic

6. Fernando Ventresca, Realtor, The Jennifer Rosdail Team, Keller Williams

As a long-time San Franciscan, I bring passion and excitement for the city to my approach in finding a home for you. I felt at home in San Francisco the moment I arrived and instantly fell in love with it. You probably fell in love with this place pretty quickly too—if you are like 90% of us and came from somewhere else—and now it’s time to put down some roots and stay a while.

I will help you obtain the San Francisco property you’ve always dreamed of by focusing our strategy on your individual style, needs, and budget. I enjoy keeping up with the latest restaurants, shopping, events, and “only in SF” attractions that make each neighborhood unique, and we will leverage that knowledge, the power of Keller Williams, and the experience of the Jennifer Rosdail Real Estate Sales team to your benefit.

What We Love About Fernando’s Bio

When we read Fernando’s agent bio, it’s his enthusiasm for San Francisco that shines through. If you’re a transplant like he is, you immediately feel a connection. His bio is brief, helpful, and positive—and did you notice you have no idea how many years he’s been a Realtor?

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Maybe you haven’t been in real estate a long time—or any career, for that matter. We all started out somewhere, and it’s OK to focus on your skills, your hunger to prove yourself, your love of your community, and not how many deals you’ve done.

Real Estate Agent Bios That Are Outside the Box

7. The Logan and Bernard Group, Real Estate Team, Compass

Real estate is a powerful thing. Where you live becomes the center of your universe: your “home base” and a place where memories are made. Even an investment property can have a profound effect on your life’s story—when chosen correctly, it becomes long-term financial freedom and a vital part of your well-diversified portfolio.

Anchored by Logan Link, Bernard Link, and Nicole Grinsell, allow the Logan and Bernard Group to guide you through the real estate process. Whether a buyer, a seller, or an investor, we think of our clients as family. Lean on us—we are here to keep the process fluid, successful, and as low-stress as possible.

Thanks to a combined 20 years as real estate professionals in Marin County, we are proud of our reputation for excellent negotiation skills, cutting-edge marketing, and invaluable connections, both locally and globally.

Not quite ready to buy or sell, but curious about neighborhood options, local schools, our techniques, or current real estate “buzz”? Don’t be shy—reach out to us (note: includes link to contact).

Think of the Logan and Bernard Group as your Marin County Concierge. If we don’t know the answer, we will find it.

What We Love About the Logan and Bernard Group’s Bio

This bio is unconventional, but it totally works. We love how it starts with powerful, emotional language; from the first line, you’re hooked and want to keep reading. This group bio takes an intimate, narrative approach that makes the reader feel connected to Logan and Bernard, thus making the conversion from prospect to client easier.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: The real estate bio is written about you, but for your clients. Crafting a narrative (even within your bio) that captivates your audience is a strong strategy. With every sentence of your bio, stop and ask yourself, “Is this serving my reader?”

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8. Aaron Seawood, Broker, Team Carte Blanche, Triplemint

Aaron Seawood has raving fans and an impeccable reputation as an advocate, partner, and confidant. “I’d call Aaron the Rolls Royce of real estate brokers. He’s hands-on with physical help and emotional support, which people so often need when taking the step of selling or buying their home. Hands-on, heart on, wisdom on. We didn’t expect to make a real friend from our broker, but we have. Aaron turns the business of selling real estate into an art” remarks one of his many satisfied clients.

A dominant force in the New York real estate market for well over a decade, Aaron formed Team Carte Blanche on the premise that when good people work together, good things happen. With that mindset, he vetted an all-star team that contributes their unique skill sets to each client, so they feel the impact of many with the singular focus of one.

Keenly aware of the nuances that make for a sophisticated real estate experience, he spares no expense to make that a reality for each client. Whether guiding first-time buyers through the complexities of New York City real estate or advising athletes and celebrities on their property plays across the country, Aaron’s level of commitment to his clients can only be described one way: “All-in.”

Prior to real estate, Aaron was an entertainment executive spawning collaborations with a roster of platinum artists and producers with notable stops at Virgin Records and Queen Latifah’s management company, Flavor Unit. Navigating high-stakes situations honed his skills as a negotiator, problem-solver, and artist advocate, which translated nicely into the rough-and-tumble world of real estate. Aaron has called New York City home for over 25 years, and lives in Brooklyn Heights with his wife, two children, and a rescue puppy, Knox. He loves cycling, photography, and the occasional cigar.

What We Love About Aaron’s Bio

This is another bio that is fairly unconventional, but we love it. While it’s definitely on the long side, we kept reading because Aaron almost leaps off the page with personality and confidence. He shares his fascinating background, and while it’s not all directly real estate-related, it’s pretty awesome and makes us want to know him better.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Consider including a testimonial in your bio. It can speak to who you are, but maybe more importantly, how others see you. Knowing that you’re trusted and respected by other people can go a long way in establishing your credibility.

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9. Katie Clancy, Sales Vice President, The Cape House, William Raveis

When we want the freshest oysters, we don’t go to the fish counter at the grocery store—we go to John, the East Dennis oyster guy. When we want a perfectly tailored suit, we don’t go to the mall—we go to Puritan Clothing in Hyannis. When we want the best chocolate this side of the Alps, we don’t go to the candy store—we go to The Hot Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans. When you want a home on Cape Cod, entrust your dream to me, Katie Clancy and The Cape House team.

What We Love About Katie’s Bio

We couldn’t resist including this short, pithy, very entertaining example, just to show you that there is no one way to do a bio. Katie’s sense of humor, local knowledge, and professional confidence shine through, and she doesn’t even talk about herself until the last sentence. This blurb is followed by a list of her accomplishments, awards, and local engagements, but really, she had us at oysters.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Be yourself and remember that the whole point of a bio is to show who you are. You can do that with a 3,000-word memoir or a brilliantly concise and memorable list of beloved local businesses.

Want to Outsource Your Real Estate Bio Writing?

If writing a real estate bio is high on your to-do list but you can’t find the time, consider hiring a freelancer to do it for you. Fiverr is a resource of professional writers willing and able to put together a killer real estate bio for you—for a price as low as five bucks.

Find a Freelancer on Fiverr

Real Estate Bio Toolkit: 4 Tips to Write a Great Bio

Ready to start writing a compelling real estate agent bio? Before you put pen to paper, review these tips designed to help you craft an engaging bio that will connect with readers and convert leads into clients.

1. Your First Sentence Is Crucial

Inspirational speaker Matthew Ferrara has said that many people will make up their minds about you in the very first sentence of your bio. Don’t use that sentence to meander your way toward your message. Jump right into demonstrating your value and capture your reader’s attention early.

2. Bigger Is Not Better

A longer real estate agent bio does not make you seem more impressive. In fact, it makes it less likely someone will even read it at all. Studies show that 50% of readers won’t read more than a single screen worth of text on their phone. Keep your bio to less than 200 words and make them captivating.

3. Social Media Links Are a MUST

A great bio will make a reader say, “I’d like to learn more.” Include links to your social media to give them that opportunity. However, if you don’t regularly engage with your audience on social media, including social links in your bio can be detrimental. Remember to only link to platforms where you spend time online.

4. Use Your Brokerage’s Clout to Build Your Own

Your brokerage has likely invested a lot of time and money in building its reputation in your community. You can leverage these investments to springboard your professional reputation—building on the good vibes they’ve already established. If their ideals run counter to your own, you’re likely at the wrong brokerage.

Spice Up Your Real Estate Agent Bio With These Buzzwords

Struggling with the perfect description for yourself and what you do? Here are some of our favorite buzzwords and descriptors:

Bringing It All Together

Someone who has chosen to read your bio is clearly interested in you. They want to see if you’re a good fit both personally and professionally and get a sense of what it would be like to work with you. Why not give them what they’re looking for? 

If you’re authentic and let your personality shine through, your real estate agent bio may serve as the very first step toward a new client relationship that could last for years. Please share any questions you may have about writing an effective real estate agent bio in the comments section below!

The post 9 Real Estate Agent Bio Examples We Love (+ Templates & Bio Generator) appeared first on The Close.

We put together this guide to help you get started. We’ve included nine real estate SEO strategies to help your content rank better in Google (and other) search results. We’ll also cover the most frequently asked questions and common SEO mistakes to avoid. Here’s what you’ll learn:

What Is Real Estate SEO?

Real estate SEO is the strategy real estate websites use to improve their ranking on search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Bing. The higher your website ranks on a search engine, the more people will see it and hopefully click on it. This translates into more site visitors, and if your website is optimized for lead capture, more buyer and seller leads in your CRM.

Deep Dive: How Google & Other Search Engines Rank Content in 2022

In 2022, Google uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to decide which websites and pages rank on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). Since Google wants to deliver the best and most relevant results, they continually tweak their AI to make sure the most helpful results rise to the top on the search engine results page.

Of course, publishing content that answers common questions that your target audience is asking on Google is not enough to rank well in 2022. After all, thousands of websites are likely to publish content similar to yours. As a result, Google also considers factors like the expertise of the person writing the content, the quality of the website, how easy the content is to read, among other factors. 

9 Steps to Perfect Real Estate SEO

Deep Dive: How Google & Other Search Engines Rank Content in 2022

Now that you have a better idea of how search engines rank content, let’s dive into the nine steps to perfect real estate SEO.

1. Run an SEO Audit on Your Website

The first step to any SEO project is to audit your current website to see if there are any technical issues that might cause Google to rank your content lower or ignore it entirely. There are a few ways to do an SEO audit for your website. 

The easiest way to do an SEO audit is to hire someone from a site like Fiverr to run the audit for you. After they run the audit, they will send you a report that will go over any issues that might be holding your site back from ranking on search engines. Expect to pay around $50 for a site audit on Fiverr. Some SEO freelancers or companies will do this for free, but they will also try to upsell you to paid services without explaining the actual issues with your website. 

Here is a Fiver freelancer who runs SEO audits for $35 with a Zoom call to talk through issues that need to be fixed:

Visit Fiverr

If you’d rather DIY your SEO audit, you will need to invest in a few free and paid tools to do it. Here is a quick rundown of the tools you will need:

Here are a few issues to fix that an SEO audit might turn up: 

• Meta descriptions
• Image alt text
• Image compression
• Keyword usage
• Heading structure (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
• Duplicate content 
• Broken links 
• Security: HTTP vs HTTPS

While we don’t recommend it, if you want to run your own SEO audits in the future, you can use this in-depth guide from SEMrush to set up and run your audit.

2. Fix Issues Found in Your SEO Audit

After you have your audit, you can then start fixing any issues uncovered in the audit. These might be easy fixes, like deleting duplicate content or fixing broken links, or more complex issues like HTTP vs HTTPS. Fix what you can and hire out for the rest. 

One of the easiest improvements you can make on your website is to make it load faster. This is something anyone can do with Google’s free Page Speed Insight tool. Run the most popular pages of your website through the Google Page Speed Insights tool. If they load slowly, try removing or reducing the size of large images or infographics. You can also try removing WordPress plugins or IDX widgets from pages that load slowly. If all of your pages load slowly, you might need to upgrade your web hosting plan from a shared plan to a VPS or dedicated server. 

VPS (virtual private server) plans will run you around $20 per month and will offer significantly faster landing times than shared hosting. Dedicated hosting plans will run you around $100 per month and will offer significantly faster loading times than VPS plans. If your website gets a lot of traffic, you might want to consider dedicated hosting. If not, VPS hosting should do the trick.

3. Set Up Your Google My Business Account

After you’ve run your SEO audit and fixed any issues that came up, the next step is to claim your Google My Business account. Google My Business is Google’s tool for indexing local businesses for search on Google Maps. This is important in 2022 because Google Maps results are almost always at the top of search results pages (SERP) for searches related to real estate. For example, when I search “real estate agent” from New York City, Google puts a map of nearby real estate brokerages at the top of the SERP:

If you want a chance of showing up here, you need to set up your Google My Business account. You can get started here: https://www.google.com/business/ 

While this won’t guarantee your site shows up at the top of the search results, if you don’t fill out your Google My Business profile, you will never show up!

4. Research Keywords You Want to Rank For

After you’ve completed your audit, fixed SEO issues, and set up your Google My Business profile, the next step is to research the keywords your local audience is searching for. Once you know what your audience is searching for, you can create content to address their questions and concerns. For example, if your audience is searching for “affordable condos in Miami,” you can write an article or create a video explaining how to find affordable condos in Miami. 

Use a Keyword Research Tool Like Ahrefs 

The best way to do keyword research is to use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs. Ahrefs isn’t free but is a worthwhile investment to help plan what content to write for your website. You can also hire a freelancer on a site like Fiverr or Upwork to do basic keyword research for you. Most freelancers will use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs to research keywords. 

Research SERP & ‘People Also Ask’ Results for Your Keywords

Once you have a list of keywords you want to target, research the SERP for each keyword to see what kind of content is ranking for those keywords. Are they articles or videos? How long are the articles? What kinds of websites are ranking for these keywords? What other content are they creating? What keywords do they seem to be targeting? Finally, how can you improve on the content currently ranking on the first page for your keywords?

  Pro Tip

Google’s “People Also Ask” section on SERPs can be a goldmine for content ideas. These are questions that Google’s algorithm thinks are related to the main keyword. Here are the “People also ask” results for the keyword “Condos in Miami”: Each one of these questions would make a great blog post.

To learn more about keyword research, check out our in-depth guide.

5. Create a Content Cluster Strategy

Generally speaking, search engines rank content created by subject matter experts higher than content created by amateurs. For example, when people search for “best cancer treatments,” search engines will display results from top oncologists before your cousin Jeff who thinks crystals and herbs cure cancer. (Sorry, Jeff!) One of the ways that search engines determine your expertise in a subject area is by looking at how much content on the subject you have on your website, and how well organized that content is. 

This is where content clusters come in. Content clusters are groups of articles organized from top-level subjects like “condos in Miami” that then drill down to more specific related topics like “Condos in Brickell” or “How to qualify for a condo in Miami.” 

Pillar Content, Subpillar Content & Cluster Content

Creating content clusters is simple. Start by identifying your most general local keywords. These will be your “pillar pages.” Then organize more specific content related to that pillar page underneath the pillar page. Once you have your cluster mapped out, start writing the content for your pillar pages and planning to write content for your subpillars and cluster content. Once you write your subpillar and cluster content, link to them from your pillar page. 

Here’s what a cluster map might look like for an agent who sells condos in Miami:

Pillar content: Condos in Miami 

Links to: 

Subpillar content: Best neighborhoods to buy condos in Miami, How to get approved for a condo in Miami, Most affordable condos in Miami, Waterfront condos in Miami, etc. 

Links to: 
Cluster content: Condos in Brickell, Condos in Miami Beach, Condos in Coconut Grove, Brickell Neighborhood guide, etc.

6. Create Useful & Compelling Articles, Videos & Infographics

Now that you have a cluster strategy mapped out, the next step is to create the content for your website.

Create Pillar Content First 

Start by creating your pillar content. Your pillar content should address general topics that you will expand on in your cluster content.

For example, a pillar page about condos in Miami should be a high-level overview of buying condos in Miami. Try to think of questions your audience might have about buying a condo in Miami and answer them in your article. Answers that require more detail will be addressed in your cluster content, so a general overview will be fine for your cluster content. What are the general price ranges by neighborhood for condos in Miami? How competitive is the market? What should buyers look out for? What should sellers be aware of?

How Long Should Your Content Be? 

There is no hard and fast rule for how long your content needs to be to rank on Google, but studies show longer content tends to outrank shorter content. Research from HubSpot showed that the best-ranking articles on Google were over 2,000 words. Just do your best to answer the questions you think your audience will have about the topic and remember to address more specific answers in your subpillar and cluster content.

Article vs Video Content 

While articles usually rank better than videos, for some keywords at least, videos will outrank articles. This is why researching SERPs before you start writing content is so important. If a SERP for a keyword you want to rank for has videos ranking at the top of the page, then making a video for that keyword is a no-brainer.

The best approach is to embed a video in an article. For example, after you finish writing your pillar content for “condos in Miami,” record and embed a quick YouTube video summarizing the content.

Use SEO Best Practices as You Write 

Always use SEO best practices for creating content for your website. These include using structured headings like H1, H2, H3, or numbered lists, using keywords in the first paragraph of your articles, writing in simple, direct language, and focusing on answering readers’ questions in the most direct way possible. Getting creative with your writing can be tempting, but for most articles, a bare-bones “just the facts” approach will work better. People are busy! They just want to learn what you have to teach them as quickly as possible.

If you’re using WordPress, a free SEO plugin like Yoast will make following SEO best practices much easier.

7. Work on Getting Backlinks to Your Content 

Another way search engines decide where to rank your content is by the number and quality of other websites that link to your homepage or directly to your blog posts. This is why getting other sites to link to your website is crucial for SEO. 

Link Quality Counts More Than Quantity 

Generally speaking, quality counts for more than quantity when it comes to links to your website. For example, a link from a well-respected site like the New York Times might be worth 100 (or more!) links from smaller websites. It’s not easy, but putting in the work to get high-quality links to your website will have an unbeatable return on investment (ROI) for SEO. 

Links from websites that are related to your pillar content are also more valuable for ranking than more general sites. For example, if you’re writing about condos in Miami, then a link from the Miami Herald might be more valuable than a link from the New York Post. Since you are writing about real estate, a link from Realtor Magazine or NAR would be even more valuable. 

Link-building Strategies 

One of the best ways to get links from high-quality websites in 2022 is to use HARO. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a website where journalists submit questions when they need expert quotes for articles they are working on. Getting quoted as a real estate expert along with a link to your site is actually much easier than you might think. Journalists are almost always on tight deadlines, which means they sometimes scramble at the last minute to get good quotes from experts. 

To get backlinks from HARO, subscribe to their email and pitch journalists when they need quotes from real estate experts. If they accept your pitch, ask them to link to your website. Easy, right? The key is to respond to journalists’ quote requests as soon as they get posted. This will greatly increase your odds of getting your quote accepted. 

To learn more about getting links from HARO and other sources, check out our in-depth guide to strategic PR below.

8. Update Your Best Performing Articles on a Schedule

Since your local real estate market can change from quarter to quarter or even month to month, search engines generally rank up-to-date content higher. So once you have your content written, create an update calendar to make sure that content stays fresh. 

For pillar pages, you should schedule updates at least once per quarter. For subpillar and cluster content, you can get away with updating once or twice per year. When updating your articles, spend a few minutes researching what changed since your last update, and then address those changes in your article. 

9. Regularly Audit Your Website for SEO Issues 

Even if your content is ranking well, you still need to regularly audit your website to look for any issues that might affect your rankings. For example, articles or videos you link to might change their URLs, leaving you with dead links, or your articles might start to load slowly if you install a new plugin. Scheduling yearly or quarterly SEO audits can find these issues before they start to affect your ranking. 

How Much Does SEO Cost?

Like most great lead generation strategies, real estate SEO can be done for free. Writing great content that puts the reader first might take up a lot of your time, but there are no real upfront costs. 

That said, if you are serious about using SEO as a lead generation strategy, investing in some basic tools or hiring freelancers will be a huge help. Here is a quick rundown of some SEO tools and services you might want to consider as your rankings grow: 

DIY SEO Tools 2022: Recommendations & Pricing

Hiring SEO Freelancers 

Since ranking your website on search engines can take years of hard work, you might be tempted to skip the line and just hire a freelancer to do SEO for you. Having hired many SEO freelancers in the past, this is not something we recommend for individual Realtors. Like any good freelancer, good SEO freelancers can be extremely expensive. The best SEO freelancers charge $5,000+ per month! Beware the “affordable” SEO freelancers. Some use dishonest tactics that might help you rank on Google for a week or so, but can also result in your site getting blacklisted from Google’s search results. 

That said, there are many SEO tasks that you can and should outsource to freelancers on a site like Upwork or Fivver. Here are a few tasks that you can safely outsource as the need arises: 

• Keyword research 
• Google My Business profiles
• Article editing 
• Reducing image sizes 
• Submitting your pitches to HARO 
• Basic link-building outreach

Visit Fiverr

How Long Does It Take to See Results?

This is kind of like asking, “How long will it take until I can speak French?” You might see some results right away, while others can take years. There are two basic factors that determine how quickly you will see results from your SEO efforts:

1. How Competitive the Keywords You Are Targeting Are

The first criteria is how competitive the keywords you’re targeting are. For example, if you’re trying to rank for “Beverly Hills Mansions for sale,” your chances of seeing results right away (or at all!) are very, very low. This is because there are many real estate portals like Zillow and well-established real estate brokerages that also want to rank number one for those keywords. Your chances of outranking Zillow or Compass for these keywords is virtually zero. These companies spend millions of dollars to rank their content on search engines.

However, if you’re trying to rank for “best neighborhoods in Elmira New York,” you will see results much faster since you will have much less competition on the SERP.

2. The Quality of Your Content, Website & Backlink Profile

The second criteria that determines how quickly you will see results is the quality of your content, website, and backlink profile. Let’s tackle those one by one: 

• Your content: If your content does not offer useful information related to the topics people are searching for, you might never see results.
• Your website: Even if you have great content, if your website loads slowly, is not optimized for mobile, or uses complicated code, you will have a hard time ranking.
• Your backlink profile: Part of the way Google and other search engines judge the quality of your content is by looking at how many other websites link to it. More high-quality links = better chances of ranking highly. 

Bottom Line: Is SEO Good for Realtors? 

As long as you’re willing to put in the time and effort to audit your website, research keywords, create content clusters, and produce great content, then SEO can be an effective way to generate leads and raise brand awareness with your website.

The post Real Estate SEO: The Ultimate Guide for 2022 (9 Steps to Better Ranking) appeared first on The Close.

80 Viral Real Estate Blog Ideas

1. Home Renovations That Offer the Best ROI for Resale

Example title: 7 Home Renovations That Will Get You an ROI at the Closing Table

Here’s a real estate blog idea that most homeowners thinking of selling will find irresistible. After all, renovating their older home will cost them tons of money, and most homeowners don’t have a clue if they will ever get any of that money back at the closing table.

2. Before & After Renovation Examples

Example title: Before & After: This Humble Bungalow in ______ Was Transformed Into a Luxe Retreat

People love Cinderella stories, so writing about local homes transformed by tasteful renovations is a great way to get readers hooked on your blog. The more specific you can get here, the better. Check sites like Curbed for examples of local renovations and see if you can get a quick comment from the homeowner, architect, or interior designer.

3. How to Fix & Flip Homes

Example title: How to Fix & Flip Homes in __________

With the popularity of real estate reality TV shows growing every day, writing blog posts that educate your audience on investing is a great way to increase traffic and conversions. If you’re serious about working with new investors, writing an in-depth e-book explaining the fix-and-flip process in detail would make a great lead magnet.

4. Home Staging Mistakes to Avoid

Example title: 7 Embarrassing Home Staging Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Home’s Value

Home staging mistakes is a fantastic blog idea because it’s something every homeowner thinks they can do independently. The reality, of course, is that home staging can be difficult and expensive. Something most homeowners don’t realize until they actually try to stage their own FSBO!

5. Highlight Successful Women in Real Estate

Example title: 7 Women Who Are Changing the Way _________ Real Estate Sells

According to one study, women make the decision of which home to purchase 91% of the time. That means celebrating women’s role in the real estate industry is not just a nice thing to do, but a savvy marketing decision. A blog post highlighting women’s achievements in your local market is a great way to do just that.

6. Real Estate Negotiation Tips

Example title: 5 Negotiation Secrets Smart Buyers Use to Get Better Deals

Since most buyers or sellers have minimal experience in negotiating, offering them a peek inside the process of negotiating a deal can make a great blog post. If you really want to wow them with your skills, try using actual examples from your career.

  Pro Tip

If you’re really strapped for time or suffering from a case of writer’s block, consider hiring a professional marketing company like Artur’In to write your blog posts for you. You’ll end up with blogs your audience will love & you’ll have more time to do what you do best: sell houses!

Visit Artur’In

7. How to Choose a Mortgage or Hard Money Lender

Example title: 7 Tricks to Choosing the Right Mortgage Lender in ________

Since the mortgage process is still intimidating for most new buyers, a guide on choosing a mortgage lender will be a welcome topic for new buyers reading your blog. If you’re targeting investors or even would-be investors, a guide to picking a suitable hard money lender can also work.

8. An Overview of Virtual Staging Software

Example title: How Virtual Staging Software Can Drive Traffic to Your Home

This one falls into the “seems easy until you try it” category for homeowners. Virtual staging looks like magic, but once they try to do it, they will realize that hiring a professional like you to market their home might be a better investment. 

9. Tongue-in-Cheek ‘Behind the Scenes’ Posts

Example title: 12 Common Lies Realtors Tell New Buyers in _________

Since Realtors still have a reputation for dishonesty, pulling back the curtain and dishing on what really goes on in the industry is a great way to disarm your site visitors. Just remember to keep it PG, and don’t accuse any fellow agents or brokerages by name.

10. Open House Food Ideas

Example title: 17 Open House Food Ideas to Make Your Open House a Success

Another subtle way to show off your marketing skills, writing up a short article on popular open house food ideas is a great way to impress homeowners.

11. A List Post or Explainer Article on Dual Agency

Example title: 7 Reasons Dual Agency Can Be a Mistake in _________

Dual agency is one of those real estate topics that seems easy to understand at first but gets more complicated as you dig in. That makes it a perfect blog post to show off your sales expertise. Just make sure to be clear about the complexities of dual agency. List the pros and cons honestly.

12. A 101-Level Crash Course in Real Estate Investing

Example title: Investing in ______ Real Estate 101

Since everyone wants to make a great investment, a crash course in real estate investing is a great idea for a blog post. You can explain some common industry terms and investment strategies and then discuss which one works best in your farm area.

13. A Guide to Evaluating & Purchasing Rental Properties

Example title: 8 Tips for Buying Rental Properties in _________

Since the real estate investment niche is red-hot these days, an expert guide to purchasing a rental property in your farm area can get you clicks and conversions on your blog. If you’re not an expert in rental property, work with your broker or a local investor to write this one.

14. Questions to Ask When Hiring a Real Estate Agent

Example title: 7 Questions to Ask When Interviewing a New Realtor

Wouldn’t it be great if you could tell someone which questions you want them to ask you in an interview? Well, if you write this blog post, you can! You can use this post to educate buyers on what to look for in a Realtor, and also subtlety play up your strong suit. For example, if you have a lot of local experience, spend more time telling them why this is so important in your post.

15. Home Staging Tips & Tricks to Sell Faster

Example title: 7 Interior Paint Colors That Will Help Your Home Sell Quicker

If you’re working in a relatively upscale neighborhood, then chances are your homeowners will look at beautifully staged local listings and start to get intimidated. How will their home compete with these beautiful spaces online?

The trick with this blog post idea is to make sure to interview (or research) experts who actually know a thing or two about interior design and how it might affect their listing. Again, just be careful about making any promises here. Avoid saying things like “this paint color WILL increase your listing price” and instead say something like, “One study showed this paint color helped XX homes sell faster.”

16. In-depth Neighborhood Guides for Relocation Buyers

Example title: An In-depth Guide to [Neighborhood] for New Homeowners

While ranking on Google for neighborhood guides will be extremely difficult in many cities, in-depth neighborhood guides make excellent lead magnets, e-books, or social media content. The trick here is to go deep. Most agents will write fluffy overviews, if anything, so make sure to get into the nitty-gritty of what moving to your neighborhood will be like.

17. Hyper-local New Homebuyer’s Guide

Example title: A New Homebuyer’s Guide to Moving to [Your Farm Area]

Are you working with new buyers? If not, you’re missing out. Many first-time buyers these days have excellent income and credit, and all they really need is someone to walk them through the transaction. If you get it right, you could have an evangelist for life.

18. Monthly or Quarterly Aggregated Market Reports

Example title: Aggregated Market Report for [Your Farm Area, Month Year]

While most agents post some kind of market report on their blogs, most are pretty thin and not actually useful for their readers. If you want to stand out, then take the time and effort to make your monthly or quarterly local market reports as in-depth and nerdy as you can manage.

19. Local Listing(s) of the Week

Example title: 3 Drop-dead, Gorgeous, Mid-century Modern Homes in [Your Farm Area]

This is a fun one and can help you build relationships with local listing agents. Try to choose three to five listings every week that might fit a specific theme your audience will like for more impact. For example, if you’re working in Miami, waterfront listings would be fun to write about. If you’re working in Manhattan, then you can’t go wrong writing about penthouses.

20. A Property Marketing Case Study

Example title: Case Study: How 3 [Your Farm Area] Luxury Homes Sold 20% Over Asking

This blog post requires a little more research and, of course, access to data and assets such as before-and-after images. But if you either have a few listings under your belt where marketing made the difference, or know an agent who does, then this is a great post to show off your marketing knowledge to your readers.

21. How Economic News Affects Your Farm Area

Example title: What the [Latest Economic News] Means for [Your Farm Area] Homeowners

While your wealthy clients might read the Wall Street Journal every morning, most of the economic news won’t be directly relevant to their real estate portfolio. That’s why taking that news and contextualizing it for them is another excellent way to use your blog to offer something of value for your audience.

22. A Guide to Local Architectural Styles

Example title: A Cheat Sheet to the Architectural Styles of _________

When people start thinking about buying or selling a home, they generally go into education mode. Learning about local architectural styles is a great way to get them to click on your posts on social media.

23. An Interview With a Lawyer on Common Local Legal Issues

Example title: A Lawyer Explains the Legal Issues of Accessory Dwelling Units

Real estate lawyers also want to show off their local expertise to your audience because your leads might potentially be their leads too. Are you starting to notice a trend here with interview articles? If you’re just jumping in on this article idea, then here’s a quick recap: Interviewing local experts can help build relationships that lead to referrals down the road.

24. A Guide to Local HOA Covenants

Example title: 15 Common HOA Covenants & What They Really Mean

If you want to get confused (and angry), ask someone what they think about their homeowners association (HOA). For most people, HOAs are right up there with the IRS when it comes to confusing and potentially expensive adversaries. That’s why a friendly explainer piece on HOA covenants can help new homeowners or anyone who never lived under their rules feel a little more comfortable about them.

25. An Explainer on What Listing Agents Do

Example title: 12 Hidden Ways Listing Agents Help _______ Homeowners Sell Faster & for More Money

Justifying your own job might seem a little desperate, but if you focus on the positive and talk about some uncommon but essential ways you can help them, you just might end up with a popular blog post.

26. Affordable Curb Appeal Ideas for Your Local Market

Example title: 11 Affordable Curb Appeal Ideas for [Your Farm Area] Homes

Curb appeal is one of those things that most homeowners don’t quite understand. They THINK they do, but when it comes down to pulling out their credit card or rolling up their sleeves, they will inevitably head to Google. Or if you have a well-written article, your blog.

27. A Guide to Up & Coming Micro-neighborhoods

Example title: 3 Neighborhoods in ________ Set to Take Off in 2022

While every agent in your farm area is probably writing about the hot new neighborhood, writing about smaller micro-neighborhoods with appealing qualities is a great way to show off your local market knowledge.

More Real Estate Blog Ideas…

28. Common questions sellers ask
29. Common questions buyers ask
30. Common questions relocation clients ask
31. A guide to buying foreclosures
32. Why hiring an agent is important
33. A guide to iBuyers
34. Why Zillow Zestimates are not accurate
35. The perils of for sale by owner
36. Weekly starter home wrap-up post
37. Interview a local developer
38. Interview a local mortgage broker
39. Interview a local daycare owner
40. Interview a local home inspector
41. Monthly wrap-up of major sales
42. A guide to the best coffee shops in XX
43. A guide to your favorite restaurants in XX
44. A guide to local parks
45. A guide to local school districts
46. A guide to local dog runs
47. Renting vs buying
48. Overview of the closing process
49. Tips for getting offers accepted
50. Fun historical facts about your farm area
51. When to refinance
52. How to get prequalified for a mortgage
53. Weekly wrap up of luxury listings
54. News about new developments
55. Local politics and how it might affect your farm area
56. Best colors to paint a home to sell faster
57. What to do with pets when showing your home
58. Tips for a successful open house
59. Gardening and landscaping tips
60. How to save money on heating or cooling bills
61. How to winterize a home
62. Yearly maintenance schedule
63. Zoning laws for additions or renovations
64. Highlight local artists
65. Highlight local art galleries
66. Highlight a local photographer
67. Tips for packing for a move
68. Tips for hiring a long distance mover
69. Tips for hiring a contractor
70. Tips for hiring painters
71. Tips for hiring a landscaper
72. Moving checklist
73. Prelisting checklist
74. Closing checklist
75. Guide to local wildlife
76. Guide to local attractions
77. Guide to local beaches
78. Guide to local hiking trails
79. Rank the best supermarkets
80. Rank the best bakeries

7 Expert Real Estate Blogging Tips & Resources

Now that you’re (hopefully) inspired to start blogging, here are some insider tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years that will help you get more page views.

1. Write 3 Different Versions of Your Headline & Pick the Best One

The headline is by far the most important element of your blog post. It’s the first and sometimes only thing your audience will see before they decide to click on it and read it. So take the time to learn how to write headlines that get clicks. Here are some simple formulas you can use.

2. Use H2 Headings to Break Up Your Posts Into Bite-sized Chunks

Since your readers are busy, do them a favor and break up your blog posts into bite-sized chunks using H2 subheadings. Most people are going to skim your posts anyway. Make it easy for them. Using H2, H3, and H4 subheadings is also a best practice for real estate SEO.

3. Include Links to Other Related Blog Posts

This will not only help your reader quickly get to related posts, but will help Google crawl your site and might help you rank better.

4. Do Keyword Research to Find Out What Your Audience Is Searching for on Google

If you want a chance of ranking your blog posts on Google, you need to research what keywords your audience is searching for. You can start by checking out some other successful real estate blogs in your farm area. Which articles do you think are most helpful for buyers and sellers? If you want to get serious and do professional keyword research, check out our in-depth guide below.

5. Use Descriptive Language & Write Short Sentences & Paragraphs

Long paragraphs are like homework, and you have about 10 seconds to capture your reader’s attention before they click back over to Facebook. Worse, they take forever to scroll through on mobile.

6. Read Your Writing Out Loud Before Hitting Publish

Editing your own writing can be tricky, but one way to make it easier is to read your entire post out loud and see if you stumble. If you can read through it without stumbling, then chances are so will your readers.

7. Always Put the Reader First

Always put your reader first. Make sure to focus on their needs and experience rather than search engine optimization (SEO), selling, trying to sound clever, or anything else. Always remember your blog is for your readers, not to stroke your ego!

Over to You

Have a great real estate blog idea that we forgot? Let us know in the comments or join us on our Facebook Mastermind Group here.

The post 80 Viral Real Estate Blog Ideas for 2022 (+ Examples & Expert Tips) appeared first on The Close.

Without a high-performing real estate website, you’re leaving money on the table and missing opportunities to grow your business. Check out our six favorite providers to help you launch beautifully designed, functional, high-performing real estate websites for agents, teams, and brokerages.

Best Real Estate Website Builders for 2022

How We Chose Our Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2022

While there are other important considerations, we used the following elements as criteria for inclusion on our list of the best real estate website builders available today: 

• Price
• Templates and customization options
• IDX capability
• Lead capture options
• Built-in CRM (or easy connection capability)
• Customer support

For this list, we graded each of our chosen providers based on these criteria. How did they measure up? Check out our product reviews below.

1. Best Overall Real Estate Website Builder: Placester

Placester offers a balanced real estate website builder experience with a great price point and tons of features—making them an easy choice as leader of the pack.

Placester offers a discount to National Association of Realtors (NAR) members, and they’re the only provider on our list in partnership with NAR. These savings make their already affordable solution an even better value for cash-strapped agents and teams.

Placester Pricing

Placester’s pricing model depends on two factors: whether you’re a National Association of Realtors member and which package you choose. Their Starter Plan starts at just $64 per month for NAR members.

Here’s a breakdown of their pricing and what Placester offers at each tier of service.

Placester Pricing at a Glance—January 2022

Placester Package Options	NAR Members	Non-NAR Members
Starter Plan	$64 / month	$100 / month
Advanced Plan	$120 / month	$190/ month
Office Builder Plan	$240 / month	$240 / month

NAR membership has its benefits, especially when you’re building a real estate website. The prices listed above are for Realtors who opt for an annual commitment. If you go with this plan, Placester also waives your one-time setup fee.

Placester offers some a la carte add-ons that further enhance the platform’s value. For example, their Open House Pro Premium app is a fantastic, tablet-based service that provides more than just a digital sign-in option for your open house attendees.

Related Article

Placester Review + Video: Is It Really the Best Real Estate Website Builder?

The app syncs with your customer relationship management (CRM) software. All event attendees are automatically added to your database, giving you the ability to create customized marketing messages for each event you host.

For real estate professionals with a website they’re not happy with, Placester offers customized data migration services, allowing you to migrate all your hard work put in on another platform to the Placester platform.

Here’s a breakdown of the cost for each of those Placester add-on features.

Add-on	Price
Open House Pro Premium	$20 / month
Data Migration Services	Prices vary

Placester Marketplace: Our Favorite Placester Feature

Take it from someone who spends a lot of time working on content for websites—it’s important to know the limits of your skillset and when it’s appropriate to hire someone to give you a hand. The new Placester Marketplace is a perfect solution for someone who needs a little creative help but who doesn’t know where to start.

Suppose you want a basic website refresh or want to install site tracking tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. Or maybe you just want someone to help import your contacts into the Placester CRM.

You can hire a pro through Placester Marketplace to complete all those tasks for a reasonable price. Outsourcing will free up some of your time that could be better spent returning phone calls, showing properties, and handling other tasks that directly advance your business.

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Placester Templates & Customizability

• The Close Rating:
• 4.5 out of 5

Placester offers 24 templates for subscribing agents. Templates are mobile-responsive and they provide everything a real estate agent needs in a website, including IDX search integration, a blog platform, additional landing pages, and more.

The fundamental differences between the templates are aesthetic, for the most part, and since there isn’t an unattractive option, you really can’t go wrong.

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Placester IDX Capability

• The Close Rating:
• 4.5 out of 5

Since Placester is a real estate-specific tool, their websites are all IDX-ready. As with any similar platform, you’ll simply need to link your local MLS to their website. Next, you’ll need to verify your brokerage information and provide specific data from your local real estate board.

The Placester support team has expertise in this area and can provide live support if their extensive library of self-help resources doesn’t immediately answer your questions.

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Real Estate Lead Capture on Placester

• The Close Rating:
• 5 out of 5

Placester employs proven lead capture methods for your real estate website by providing a place for visitors to reach out and request more information, including a proactive, sitewide pop-up (shown above).

Pop-ups are very effective at focusing your reader’s attention on a single message, even if it’s for a short time. Pop-ups increase lead capture rates consistently, so they’re a great addition to your site.

If visitors overlook your pop-ups, Placester positions another contact form in the footer of every page and a button to click for more information on listings or services, thereby providing readers plenty of ways to reach out on their own.

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Placester CRM Capabilities

• The Close Rating:
• 3 out of 5

The Placester CRM doesn’t come with a ton of bells and whistles, but the features it includes are easy to use and work well. Our favorite part of the Placester CRM is the built-in integration with your website. When you get a lead through your site, Placester CRM automatically converts their inputs into a contact profile that includes all their website activity.

In other words, you get to see all the properties they view, the blog posts they read, and even the criteria they use to search for homes. Granular insider information like this can help you nurture your leads effectively—sending them just the right messages at just the right moment.

The Placester CRM also allows you to import leads from other sources, like Zillow or BoldLeads. Marketing to your contacts is limited to basic email drip sequences, but the system is streamlined and intuitive. If email marketing is all you need from your CRM, Placester is a great choice.

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Placester Support

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

Placester provides live, US-based phone support Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We tested their phone support with some basic questions about the platform. Our friendly and knowledgeable phone rep helped immediately with exactly what we needed.

Outside of U.S. business hours, Placester offers support via email. We submitted a request for technical support at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday and received an email reply from a Placester representative by 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday. They provided specific information regarding our request and a link to an article in their library of support knowledge documents.

Overall, our experience with Placester’s customer support was very positive and helpful, especially when creating a new real estate website.

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Where Placester Comes Up Short

Although the design options available for Placester websites are very attractive and work for most agents, they don’t offer a ton of flexibility within those templates. Placester customers don’t have much control over how their website looks other than color schemes. They offer limited font choices and 24 templates.

For agents looking for a more robust design experience and total control over the look and feel of their website, you might consider a provider like Squarespace.

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Examples of Placester Real Estate Websites for Agents

Kim Spears Group, KELLER WILLIAMS® Treasure Coast

NoBedrooms, One Real Estate

Al Waddell, RE/MAX Metro Plus

Placester: The Bottom Line

Placester is a superior product for anyone looking to build a real estate-specific website. Placester knows what’s important to Realtors and has put those features front and center. Plus, their affiliation with the National Association of Realtors makes them a provider that Realtors can trust.

Check out Placester

2. Best Website + CRM Combo: Propertybase

Propertybase provides real estate professionals with a fantastic, all-in-one solution for client acquisition and nurturing with their lead generation, website, and CRM components all working together. Their websites are clean, customizable, and trusted by some of our industry’s most prestigious companies.

The Propertybase CRM is second to none as far as capabilities to keep your leads moving down the sales funnel.

Propertybase Pricing

Propertybase offers two different tracks for those seeking a real estate website. The first track is called Propertybase GO, and it’s designed for single agents, teams, and brokerages. The starting price for Propertybase GO includes the website and the highly regarded Propertybase GO CRM for $349 a month, with a one-year commitment.

We did an in-depth review of Propertybase GO if you want to learn more.

The second track, called Propertybase Salesforce Edition, is designed to be an enterprise solution for users across large organizations. Prices for this product vary case by case. Check out our Propertybase Salesforce Edition review for more information.

High-performing Landing Pages: Our Favorite Propertybase Feature

Not long ago, Propertybase acquired real estate lead generation platform BoldLeads, which has led to significant returns for landing page lead generation.

Using the BoldLeads system, you can place attention-grabbing ads on social media platforms and drive traffic to your landing pages. These have been endlessly tested and optimized for industry-leading conversion rates.

As a Propertybase website user, you don’t just access a fantastic lead-generating website—you also gain access to an amazing CRM and the BoldLeads lead generation system—a very effective 1-2-3 punch.

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Propertybase Templates & Customizability

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

Propertybase offers six real estate website templates for agents to customize and make their own. Though this might seem like a limited number of options, you can do a lot of customization. You have complete control over photos, videos, color schemes, and limited control over layout and display options.

The platform takes this customization to another level with what they call “agent stickiness,” a feature that uses website cookies to create an agent-specific experience on your website once a prospect has filled out a lead capture form.

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Propertybase IDX Capability

• The Close Rating:
• 4.5 out of 5

Like Placester and InCom, Propertybase websites are IDX-ready. All you have to do is turn on the feed from your local MLS.

Propertybase takes this a step further by fully integrating their CRM with the IDX information, allowing you to send listing information and see more about the properties your prospects are viewing on your website—all without having to tab over to another browser window.

[Related article: Still Using Your MLS for Search? Propertybase GO Says, ‘OK Boomer’]

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Real Estate Lead Capture on Propertybase

• The Close Rating:
• 5 out of 5

Lead capture on the Propertybase platform is powerful. Not only do you have the typical lead capture tools like form-fills and pop-ups, but you also have the power of the BoldLeads lead generation system behind your efforts, putting their high-performing landing pages at your disposal as well.

The BoldLeads options aren’t free, but their return on investment is typically so high that it becomes a no-brainer to employ them in your lead generation strategy. While you can use landing page templates from Propertybase for free (without the BoldLeads traffic boost), you’ll need to drive traffic to them on your own.

[Related article: BoldLeads Review: How Does It Work & Is It Worth It?]

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Propertybase CRM Capabilities

• The Close Rating:
• 5 out of 5

If this list were only about the capabilities of the CRM, Propertybase would easily be at the top. In fact, they’re on our list of the best real estate CRMs.

Propertybase is a CRM based on the Salesforce platform. They have full integration with your MLS via IDX, and they offer an intuitive interface, lead profiles that are automatically populated with your lead’s activity on your website, plus tons of automated communication options. You’ll also get customizations that show you exactly the information you want, right on your dashboard.

If email communication isn’t enough for you (spoiler alert: it shouldn’t be), Propertybase also offers some third-party integrations to allow you to automate SMS text messaging, and even a dialer so you can call your prospects right from your CRM.

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Propertybase Support

• The Close Rating:
• 4.5 out of 5

Propertybase provides a wide variety of helpful information in their support center, including a collection of articles and walk-throughs of the most frequently asked questions. If you aren’t finding your answers there, Propertybase provides 24/7 email support and phone support from Monday through Friday during business hours.

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Where Propertybase Comes Up Short

You get a ton of functionality with Propertybase, but with that comes a hefty price tag. Real estate agents who have a CRM that they love and who want a website are going to be out of luck here.

You really won’t get the most out of the platform unless you are using the website and the CRM together. It would be great to be able to just get the website and the BoldLeads integration for a lower price than $349 a month.

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Examples of Propertybase Real Estate Websites for Agents & Brokerages

Pink Realty

Colorado Group Realty

Ocean, Sotheby’s International Realty

Propertybase: The Bottom Line

Propertybase provides a customizable website with lots of great lead capture options, as well as the best CRM in the real estate industry. If you are looking for a powerful new way to grease the sides of your lead funnel and create more prospect conversations, you should check out Propertybase.

Check out Propertybase

3. Best Real Estate Website Builder for Agents Who Want Advanced Home Search Tools: IDX Broker

If you’re an agent looking for more control over your website visitor’s experience, IDX Broker is a great option. Loaded with all the options you’d expect to find in a real estate website provider, IDX Broker delivers on the must-haves for your real estate website while also providing ultimate flexibility.

With the ability to customize how aggressive your lead capture strategies are, you’re in charge of your visitor’s journey. You can allow site visitors to create accounts using popular social media logins, and even customize their user interface. They get to choose how they experience your site, and that information gets fed into your CRM for you to leverage later on.

It’s important to remember that IDX Broker is built on the WordPress platform, so you need to have some WordPress knowledge (or hire someone who does) to take advantage of what is being offered here.

IDX Broker Pricing

Pricing on IDX is complicated, but once you’re on their website, it makes sense. Pricing is divided into three tiers:

• Lite (starting at $50 per month)
• Platinum (starting at $80 per month)
• Home (starting at $150 per month)

After you’ve selected your tier, you have options for plans best suited for a single agent, a real estate team, or an entire office.

Each option within each tier offers an increasing number of features, but all the fundamentals are a part of every package—complete with all the lead capture options, search functionality, and so forth—plus a nice back-end CRM.

IDX Broker Lite Tier Pricing at a Glance

IDX Broker Plan	Prices Starting At
Agent	$50 / month
Team	$70 / month
Office	$100 / month

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IDX Broker Platinum Tier Pricing at a Glance

IDX Broker Plan	Prices Starting At
Agent	$80 / month
Team	$100 / month
Office	$130 / month

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IDX Broker Home Tier Pricing at a Glance

IDX Broker Plan	Prices Starting At
Agent	$150 / month
Team	$170 / month
Office	$200 / month

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Though the Lite tier does offer lots of value, most agents are going to find the Platinum tier to be the place they should start looking.

At Platinum, agents unlock features like automatic market reports, upgrade support and service, advanced map and polygon searching, home valuation tools, and more.

With the Home Tier, you get a WordPress website developed and maintained in-house by IDX Broker, rather than having to work with your own developer to build one with you. Basically, you take all the best parts of IDX Broker and add concierge-level support to it.

Customized Lead Capture Strategies: Our Favorite IDX Broker Feature

IDX Broker knows that not every market, office, and agent is alike. Some agents prefer a more aggressive lead capture style with required sign-ins, pop-ups, and more touches on the website with each prospect.

Some agents are looking for a subtler approach, preferring to let their prospects browse a little longer before asking for contact information. With IDX Broker, you can choose how aggressive you want your lead capture strategy to be, and you can change it whenever you want.

For example, maybe during the high season, when people are shopping for homes, you’re able to capture leads after asking for contact info just a few times. As such, you might want to dial back your strategy, making your visitors feel more like they are making the first move.

At other times, when there’s less going on, you may need to dial up the lead generation on your website, which is when you can really kick your pop-ups, email solicitation, and lead magnet promotion into high gear.

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IDX Broker Templates & Customizability

• The Close Rating:
• 5 out of 5

IDX Broker runs on the WordPress platform, so the number of customization options are virtually limitless. There are seven different themes you can choose from if you choose the Home tier, and you can have IDX Broker build your website for you.

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IDX Broker IDX Capability

• The Close Rating:
• 4.5 out of 5

Just the name of this company should give you an indication of IDX Broker’s strong IDX capabilities. The IDX Broker website experience is really centered around search. As such, they need a reliable and complete IDX connection to fill out their list of features.

We tested IDX Broker’s connection with a local MLS, and it connected with every major property category, making the search functionality on the agent website nearly identical to that of the local MLS’ own website platform.

Note: If you’re located in New York City, this platform won’t work for you, as IDX Broker doesn’t connect with REBNY.

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Real Estate Lead Capture on IDX Broker

• The Close Rating:
• 5 out of 5

As we mentioned earlier, the lead capture options on IDX Broker are our favorite part of the platform. You really can create exactly the experience you want for your visitors, such as including, eliminating, or requiring certain fields, pop-ups, social logins, and more.

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IDX Broker CRM Capabilities

• The Close Rating:
• 2 out of 5

IDX Broker doesn’t really offer a CRM for real estate agents. There are some limited real estate lead distribution tools, and some back-office management tools (available on the Team and Office plans). But this platform is designed to be easily integrated with another CRM, connecting with every one of the CRMs on our list of Best Real Estate CRMs for 2021.

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IDX Broker Support

• The Close Rating:
• 2 out of 5

IDX Broker provides standard email and phone support during business hours, and has a decent library of on-demand resources so you can help yourself, including an on-demand webinar section we found particularly useful.

Unless you choose the Home tier, IDX Broker doesn’t offer live support for WordPress-related questions.

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Where IDX Broker Comes Up Short

IDX Broker is great for agents who want a ton of customization, but it comes with the need to hire someone to help you with the WordPress work, unless you are getting the Home tier package or happen to be a developer yourself. It would be great if IDX Broker offered a prebuilt option for agents looking for the Lite or Platinum options.

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Examples of IDX Broker Real Estate Websites for Agents & Brokerages

Brace Homes, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Michigan

Mello Group

Hood Homes, Starpointe Realty

IDX Broker: The Bottom Line

If you want ultimate control over your website and your user experience, IDX Broker is definitely a provider to consider. Visit them today to see which tier, plan, and options are best for your business.

Visit REDX

4. Best Website Builder for Budget-conscious Agents Looking for Premium Marketing Features: InCom

InCom provides attractive websites for real estate agents that do everything you need them to do. They provide a place for people to search for listed property, give prospects an easy way to contact you, and provide a platform for them to consume your content online.

But the extras that InCom offers really set it apart from the rest of the providers on our list. These include a makeshift CRM, integration with social media platforms to make lead generation easier, and real estate-specific landing pages that will convert your incoming lead traffic better than a generic website landing page.

InCom Pricing

InCom pricing starts at just $39.95 a month for an annual plan, plus a one-time setup fee of $250. InCom’s pricing is very competitive, and unlike real estate-specific competitor Placester, nearly all the essential features of the platform are included in their monthly or annual rate.

InCom Pricing at a Glance—January 2022

InCom Offers	Price
IDX Website With Unlimited Content, Access to 6 Standard Templates	$44.95 / month (annually) or $49.95 / month (monthly)
Access to Additional Premium Templates	$4.95 / month
One-time Setup Fee	$250
Google Ad Words Management	$100 / month
Facebook Ads Management	$100 / month
ReCall Marketing - Silver Package	$45 / month + $125 setup fee
ReCall Marketing - Gold Package	$175 / month + $125 setup fee
ReCall Marketing - Platinum Package	$300 / month + $125 setup fee

All the integrations, page features, and offers from InCom are included in their base package. There’s no need to budget for add-ons unless you want one of the premium templates they offer or some of their premium marketing options.

ReCall Marketing: Our Favorite InCom Feature

One of the best parts of the InCom platform is access to their premium marketing features. Yes, you have to pay extra for these, but the upcharge on each of their offerings is significantly less than what it would be if you were working with a standalone marketing agency.

Our favorite is their ReCall Marketing strategy, InCom’s website retargeting service. If you aren’t familiar with retargeting, here’s how it works: When someone visits your website, a small piece of code (or “cookie”) is installed on their browser. Then, when they visit other websites on the internet, they are served ads about your business. These could be ads for particular properties, ads for your services in general, or even for an event like an open house you’ve got coming up.

InCom offers three different levels of ReCall Marketing, depending on how many impressions you want to make on your website visitors after they’ve left your site. While retargeting isn’t new, this is an easy, relatively hands-off approach for real estate agents, freeing up the time and energy of already busy real estate professionals to focus on other things.

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InCom Templates & Customizability

• The Close Rating:
• 2 out of 5

You don’t get a ton of templates to choose from with InCom, as seems to be the case with most real estate-specific website builders. With InCom, you have access to six standard templates, and for an extra fee you can get a few more in the “premium templates” area.

While the premium templates are nice, they really didn’t seem to add a ton of value above and beyond what the standard templates offered. All of the important elements are in place on InCom websites, though, so you don’t need to worry about missing an important feature.

Like Placester, website layouts aren’t very customizable and you can’t manipulate many features beyond color schemes and fonts. If you’ve got a particular vision for what a reader will find when they arrive at your site, InCom provides only limited design modifications.

One thing we really liked about InCom was that, unlike Placester, agents can have unlimited pages on their site. If you’ve got grand plans to become the content marketing wiz of your local market, you’re going to need a website that can host all your blog posts, neighborhood feature videos, and checklists for new homebuyers and sellers. InCom offers agents as many internal pages as they’d like to host all the content their heart desires.

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InCom IDX Capability

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

InCom’s websites are all IDX-enabled and ready to connect to your local MLS. This is definitely one of the benefits of working with a real estate-specific website builder, rather than going through a generic provider like Squarespace.

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Real Estate Lead Capture on InCom

• The Close Rating:
• 3.5 out of 5

InCom does offer a lot of lead generation opportunities through their premium services managing your advertising on other platforms, and they support that ad management with solid lead capture options on their sites as well.

When users are directed to your website, you can send them to one of your custom InCom landing pages, designed to capture lead data before a visitor can dig into what you have to offer. Or, you can send them straight to your site and trigger what InCom calls a “User Registration” after a certain number of properties or pages are viewed.

This strategy is more in-your-face than the optional pop-ups on other sites, but will also provide you with more qualified leads. Anyone who is willing to fill out a user registration form is more likely to be a serious shopper and not just someone who came to your site because they’re curious.

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InCom CRM Capabilities

• The Close Rating:
• 3.5 out of 5

InCom has a relatively limited built-in CRM to help you manage the leads you get from their website. It pales in comparison to the one from Placester or a dedicated real estate CRM product, so you’ll want to partner your InCom website with another platform.

One nice thing about the onboard CRM is that it allows for custom alerts to be sent to you whenever you’ve got lead activity on the site, making prompt follow-up easier.

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InCom Support

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

Customer support on InCom was easy to access and prompt in follow-up. They offer phone support during US business hours and 24/7 email support. We submitted a question via the email support system on a Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m. and got an answer back within three hours, including an invitation to speak on the phone if our problem wasn’t resolved.

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Where InCom Comes Up Short

While InCom’s website templates were attractive and useful, their lack of design flexibility is challenging. For example, there is no template that adequately addresses the needs of small to medium-sized real estate teams—very common players in most real estate markets.

They have websites for brokerages and large teams, but no solutions that are ideal for three or four agents working together. They do have “partner” website templates that start down that road. However, customizing your website to highlight the strength of working with a team (rather than just a few agents) isn’t easily achieved using InCom.

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Examples of InCom Real Estate Websites for Agents

Michael Steinman, Forest Hill Real Estate Inc.

Mary Cerqua, Right At Home Realty Inc.

Steven Maislin, RE/MAX Realtron Realty Inc.

InCom: The Bottom Line

InCom offers a fantastic real estate website at an affordable price. For agents operating a one-person business, they provide all the elements you need to be successful, and their additional premium ad support and lead generation options are great ways to get your business into growth mode. Whether you’re a new agent or a seasoned professional, InCom is a great option for anyone looking for a real estate website builder.

Check out InCom

5. Best Real Estate Website Builder for Brokers & Teams: BoomTown

Larger organizations require a different approach with features like lead distribution, team tracking, pipeline management, and more. BoomTown offers all of this, taking the website building process out of the individual’s hands and making it an office solution.

BoomTown Pricing

BoomTown’s real estate websites for agents and brokerages start at $1,000 per month, plus a $750 onboarding fee for their Launch package, which is ideal for one to three agents.

The next step up is their Grow package at $1,550 a month plus a $1,550 onboarding fee, designed for teams or brokerages of three to 10 people.

BoomTown also offers a whole suite of other products, including a CRM, lead generation, marketing automation, lead qualification, and pipeline management.

Unfortunately, the prices for each of these products is not listed publicly and are subject to change based on the other products you purchase, so we weren’t able to get a clear understanding of all the different BoomTown product prices.

BoomTown Pricing at a Glance—January 2022

Package	Price
Launch (1-2 agents)	$1,000 / month + $750 onboarding fee
Core (2-5 agents)	$1,300 / month + $1,700 onboarding fee
Grow (3-10 agents)	$1,500 / month + $1,500 onboarding fee
Advance (11+ agents)	Call for pricing

Since BoomTown is geared toward brokerages and teams, the prices of their products are definitely in a different weight class than other real estate website builders on our list. However, BoomTown offers other perks you might not find elsewhere, giving you a serious bang for your buck. Some perks include access to a very competitive real estate CRM, lead distribution tools, and some brokerage-level marketing strategies.

Lead Generation Ad Management Included: Our Favorite BoomTown Feature

Even though the cost to get into the BoomTown club is significantly higher than the other real estate website builders on our list, membership does have its perks. Our favorite is that they include lead generation and ad management in their price.

Yes, that management is a little more automated, but you still have a person on the BoomTown end of things making sure that your ads are going in the right place and performing as efficiently as possible. This extra layer of support for lead generation for your entire team ensures that business is going to keep moving in the right direction and that leads are going to keep coming in.

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BoomTown Templates & Customizability

• The Close Rating:
• 3 out of 5

There are three different templates to select from when building a BoomTown website. Each of the themes is extremely attractive, focuses (smartly) on the local area of your business, and is a place where agents on your team can customize their personal web presence to add to the value of your brokerage.

Because BoomTown websites are designed for larger groups, your ability to customize them is somewhat limited. However, as with other real estate-specific website builders, BoomTown offers brokers and team leaders fine-tuning and aesthetic control over the details of their website—so getting your site to look a certain way is definitely within reach.

Though we’ll talk a little more about this in the “support” section of the BoomTown review, it’s important to point out that the conversations we had with the BoomTown folks were encouraging. It appears that if a team or brokerage has a specific request that couldn’t be achieved within the framework of the existing themes, BoomTown would work with you to try to design a custom solution.

While there would be a cost associated with that service, having a provider offer an exclusive solution to a problem is definitely worthy of mention and a big asset for those who are considering building a website for their brokerage—especially if you’ve got some unique marketing ideas in mind.

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BoomTown IDX Capability

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

Just like the other real estate-specific website builders on our list (Placester and InCom), BoomTown includes IDX in all their base packages.

Like you need to with any IDX integration, there are forms and contacts you have to make with your local board to authorize access to that service for your site, but BoomTown is trained to help you through that, so it’s an easy part of the setup and done during your initial onboarding.

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Real Estate Lead Capture on BoomTown

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

BoomTown offers standard lead capture options on each of their templates, including custom landing pages, pop-ups, lead capture forms, and the like. As we mentioned, BoomTown also offers ad management that will draw leads to your new website.

Where BoomTown stands out among its competitors, though, is in the distribution of these leads among your team members and your ability as the team lead to keep everyone on track.

With a sophisticated lead distribution and pipeline management system, BoomTown makes it easy to see how each of your teammates is progressing with each of their leads. This feature allows brokers and team leaders to provide timely coaching and counsel, upping your conversion rate with leads.

Once an agent has received a lead, it is automatically filed in the BoomTown CRM—a tool powerful enough to be considered worthy of mention as a standalone product. All in all, BoomTown is the most efficient lead capture platform on our list.

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BoomTown CRM Capabilities

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

BoomTown’s CRM provides a clean, easy-to-use interface for each agent or team leader, it offers their own version of predictive technology, helping agents determine who is a hot lead and who needs more nurturing, and probably best of all, it offers an interface with your MLS through IDX.

This last feature is especially nice—it allows you to create custom email updates for your leads when property of a certain criteria hits the market without having to leave your CRM and actually log on to your local MLS site.

You can do all the typical things a CRM offers: basic email marketing and automation as well as tagging and bucketing contacts, and since you’re linked up to your website, you can see all the activity your leads are engaging in on your site right from their profile.

Since BoomTown is designed specifically for teams, there are also some great lead routing options, team management, even training modules you can set up for new agents to reduce their learning curve and start producing sooner.

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BoomTown Support

• The Close Rating:
• 2 out of 5

BoomTown offers phone and email support during US business hours. We tried out both and had mixed results. We sent an email on a Wednesday morning requesting support on a website template and never received a message back.

Our phone support was a better experience, but there was no explanation as to why we didn’t get an email back on our question.

Other reviews of the BoomTown platform have echoed similar experiences. BoomTown does have a pretty extensive library of resources available to customers to help with questions, so we suggest you start there rather than jumping straight to the phone or email.

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Where BoomTown Comes Up Short

While BoomTown is the best option for teams or brokerages, it’s actually hard to see why at first, unless you really dig deep into BoomTown’s website and marketing materials. They are relatively opaque about their prices, and require a demo with a sales agent before you can really get your hands (or at least your eyes) on the products you’ll be using.

Brokers or team leaders who want to kick the tires on their own first are going to have a hard time here.

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Examples of BoomTown Real Estate Websites for Agents & Brokerages

Jim Allen, Coldwell Banker Howard, Perry and Watson

Ben Kinney Team, Keller Williams Western Realty

The Duncan Duo, RE/MAX Dynamic

BoomTown: The Bottom Line

If you need a real estate website solution for your brokerage or team, BoomTown is the best place to get it. Yes, it’s a little pricey, but you get a lot for your money, and even though there’s an investment to be made, running a business requires investment on a large scale if you’re going to support the success of multiple agents.

Check out BoomTown

6. Best Builder for Agents Seeking Attractive Templates & Flexible Design: Squarespace

Squarespace provides, far and away, the most templates, design flexibility, and options for anyone creating a website—including real estate professionals. To be totally clear, Squarespace is not a real estate-specific platform. As such, they’re missing a couple of website elements, like a built-in CRM and real estate lead capture landing pages that you’ll find on Placester and InCom.

However, the platform provides a wide array of website design options, and these integrate with nearly every major CRM and lead capture platform on the web. Any integration challenges can be overcome, especially if you have a specific vision for how you want your website to look, and you feel that you can’t achieve your goals using the relatively restrictive templates of the other providers.

Overall, Squarespace is an affordable, open-world option for real estate professionals who want total control over their website’s design and don’t mind integrating their website with other real estate products like a CRM or email marketing system.

Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace pricing starts at $12 per month when paid annually for their Personal Plan.

Though a well-appointed package, most real estate agents will find the Business Plan at $18 per month (when paid annually) to be the way to go. This plan allows better on-page lead capture, one year of free Google Workspace access, and other premium design elements.

Squarespace Pricing at a Glance—January 2022

Squarespace Package	Price
Personal	$12 / month (annually) or $16 / month (monthly)
Business	$18 / month (annually) or $26 / month (monthly)

Squarespace also offers pricing options for individuals looking to sell things directly on their site. While most real estate agents don’t need this feature, if you ever decide to offer professional real estate products like coaching or services, Squarespace lets you take payments and sell right from your site.

Awesome Design Flexibility: Our Favorite Squarespace Feature

Do you ever wake up with a specific vision for how a project should look, how your customers will interact with it, and ultimately, how you’ll manage it? When that happens, you want to have a platform that allows you to bring your vision to life.

Squarespace provides over 100 unique and beautiful templates to start building your website, and those templates can be stripped down, changed, and practically broken down to a white screen if that’s where you want to start.

Given the fact that you have dozens of design elements you can include—things like contact forms, photo carousels (perfect for featuring properties), blogs, video, and calendars for scheduling appointments, just to name a few—there are virtually unlimited ways you can put your Squarespace website together.

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Squarespace Templates & Customizability

• The Close Rating:
• 5 out of 5

As we just mentioned, the templates and customizability on the Squarespace platform are its strongest features. If you have an active blog with lots of content and content types, or if you’re a video wiz or you have some other advantage over your competition—you want a customizable website that will highlight those advantages.

Also, Squarespace offers 30 different templates for landing pages—perfect for pairing with your social media-driven lead capture efforts. These landing page templates are already beautifully designed. But you can tweak them to say exactly what you want and easily gather the right information from your leads.

Remember, these aren’t real estate-specific landing pages, so they are less of an out-of-the-box solution than you’ll find with providers like Placester. However, the customization options will let you shape your landing pages into exactly what you want.

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Squarespace IDX Capability

• The Close Rating:
• 2 out of 5

Squarespace offers full IDX integration capability. The big difference between the Squarespace IDX process and the included IDX integration in real estate-specific website providers like Placester, BoomTown, and InCom is that you need to first subscribe to an IDX provider like Ultimate IDX.

This provider acts as a bridge between your MLS and your website, providing a plugin that’s installed directly on your website. The plugin enables live searches and responsive design (meaning the interface will adjust to be mobile-friendly if someone is accessing your site on their phone).

In short, Squarespace’s platform allows for all the same IDX capability that you’d find on real estate-specific websites, but there is a little more legwork required at the outset to get it up and running.

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Real Estate Lead Capture on Squarespace

• The Close Rating:
• 3 out of 5

Since Squarespace isn’t a real estate-specific website builder, lead capture options here are a little more generic, but still effective. You can create lead capture forms and include them on every page of your site. You can utilize sitewide pop-ups to capture client information, and a handy Announcement Bar displays at the top of your site, visible no matter how someone scrolls on a page.

Since Squarespace isn’t designed just for real estate agents, it will be up to you to effectively manage the data that you capture here. While Squarespace provides easy ways to connect to CRMs or email marketing systems, those connections aren’t automatic like they are on platforms like Placester. You’ll need to ensure you’ve got your ducks in a row and your lead data is routed to the right place.

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Squarespace CRM Capabilities

• The Close Rating:
• 1 out of 5

Squarespace doesn’t offer an integrated CRM. This is definitely a drawback, as it means that all the leads you get through your website have to be transferred and managed somewhere else.

To be totally fair, this migration is pretty easy. Squarespace offers built-in integrations with Mailchimp for your email marketing and Zapier for your standalone CRMs. However, you don’t get all the benefits of having your website working directly with your CRM to track lead activity.

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Squarespace Support

• The Close Rating:
• 4 out of 5

The Squarespace account support team is very responsive and worked great for us. They don’t have dedicated phone support listed on their website, but offer live chat help from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. We tried the live chat help, and it was easy to understand. The person helping us was able to answer our question and fix something in our account very easily.

If you are looking for help outside of the live chat time frame, the email support is similarly responsive. We sent a request for help on a technical issue on a Monday evening at 9:15 p.m. and got an email back with an answer to the question by 12:00 p.m. the next day. Also, given how large and widely used Squarespace is, there is also an active peer-to-peer network of troubleshooting guides available through the Squarespace knowledge base.

We found answers to relatively obscure and complicated coding questions, innovative suggestions on how to customize our site, and much more on these forums. Definitely a standout resource.

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Where Squarespace Comes Up Short

Squarespace is a little frustrating when it comes to translating your designs to a mobile experience. We all know that the majority of web traffic is generated via mobile devices. We’re happy that every single template on Squarespace is mobile-optimized. However, the webpage we spent an hour meticulously assembling on our laptop was a little out of order and not as effective on a mobile device.

After we figured out what was happening, the problem was fixed. Ensuring that users will get an equally great experience on their phone and computer screen requires an additional step, which is less than ideal.

A more straightforward template like the ones provided on Placester, InCom, or BoomTown will eliminate this problem, so if these sorts of mobile optimization hurdles are a sticking point for you, consider those platforms as good alternatives.

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Examples of Squarespace Real Estate Websites for Agents

Linda Levin, Sotheby’s International Real Estate

Estates Business Group

Suzanne McMillan, Sotheby’s International

Squarespace: The Bottom Line

Out of all the website builders that aren’t real estate-specific, Squarespace is the clear leader. Their designs are beautiful, their options are virtually limitless, and their prices are very competitive. Though they lack some of the industry-specific touches that a provider like Placester makes available, they are still a very viable option for anyone needing to design a new online presence.

Check out Squarespace

Your Turn

Are there any real estate website builders that we missed? What other providers are worthy of review? Tell us which platform you use and what your experiences have been in the comments below.

Real estate websites are one of the many real estate marketing tools agents need to get more leads and promote their business. If you’re looking for more ideas to fill your lead funnel, make sure to check out our article 37 Underrated Real Estate Lead Generation Ideas for 2021.

The post The 6 Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2022 appeared first on The Close.

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Our Top Picks for the Best Real Estate Agent Websites for 2022

After weighing our own subjective judgment of layout and design with more objective quality measures like page loading speed and Domain Authority, we came up with our top picks for the best real estate agent websites for 2022:

Best Layout & Design: Tim Allen

Of all the real estate agent websites we tested, we thought Tim Allen’s had the best overall layout and design. The site is a perfect example of just how crucial choosing the right font is for your website. Almost every site we looked at had lush drone videos, but the font choices never quite worked. Tim Allen’s site meshes great visuals and great typography perfectly.

Runner-up: Jade Mills

Since we had an extremely difficult time choosing the best layout and design among real estate agent websites, we decided to also include Jade Mill’s site as a runner-up. Jade’s site has the same flawless layout and design, with a slightly different aesthetic. Both scream luxury, but in different ways. Which one do you think is better? Let us know in the comments.

Best Personal Branding Website: Susan Breitenbach

While personal branding is not technically part of website design, the imagery an agent chooses to represent themselves and their personal brand is. While most sites went with lush drone videos of beaches and mansions, Susan Breitenbach chose a friendly picture of herself on the beach. Agents are selling their personal brand, not houses. A crucial difference many realtors choose to ignore.

Runner-up: Sandro Dazzan

Another almost perfect mix of gorgeous imagery and beautiful typography, Sandro Dazzan also puts his personal brand front and center on his website. While the majority of the agents on our list featured ethereal drone videos on their image slider, we thought Sandro’s were especially lovely, and he leads right into his bio and headshot from there.

Fastest Loading Time (Mobile & Desktop): Tracy Campion

While there were some stylistic choices on Tracy Campion’s website we would have done differently, her site was the fastest loading website by far, scoring an almost perfect 91 out of 100 on Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool on desktop, and a solid 65 on mobile.

Why This Matters

After Google’s Page Experience Algorithm Update rolled out in August of 2021, loading times on desktop and especially mobile have become crucial ranking factors for Google. You can learn more about this important update and how important it is for your website here: (Google.com) Understanding page experience in Google Search results.

Bonus: Create Your Own (Affordable) Beautifully Designed Real Estate Agent Website

Layout and design: Excellent

Here’s the truth: Competition for leads online will only get fiercer in 2022. That means you need a great-looking real estate website if you want to even have a chance of dominating your farm area.

Luckily, you no longer need to spend a ton of money to get one. The brand-new designs from Placester not only look gorgeous, but are highly customizable, very easy to use, work with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, and start at just $64 per month for National Association of Realtors (NAR) members.

Visit Placester

Real Trends + Our Rankings (From Highest to Lowest)

1. Ben Caballero: 4.1 (out of 5)

Ben Cabellero’s homeusa.com website is clean, attractive, and gets the job done. Since this site is likely targeting developers just as much as it’s targeting homebuyers, it does feel a bit more corporate than other brokerage sites. Slow loading times on both mobile and desktop brought the overall score down.

2. Christian Angle: 4.4 (out of 5)

Since he’s a luxury broker, Christian Angle’s website was a little more polished and attractive than homeusa.com. It also loaded faster and had search features more prominently displayed on the home page. The “call us” and “inquire” buttons at the bottom of the mobile view were a nice touch.

3. Ralph Harvey: 4.3 (out of 5)

Ralph Harvey’s website is dedicated entirely to getting listings, so it does not have any of the usual bells and whistles that other agent’s sites have. It won’t win any design awards, but it gets the job done well enough to propel Harvey into the third spot for agents by volume.

4. Andrew Ernemann 4.6 (out of 5)

Unlike many of the real estate agent websites of the Real Trends Top 25, Aspen luxury broker Andrew Ernemann’s website also loaded fast on desktop. The mobile loading time could improve, but it was still better than most other sites on the list.

5. Craig Morris: 4.5 (out of 5)

Craig Morris’ website won’t win any design awards, but it looks good and gets the job done well. Loading time was fast on desktop, but slowed down considerably on mobile. This is something realtors need to be aware of as Google changes their algorithm to favor mobile content.

6. Jade Mills: 4.9 (Winner, Best Layout & Design)

Our pick for the best-designed real estate agent website of 2022, the Jade Mills site is exactly what you would expect from one of the top luxury brokers in Beverly Hills. It just oozes luxury and prestige, but still manages to offer site visitors easy access to what they’re looking for. The only issue we found with this otherwise perfect website was slow loading time on mobile. While this is probably not going to lead to fewer closed deals for Jade, it is something her web designer should work on improving as mobile-first design becomes more common.

7. Carrie Wells: 4.8 (out of 5)

Another beautifully designed website from a broker in Aspen, Carrie Well’s website scored high in the layout and design category but fell slightly behind with a slower mobile loading time and lower Domain Authority. More proof that mobile optimization should be a primary focus for real estate website designers in 2022.

8. Tracy Campion: 4.7 (out of 5)

While we love the vintage elements of Tracy’s branding that made their way into her website’s design, it did feel slightly cluttered and not quite as put together as some of the other sites on the list. For example, the logo is a little bit blurry, and the mobile layout seemed to compress the logo horizontally on our Android test device. That said, Tracy’s website was one of the only sites to have a fast mobile loading time.

9. Dana Koch: 4.6 (out of 5)

Dana Koch is a new breed (or old breed?) of agent who does not have a website. Instead, we decided to grade Corcoran’s website. As you might expect from a luxury brokerage that cut its teeth in 1980s Manhattan, it’s pretty nice. Surprisingly though, Corcoran’s site was slow to load on both desktop and mobile.

10. David Roberts: 4.6 (out of 5)

David Roberts’ website is nice although a little generic-looking. The drone videos on the image slider are gorgeous, but considering just how expensive the properties they sell are, we would love to see a refresh to make the site feel a bit more luxurious. That said, the site had one of the fastest loading times on the list on both desktop and mobile, so maybe simple is better?

11. Suzanne Frisbie: 4.7 (out of 5)

Susan Frisbie’s site was also nice—if a little bit generic. That said, there were some more creative layout choices and slightly more up-to-date branding, which we liked. The site also loaded very fast on both desktop and mobile, which is crucial for ranking on Google.

12. Ginger Glass 4.6 (out of 5)

Ginger Glass’ website was also nice, but we found the font choices for the site a bit questionable. Personal preference! The site did load fairly quickly on desktop but was a bit slower on mobile.

13. Dora Puig: 3.5 (out of 5)

Are we to the point yet where early aughts website design is retro and cool? If not, Dora Puig’s website is well, how to put this delicately … not great? Amazingly for such a simple website, this site still loads relatively slowly on mobile. We have a sneaking suspicion that IDX might have something to do with the slow loading times.

14. Tim Allen: 5.0 (out of 5)

Tim Allen’s site is an excellent example of just how big a difference choosing the right font can make for a website. The drone videos on the slider are lovely too, but pretty much all the websites on our list had beautiful imagery. It’s not easy, but taking the time to work with your designer to choose the right font is crucial for a great website.

15. Harald Grant: 4.5 (out of 5)

We’re fairly sure this is a website provided by Sotheby’s and as brokerage freebie websites go, it’s acceptable. We would like to see a slightly more integrated header and the content area and video slider extended to the full width of the page, though. Font choices could be better too. Both the serif and sans serif fonts for the body copy are difficult to read at that size.

16. Santiago Arana: 4.4 (out of 5)

We love The Agency’s branding, but can’t help but think their website could use a quick refresh. For example, the red content grid in the middle of the homepage has a pretty generic stock image of a kid yelling into a microphone. This is the third result when you search for “scream” on Unsplash. Not the end of the world, of course, but we expect more from a trend-setting brokerage like The Agency. Mobile loading speed was also very slow.

17. Dina Goldentayer: 4.7 (out of 5)

Dina Goldentayer’s site is a single agent site provided by Douglas Elliman, and we think they do an excellent job. The layout is a bit more creative and put together than many other brokerage’s agent pages, and focusing on listings, in the news, and social media accounts makes a lot of sense for luxury agent pages. Loading speed wasn’t amazing but was at least consistent between desktop and mobile.

18. Susan Breitenbach: 4.8 (out of 5)

Susan Breitenbach’s website has a DIY feel to it—but in a charming way. It’s very clean and spare looking, and we liked how she bucks tradition and doesn’t shove a search bar or listings in your face. It feels personal and welcoming—perfect for selling homes in the Hamptons.

19. Jason Saphire: 4.2 (out of 5)

Jason Saphire’s website is another low fee MLS listing site and while we don’t doubt that it converts like crazy, it’s not exactly pretty. Then again, it doesn’t have to be to do its job as a landing page. As someone wiser than us once said, “ugly converts.”

20. Sandro Dazzan: 4.9 (out of 5)

Feature film quality drone video on the slider, thoughtful font choices, and an attractive layout. What’s not to like here? This is a gorgeous website and we had a hard time finding faults with it. We just wish The Agency brokerage website took a few design cues from Sandro’s website! Mobile speed was a bit slow, but so were most of the other websites on the list.

21. Judy Citron: ​​4.5 (out of 5)

A fresh approach indeed! While we’re not 100% sold on using her last name as a pun to create her branding, we were, well, refreshed to see some creative design choices on her site. After staring at an endless array of hazy Malibu beach drone videos, a fun lemon animation was a welcome change. That said, loading speed was very slow on mobile, probably due to the lemon animation we liked so much.

22. Shana Rohde-Lynch: 4.5 (out of 5)

Nothing groundbreaking here, and we wish her branding was a bit better, but overall this is a pretty solid website. Maybe a bit too minimal, but it does work.

23. Nancy Kogevinas: 4.4 (out of 5)

A well-designed site for sure, but we weren’t wild about the placement of the logos in the header. They seemed a bit too close to the navigation bar for comfort. I get why they did that, but choosing better breakpoints would have done the same thing.

24. Jordan Cohen: 4.5 (out of 5)

A nice-looking site, but maybe starting to feel a little bit dated. This kind of severe design style seemed to be everywhere a few years ago, but most other agents have softened the edges a bit. This does seem to work well with his personal branding. The site also loads quickly on desktop, so a decent compromise maybe.

25. Tim Davis: 4.5 (out of 5)

A fairly standard real estate agent website with pleasant drone photography on the slider and solid typography. It’s a little on the safe side, but traditional seems like the way to go to sell Hampton’s real estate. This was also one of the only sites on the list to have a chatbot featured prominently on the homepage.

[Related article: The Best Real Estate Chatbots for 2022 (Pricing & More)]

The Best Tools & Resources to Build or Improve Your Real Estate Website in 2022

Are you inspired yet? Ready to build your own real estate agent website? Well, you’ve come to the right place. We put together this handy list of real estate agent website resources to make your life easier.

DIY Real Estate Website Builders

Cost: $50-$350 per month

Website builders save you the trouble of building your site from scratch or even from WordPress templates. Using a website builder, you can get a gorgeous website for a fraction of the cost of a custom-designed website.

Here are our favorite real estate website builders for 2022:

[Read: Placester Review + Video: Is It Really the Best Real Estate Website Builder?]

Visit Placester

[Read: Real Geeks Review: An In-depth Look at Pricing & Features]

Visit Real Geeks

[Read: The 6 Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2021]

Visit Propertybase

Custom Real Estate Agent Website Designers

Cost: $5,000+

If you have some money to spend, then hiring a custom real estate agent website designer might have a good return on investment (ROI) for you. Here are a few recommended design agencies that Real Trends agents use:

Agent Image designed websites for several Real Trends agents and teams including The Jills Zeder Group and the Sue Adler Team. They have been around for years and have an excellent reputation.

Example websites: Sue Adler Team, Jills Zeder Group

Visit Agent Image

Real Estate Webmasters designed websites for Real Trends brokerages like Daniel Gale. Like Agent Image, they’ve been around for years and have an excellent reputation.

Example websites: Daniel Gale Sotheby’s, The Agency

Visit Real Estate Webmasters

Luxury Presence focuses on luxury real estate websites and has designed sites for top agents like Jade Mills and Dawn McKenna.

Example websites: Jade Mills, Dawn McKenna

Visit Luxury Presence

Union Street Media designed websites for top agents like Tracey Campion and Tate and Foss.

Example websites: Tate & Foss Sotheby’s, Campion & Company

Visit Union Street Media

Optimizing Your Website for Lead Capture

Of course, having a pretty site won’t help much if you can’t convert site visitors into leads. Our guide to optimizing your website for lead capture is a good place to start learning how to get more leads from your website:

[Related article: 7 Web Design Tricks for Realtors to Get More Leads]

Graphic Design Tools

Cost: Free-$19.99 per month

If you want a professional-looking website, you’re also going to want to use professional graphic design tools to create graphics. Here are our picks:

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for graphics creation and editing photographs. There is a bit of a learning curve, but in our opinion, it is worth the effort. You can get a subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom, Adobe’s image editing software, for $19.99 per month.

Visit Adobe Photoshop

Canva is a simplified version of Photoshop that includes thousands of templates for creating graphics for your website. You can get a subscription to Canva Pro for $4.58 per month.

Visit Canva

Image Resources

Cost: Free!

Next, you’re going to need high-quality stock images and lots of them. We recommend Unsplash, which is 100% free and has beautiful, high-quality images to download.

Unsplash is our go-to resource for free stock images. The quality of images is usually much better than other stock photography sites.

Visit Unsplash

Real Estate SEO Guide

Ranking your website on Google isn’t easy, but there are simple strategies you can use to eventually rank for keywords that will get you leads. To learn more, check out our guide to real estate search engine optimization (SEO) here:

[Related article: Real Estate SEO: 11 Tips to Dominate Local Search & Get Free Leads in 2021]

WordPress Tutorial

If you’re looking for a good do-it-yourself tutorial on building your own real estate agent website with WordPress, check out our in-depth, step-by-step guide here.

[Related article: How to Build an IDX Real Estate Website: The Ultimate Guide 2021]

Single Property Websites

Cost: $24-$99 per month

Single property websites seem to have had their day in the sun already, but they still have some uses for unique properties and luxury estates. They are also a great way to impress easily impressed homeowners. You can build one using WordPress themes or dedicated single property website builders. Check out our guide below to learn more.

[Related article: How Smart Agents Build Single Property Websites in 2021 (Are They Still Worth It?)]

Methodology: How We Ranked the Best Real Estate Agent Websites

Using a mixture of objective measurements (Domain Authority and Google PageSpeed Insights) combined with subjective measurements (our assessment of design and layout), we came up with The Close Score, our method of ranking real estate websites.

Here is a quick breakdown of what our measurements mean and why you should pay attention to them when building your website:

Layout & Design Score (0-5)

CMS

Desktop Page Speed (0-100)

Mobile Page Speed (0-100)

Over to You

What do you think are the best real estate agent websites? Let us know in the comments.

The post Real Trends Top 25 Real Estate Agent Websites RANKED (+ Tips & Tools) appeared first on The Close.

Click on a category below to jump to descriptions and in-depth reviews of The Close’s top picks for the best real estate marketing tools of 2022:

Real Estate Marketing Tool Category	Best Tools
Websites	Real Geeks, Propertybase, WordPress, Placester
Social Media Tools	Artur’In, PorchLyte, Coffee & Contracts, Hootsuite, Buffer, Tailwind
Marketing-focused CRMs	LionDesk, IXACT Contact
Community Engagement Tools	Parkbench
Graphic Design Tools	Lab Coat Agents Marketing Center, Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Kapwing, Unsplash
SEO Tools	Ahrefs, SEMrush
SMS Marketing Tools	SlickText, EZ Texting
Video Production Tools	Rode VideoMicro, Lumen5, Animoto

Websites

Real Geeks

Cost: $299 per month
Learning curve: Low

One of the earliest providers of all-in-one IDX websites and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Real Geeks offers agents, teams, and brokerages a true turnkey solution for their online marketing efforts. There are way, way too many features to list here, but you will get a gorgeous IDX website optimized for lead generation, a powerful CRM, a property valuation tool, SMS texting, market reports, and—yeah, way too much to list here.

Visit Real Geeks

[Related article: Real Geeks Review: An In-depth Look at Pricing & Features]

Propertybase

Cost: Starting at $89 per user, per month
Learning curve: Low

Originally Boston Logic, Propertybase is the professional real estate team’s secret weapon. They offer killer IDX websites with mapping features as well as an integrated CRM that is designed to help teams nurture leads long term and drive more referrals and business. If you already have a website, they offer a standalone CRM that was recently revamped to be even more effective at keeping teams organized and marketing like Fortune 500 companies.

Visit Propertybase

[Related article: Propertybase GO Review: The Next Generation of Real Estate CRM?]

DIY WordPress Website

Cost: Free to $5,000 and up
Learning curve: High

If you’re a bit more tech-savvy and want to get your hands dirty, then you might want to try your hand at building a WordPress website to show off your brand online. While WordPress is easy to use compared to building a site from scratch, the learning curve for non-tech-savvy agents is high. You’ll also need to pay to add features like IDX listings, which come standard with most real estate websites.

Visit WordPress

Related articles:

• How to Build an IDX Real Estate Website: The Ultimate Guide 2022
• The 6 Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2022
• 7 Web Design Tricks for Realtors to Get More Leads
• Real Trends Top 25 Real Estate Agents Websites RANKED

Placester

Cost: Starting at $80 per month
Learning curve: Medium

While they don’t offer a robust, integrated CRM, Placester is definitely worth considering for one reason: they make lovely websites. While there is some debate on whether or not your website needs to be beautiful to convert leads, there is no debate that an ugly site will hurt your brand. So if you already have a CRM you love, you can’t go wrong with a Placester website.

Visit Placester

[Related article: Placester Review + Video: Is It Really the Best Real Estate Website Builder?]

Social Media Tools

Artur’In

Cost: $199 to $399 per month ($300 setup fee waived for Close readers)
Learning curve: Low

One of the biggest problems agents have with social media is finding the time to post enough to stay relevant and feed the algorithms. Artur’In solves this problem by posting sticky, local real estate content to your social media channels for you. So instead of hunting for great content to post every morning, you can focus on creating high-value video content using Instagram Stories or Reels.

[Related article: Instagram Stories for Agents: 12 Easy Ways to Drive Engagement]

Visit Artur’in

PorchLyte

Cost: $47 per month
Learning curve: Low

Founded by Tracey Henning, a Realtor with 27 years of experience, PorchLyte offers agents social media posts, lead magnets, video scripts, blog posts, and training to put it all together into an unstoppable social media presence. She also runs an exclusive Facebook community to share referrals and swap social media strategies.

Close readers can claim 7 days of ready-to-go customizable social media templates from PorchLyte for free. 

Visit PorchLyte

Coffee & Contracts

Cost: $54 per month
Learning curve: Low

Another Realtor-founded company, Coffee & Contracts offers agents gorgeous and trendy templates for Instagram. Founder Haley Ingram calls it “Your $54-a-month Marketing Manager” and we couldn’t agree more. Hiring a social media manager who keeps up with the latest trends as Haley does would easily cost you 10 times what she charges. Assuming you could even find one!

Visit Coffee & Contracts

Hootsuite

Cost: $29 to $599 per month
Learning curve: Low

Hootsuite is the social media software that 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies trust to plan, create, and schedule their social media posts to maximize views and engagement. Hootsuite lets you store frequently used assets like images and logos so you can create and schedule social media content for multiple channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more from one app.

Visit Hootsuite

Buffer

Cost: Free to $99 per month
Learning curve: Low

Like Hootsuite, Buffer also lets agents plan, create, and schedule social media posts. They also have a cool feature that lets you add the first comment to your Instagram posts to entice your followers to engage and include more info about your post. The best part is that, unlike Hootsuite, Buffer offers a limited free version that lets you manage three social accounts and schedule up to 10 posts. Most teams will probably opt to upgrade to the Pro plan for only $15 a month, though.

Visit Buffer

Tailwind

Cost: Free to $9.99 per month
Learning curve: Low

Spend lots of time on Pinterest or Instagram? Then an app like Tailwind is right up your alley. Tailwind lets you schedule social media posts for Pinterest and Instagram but also helps you discover key influencers to work with on Pinterest and trending hashtags to post with on Instagram. Even better, Tailwind has a free trial that lasts forever, so you can use a limited version of the app without paying a dime. Of course, if you want to upgrade, Tailwind is only $9.99 per channel, per month. So if you only want to use Tailwind for Instagram, you’re in luck.

Visit Tailwind

[Related article: 21 Real Estate Social Media Marketing Tips From Top Agents & Coaches]

Marketing-focused CRMs

Speaking of automating relationships, a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool can do just that but on an even higher level than your phone, albeit with a less personal touch. That said, you can use it to automate text messages and schedule phone calls, so there’s a pretty good argument that your CRM is even more important than your phone for marketing. Here are two killer CRMs for individual agents and teams.

LionDesk

Cost: $21 per month
Learning curve: Medium

LionDesk is a lightweight, affordable, and easy-to-use CRM that has everything you need to start organizing and automating your relationships, and with transaction management thrown in for good measure. Even better, you can get set up with LionDesk starting at just $21 per month—less than half what other CRM companies charge.

Visit LionDesk

[Related article: LionDesk Review: The New King of the Real Estate CRM Jungle?]

IXACT Contact

Cost: $33 per user, per month
Learning curve: Medium

When it comes to bang for your buck from a CRM with great marketing tools, IXACT Contact is hard to beat. For just $33 per month, IXACT Contact users get marketing extras like social media automation, a beautiful agent website, and an automated monthly e-newsletter. Agents even get “concierge” setup help and unlimited phone support to make sure they’re getting the best return on investment (ROI).

Click here to learn more and start your free five-week trial to check out this marketing-focused CRM.

Visit IXACT Contact

Related articles:

• The Best Real Estate CRM for 2022: In-depth Reviews & Pricing
• The 7 Best Free Real Estate CRMs of 2022

Community Engagement Tools

Parkbench

Cost: Varies by ZIP code
Learning curve: Low

When it comes to building relationships with local businesses that will get you tons of referrals, there’s only one game in town: Parkbench. Parkbench is the only real estate marketing tool that gives you a turnkey solution to building relationships and nurturing them to generate referrals.

[Related article: How Parkbench Helps Agents Drive Community Connections (Even During a Pandemic)]

Visit Parkbench

Graphic Design Tools

Lab Coat Agents Marketing Center

Cost: $59 per month
Learning curve: Low

LCA Marketing Center is like Canva on steroids. It gives you all the super-easy-to-use design tools Canva does but is only for real estate agents. That means you won’t have to struggle to force restaurant templates to work for your flyers. The designs are also top-notch and very professional-looking.

Visit Lab Coat Agents Marketing

Adobe Photoshop

Cost: $20.99 per month
Learning curve: High

Of course, if you want to get really serious, then Adobe Photoshop is a no-brainer. It is and has been the choice of every serious graphic design professional for more than 20 years now. Facing stiff competition from the likes of LCA Marketing Center and Canva, prices have gone down dramatically. The learning curve is high, though, so Photoshop will require an investment of time and effort to pay off.

Visit Adobe Photoshop

Canva

Cost: Free to $30 per month
Learning curve: Medium

Designed as a Photoshop replacement for the non-tech savvy, Canva is a must-have for agents who don’t have the time to learn Photoshop, or just want to create great-looking visual assets right away. It works a lot like Photoshop—the only difference is that it doesn’t offer nearly as many features. Instead, you get thousands of predesigned templates that you can customize and make your own.

Visit Canva

Kapwing

Cost: Free to $20 per month
Learning curve: Low

Have you ever wondered how we make all those hilarious memes (our mothers think they’re funny) that we share on social media? The answer is our secret meme-making weapon called Kapwing. Kapwing offers tons of meme templates that you can quickly and easily customize, as you can with Canva. Kapwing also lets you make and edit videos, add subtitles, add music to videos, and more.

Visit Kapwing

Unsplash

Cost: Free
Learning curve: Low

Venture capital-backed Unsplash is the best source for royalty-free images online. Full stop. This is where we get 99% of our stock photos for The Close. The only drawback is that the selection of images is limited compared to other sources. The quality is higher, though, so this should be your first choice for royalty-free photos.

Visit Unsplash

SEO Tools

Ahrefs

Cost: $99 per month
Learning curve: Medium

Over the past few years, Ahrefs has managed to wrestle the throne away from Moz and become the most accurate and most useful search engine optimization (SEO) tool on the market. It lets you take the guesswork out of deciding which articles to write by showing the keywords with the most traffic and the lowest difficulty to rank for. Don’t tell them I told you this, but you could theoretically pay for just one month and research your entire content runway for the year. If you’re more serious about SEO, then a monthly subscription makes more sense.

Visit Ahrefs

SEMrush

Cost: $83 per month
Learning curve: Medium

If you want to get serious about beating the competition, then SEMrush is an invaluable marketing tool. It lets you spy on the competition and figure out what keywords they’re ranking for, how much traffic they’re getting, and who is linking to them.

Visit SEMrush

Related articles:

• Real Estate SEO: 11 Tips to Dominate Local Search & Get Free Leads in 2022
• How to Use Real Estate Keywords to Get More Leads From Google

SMS Marketing Tools

SlickText

Cost: Free to $139 per month
Learning curve: Low

SlickText lets agents send bulk text messages for new listings or open house details, schedule texts, add pictures, and set up opt-in text messaging lists to increase engagement automatically. If you start using SlickText to market to your clients and sphere, be ready to give your thumbs a workout.

Visit SlickText

EZ Texting

Cost: $39 to $119 per month
Learning curve: Low

EZ Texting lets real estate agents build SMS lists that people can subscribe to by texting a keyword to their numbers. You can also use EZ Texting to create SMS polls, drip campaigns, and more.

Visit EZ Texting

Video Production Tools

If we have to explain why video is a crucial real estate marketing tool in 2022, you might just be living on another planet. Video is no longer a bonus—it’s increasingly the primary way your leads will interact with your brand.

Rode VideoMicro

Cost: $59
Learning curve: Low

This tiny little video microphone will make your videos sound professional instead of crummy. Sound is even more important than image quality when it comes to video production. After all, your audience isn’t watching your videos to see what you look like. They want to hear what you have to say. If you buy anything to improve your videos, this should be it.

Visit Rode VideoMicro

Lumen5

Cost: Free to $149 per month
Learning curve: Medium

Lumen5 is the easy way to make professional-looking explainer videos with text, stock video, and more. Lumen5 has templates for social media as well as prosumer-level tools to help you create videos that look like they came from a Hollywood studio.

Visit Lumen5

Animoto

Cost: Free to $15 per month
Learning curve: Medium

Animoto is a drag-and-drop video editor that is designed for small businesses. It’s easy to use and gets you slick, professional-looking results without the hassle. Perfect for making quick listing videos, promotional videos, or anything else you want to make that needs to look and sound great.

[Related article: 11 Real Estate Videos Smart Agents Are Using + Examples]

Visit Animoto

Over to You

Are you using a killer real estate agent marketing tool we forgot? Let us know in the comments or join our Facebook Mastermind Group here.

The post 25 Real Estate Marketing Tools Every Agent Needs for 2022 (+ Reviews & Pricing) appeared first on The Close.

In this article, we’ll discuss why you need landing pages, the essential elements of a great real estate landing page, and look at five landing page examples from top producing agents around the country. We’ll also share our recommendations for landing page providers that can help you convert more of your website traffic into leads.

Why Your Website Homepage Isn’t Enough: You Need Real Estate Landing Pages

Studies show that the typical first-time real estate website visitor will visit only two pages of your site—and they won’t stay for longer than a minute or two. Since attention spans are so short and the window to convert a visitor into a lead is so small, you need to be sending them to pages designed expressly for conversion.

The joy and excitement of fantastic Facebook or Google analytics reports for the ads you’re running will be completely dashed when you click over to your customer relationship manager (CRM) to see that not a single one of your visitors converted. Don’t send your leads to your website homepage—you need real estate landing pages instead.

The Close Recommendations: Our Top Picks for Real Estate Landing Page Providers

Real Estate Landing Page Providers	Best For
Real Geeks	Agents who want to create high-converting landing pages and a system that integrates well with popular CRM platforms to help nurture your leads
BoldLeads	Agents who want concierge-level service that includes help with landing page design and the ads that drive traffic to them
InCom	Price-conscious agents who are looking for landing page services for as little as $30 a month
Placester	Agents and teams who are looking for a new website with landing pages and a built-in strategy to help convert web traffic into leads
Chime	Agents who want a high-performering CRM to go along with their top-tier landing pages and an IDX-enabled website

Want to learn more about some of these providers? We’ve done the hard work for you. Read our review and video walk-through of the Real Geeks, BoldLeads, and Placester platforms to help you choose which one works best for you.

5 Live Real Estate Landing Page Examples

Now that we know why landing pages are important and some options for getting one set up, let’s take a look at some real estate landing page examples from actual agents and brokerages that are out there converting prospects into leads.

For the full experience, click the link to visit the page for yourself.

1. Home Valuation Landing Page

Redfin, USA

Our first real estate landing page example comes from Redfin’s Home Valuation landing page, where property owners obtain an estimate on their home’s value at no cost! Actually, that isn’t true—there is a cost. Site visitors must share their contact information, and doing so lets Redfin know that they’re at least considering the idea of selling their home—knowledge that is very valuable.

This page offers an instant valuation, meaning, when someone types in their information, they get an instant result. When it comes to home valuation pages, there is another approach—the delayed valuation, where a visitor types in their information, you get notified, and then create a custom comparative market analysis (CMA) just for them.

Maximizing Your Return From a Home Valuation Landing Page

Providing a visitor with an instant home valuation is a strong conversion strategy. However, instant valuations are based on algorithms like the one used for Zillow’s Zestimate, and aren’t always reliable.

A delayed valuation landing page allows you to put your eyes on a property’s data before confirming an estimated value for your visitor, ensuring a higher level of accuracy and detail but converting at a slightly lower rate.

Experiment with both and see which delivers the best value for your time and money.

2. Property Search Landing Page

William Fastow, Sotheby’s International Realty, Washington, D.C.

The following real estate landing page example comes from William Fastow, a top performer in the DC area.

On the Property Search landing page, prospective buyers can search for available properties on the market and set up custom alerts for the homes they’re looking for. The cost to access these tools? Contact info.

Maximizing Your Return From a Property Search Landing Page

Prospective buyers will be much more likely to exchange their contact information for inside information or exclusive listings. Fastow does this by offering visitors a chance to “see listings before anyone else!”

When putting together your landing page, consider what is most valuable to your visitors, then offer it to them in exchange for their contact information.

3. Real Estate Farm Landing Page

Vintage Oaks, New Braunfels, Texas

Real estate agents marketing entire planned communities or using a real estate farming strategy need to have resources that can attract buyers to an entire region, not just specific properties. This landing page from Vintage Oaks, a builder-developed real estate community in Texas, offers a free e-book to anyone thinking about a purchase in exchange for contact information.

Maximizing Your Return From a Real Estate Farm Landing Page

Real estate transactions are complicated, especially on the buy side. Buyers need to think about the property itself, financing, inspections, appraisal, and more. Offering a resource that hits all those pain points is a great way to start a client relationship (good for you), as well as highlight you as a trusted adviser through a challenging process (great for your clients).

When putting together your real estate landing pages, think about more than just a single pain point. What can you provide the buyers in your market that will help them through the real estate process as a whole?

4. Community Guide Landing Page

Holly Williams, RE/MAX Gateway, Alexandria VA

As a realtor, you’re a community expert. You know every street, every city park, every hip-and-happening coffee shop, and every grocery store. You use these things to promote the listings in your community. Leverage your community expertise like Holly Williams of Alexandria, VA, does by offering exclusive advice on events, insider info on neighborhoods, and suggestions on how to get the most out of what your market has to offer.

Maximizing Your Return From a Community Guide Landing Page

By creating ads for particular communities, you capture the attention of both those who want to live there and those who already live there, making you a local expert for both buyer and seller leads.

Market your landing pages directly to potential buyers through paid advertising, and use them as evidence of your expertise in your listing appointments.

5. Exclusive Homeowner Content Landing Page

Doug Willis, Up2Date Real Estate, Pasadena, CA

Offering content in exchange for contact information is a tried-and-true approach to real estate lead generation, as we see Doug Willis of Pasadena, CA, doing here.

The decision to sell a home often occurs weeks and sometimes months before a homeowner decides to contact a realtor. By offering content designed exclusively for this situation, you can make contact early and begin that nurturing process before any of your competitors has a chance to get involved.

Maximizing Your Return From an Exclusive Homeowner Content Landing Page

Customize your landing pages and lead magnets to your target prospects. Your lead generation strategy will be more effective if your offering speaks directly to their personal profile, goals, or needs.

For instance, if an e-book is titled “6 Projects to Complete Before Listing Your Home for Sale in Oregon,” you will likely get some conversion. But, if you titled it “6 Projects to Complete Before Listing Your Waterfront Home in Portland, Oregon,” you are likely to get a much higher conversion rate from waterfront homeowners in Portland.

The major takeaway here is that multiple, personalized landing pages are much more effective than a single, homogeneous one. When offering content to your would-be listing clients, make it as personalized as possible.

The 6 Essential Elements of Effective Real Estate Landing Pages

Now that we’ve seen some landing pages out in the wild, let’s take a look at what makes these pages so effective. Landing page providers like Placester have each of these elements baked into their templates. How would you tweak them to resonate with your particular community?

Here are six things your real estate landing page can’t do without:

1. A Strong Headline

Your real estate landing page’s headline is the first (and sometimes only) thing that visitors will read from start to finish, so a clear message that captures attention and is easy to understand is a must. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel here, either.

If your real estate landing page’s purpose is to drive leads for an iBuyer platform, a simple headline like “Get an offer on your home with the press of a button” will do the job perfectly.

2. A Crystal-clear Answer to the Question Being Asked

People visiting your landing page are doing so because they were prompted by a question they wanted an answer to—a question like “How much is my home worth?”

Real estate agents who have their landing page game dialed in know that the most effective landing pages answer these questions and ONLY these questions.

If you’ve got someone who is looking for an answer, don’t provide them with unsolicited information, background noise, or further options that don’t answer the original question.

3. A Fantastic Image

Great landing pages use strong imagery to reinforce (and not distract from) their message. The best landing page images represent the geographic area your prospects are either coming from or wanting to go to.

For instance, a landing page image for a real estate agent working in Manhattan could be the city skyline, the interior of a swanky New York loft, an attractive residential block, or the interior of a neighborhood coffee shop. All of these images capture an aspect of Manhattan living without distracting from the visitor’s directive.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: Stay away from videos on landing pages. Videos can slow down the load time of a website, especially on a mobile device. According to a study done by Kissmetrics, more than 40% of your prospects will abort their visit to your site if page load time exceeds two seconds. Your cool drone video of your market’s skyline isn’t worth losing 40% of your leads.

4. A Purpose for Every Word on the Real Estate Landing Page

Every single word and punctuation mark on your real estate landing page needs to have a purpose. Remember, your audience’s attention span only allows you seconds to convince a prospect to become a lead.

The best way to go about sharpening your copy is to get others to read your work. Editing, especially by someone with a writing background and an eye for concise copy, is essential to honing your message.

5. An Optimized Lead Capture Form

The most important part of any landing page is the lead capture form, where your visitors give you their personal information. According to a study by WordStream, top-of-the-funnel lead conversions will drop significantly if a landing page has more than four fields to complete. So, stick with only the information you absolutely need.

Our suggestions are: name, email address, and phone number.

Also, take advantage of the messaging your button allows. “Submit” feels clinical and boring, and doesn’t solicit feelings of urgency. Try button messaging like “Sign Me Up” or “Get It Now” to convey a conversational tone.

CLOSE INSIDER TIP: A/B testing is a great way to continually tweak the performance of your landing page’s lead capture forms. Does a red button or a green button do better? How about three forms to fill out vs four? Perform the tests, and take the data to make your landing pages better through ongoing optimization.

6. A Mobile-friendly Experience

Just shy of 90% of Facebook sessions occur on a mobile device, which means that if you’re running ads on Facebook to drive traffic to your landing pages, making sure the mobile experience is a good one is key. Double-check all your landing pages on both desktop and mobile before sending them live.

Your Turn

Have you had success with a real estate lead generation strategy directing prospects to landing pages? Do you have an amazing strategy for converting traffic into clients? Tell us about your experience in the comments below. If you want more advice from pros nationwide on real estate landing pages, make sure to join our free The Close Real Estate Agents Mastermind Group on Facebook.

The post 5 Clever Real Estate Landing Pages That Convert Like Crazy appeared first on The Close.

So in order to demystify some of the jargon and strategies you’ll face when you start learning how to promote your real estate business online, we put together this in-depth article explaining what keywords are and how to find the best ones to generate leads.

Since keywords and keyword strategy is surprisingly complex, let’s start at the beginning:

What Are Real Estate Keywords?

Real estate keywords are words or short phrases that Google and other search engines use to categorize content. Generally speaking, the real estate keyword(s) used in an article will represent the main subject of the article or webpage.

What Are The Best Real Estate Keywords?

Unfortunately, finding the best real estate keywords for your farm area is going to take a lot more work than copy/pasting a list from a website. There are two very simple reasons why keywords from a generic list like this will not get you any leads from your website:

1. Generic keyword lists only show what the most people are searching for. They DO NOT mention that most of them are almost impossible to rank for. Even Zillow has trouble ranking for some keywords!
2. Even if by some miracle you manage to rank near Zillow, Trulia, your local MLS, or giant chain brokerages like Keller Williams and Compass, getting traffic outside your farm area is not going to help you close more deals. Period.

Still, it’s important to get an idea of what kind of keywords rank nationally, so all caveats aside, here’s a list of some of the best performing real estate keywords.

Best Real Estate Keywords

Keywords	Searches per Month (US)	Difficulty (ahrefs, January 2020)
Real Estate	396,000	94
Homes for sale near me	201,000	59
Houses for sale near me	172,000	53
House for sale	132,000	50
Real estate agent	47,000	57
How to buy a house	27,000	49
Condos for sale	65,000	17
Townhomes for sale	20,000	5
Realtors near me	27,000	3
Cheap houses for sale	9700	22
Foreclosed homes	25,000	0
Waterfront homes for sale	4600	8
Real estate agent	47,000	67
How much is my house worth?	25,000	60

Understanding Search Volume & Keyword Difficulty Estimates

Since the goal of your website is to get traffic and leads, the main criteria that professional bloggers use to measure the editorial value of a keyword is the number of searches it gets per month on Google.

Search Volume: Potential Monthly Traffic

This number is called the keyword’s search volume. As you might imagine, the higher the search volume the more potential traffic you can get from writing about it, but search volume alone only tells us how many people search for a term.

As you can imagine, the higher the search volume, the more websites trying to compete for the top spots in Google for that term. The reason why is clear; if you rank No. 1 for a very high volume keyword, your site will get a ton of traffic.

Keyword Difficulty: How Hard it is to Rank For a Keyword

Luckily, SEO software companies like Moz and Ahrefs came up with a way to measure how hard it is to rank for specific keywords. This is called keyword difficulty. As we said before, generally speaking, the higher the search volume, the higher the difficulty since there will be more competition, but some keywords with relatively low search volume can have very high difficulty.

Understanding EAT Signals & Domain Authority

Before we dig into how to research and use keywords, let’s take a quick look at other factors Google uses to rank websites.

EAT Signals

EAT is an acronym coined by Google that stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness—three criteria that Google uses besides keywords in order to decide which article from which website gets ranked highly. How Google measures EAT is a bit too complicated to get into here, but it’s still important to understand that Google values EAT highly. Much more highly than keywords!

Domain Authority

Domain authority is less about the EAT of your company and more about the trustworthiness of your website. Things like age of website (older is better), the quality of writing, other high quality sites linking to yours, and low spam scores all contribute to a site’s domain authority.

Here’s a quick example: The National Association of Realtors has been online since the mid-nineties and is pretty much the most trustworthy source for real estate information in the country. Therefore, Google ranks content from NAR very highly. If NAR decides to write an article on dual agency, chances are it will rank very well and very quickly.

Why These Real Estate Keywords Lists Won’t Work.

Hopefully by now if you’ve been paying attention, you’re starting to realize that while keywords are crucial, ranking on Google is a lot harder than just having the right keywords. Believe it or not, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Google picks search results. They even use artificial intelligence, and their exact criteria for ranking remains a closely guarded and always-changing secret.

Even if you are writing for a site like Zillow or Inman, your goal for your website is not just traffic. You only want relevant traffic that has the potential to convert into leads and deals. That means ranking No. 1 for a real estate keyword in Florida might get you some traffic, but it will be useless to you if you live and work in Michigan!

Don’t worry though, luckily you know us, and we have firsthand experience building huge six figure monthly traffic sites by ranking articles on Google … In fact, chances are you’re probably reading this because you found us on Google, right?

DIY Keyword Research Tools You’ll Need to Find The Best Real Estate Keywords

OK, if generic keyword lists like the one above won’t help you rank higher on Google, how can you find the keywords that will?

Simple. With a lot of research, a lot of analyzing Google search results pages (SERPs), and a little luck, you’ll come up with a list of relevant and targeted keywords that you can use to plan the content you’ll create for an entire year.

Unfortunately, effective keyword research requires proprietary tools in order to get the best data quickly. Since Google doesn’t really publish their search criteria and only offers search volume for customers who buy their PPC ads, a handful of SEO software companies have swooped in to fill the void.

Here are the top three keyword research tools we use every day in order to plan our evergreen (traffic comes mostly from Google searches) content for the Close.

Ahrefs

What it does: Search volume & difficulty, site audits, rank tracker + more
Cost: Starting at $99 per month
Ease of Use: Medium

Our first go-to tool for keyword research is Ahrefs. Ahrefs has very similar tools that competitors like Moz offer, but its data is a bit more accurate (according to our own research, that is). It also gives you questions people ask along with keywords.

Moz

What is does: Search volume & difficulty, domain authority, page grader, local market analytics + more
Cost: Starting at $99 per month ($79 per month paid annually)
Ease of Use: Medium

One of the earliest SEO tools, Moz actually invented its own domain authority metric which is widely used in the industry. You can also use Moz to find what other sites are ranking for, as well as who is linking to them.

SEMrush

What it does: Competitor research, keyword analytics, backlink tracking + more
Cost: Starting at $99 per month
Ease of Use: Hard

SEMrush is the go-to tool in the SEO industry for spying on your competitors’ websites to see and track what keywords they rank for as well as getting lists of other sites that link to your competitor’s site. You can even set alerts, audit websites, and more.

Frugal Alternative: Hire a Freelance Keyword Researcher on Fiverr

Why it might make sense: SEO software is expensive and takes time to learn and use
Cost for keyword research: $5-$150

Of course since writing evergreen content and optimizing it for Google is not your main gig, shelling out for expensive SEO software you don’t really know how to use might not make much sense. There’s also the fact that even once you’re an expert at the software, finding great keywords still takes a lot of time and effort.

By hiring someone on Fiverr to do your keyword research for you, you can get a simple spreadsheet of keywords and article ideas that will give you a road map for the year for less than the price of a month of SEO software. More to the point, the person you hire will probably find the good stuff much faster than you can.

Just make sure to ask them if they’re using the software listed above, and get a list of keywords with search volume, keyword difficulty, and maybe some lists of what keywords your biggest competitors already rank for.

Click below to head over to Fiverr and find someone to do your keyword research starting at just five bucks.

Visit Fiverr

How to Research & Find The Best Real Estate Keywords for YOUR Farm Area

OK, now that you have a better understanding of why generic lists won’t work and the tools you need, let’s take a look at finding and evaluating keywords to use for your blog.

1. Understand That The Days of “Tricking” Google are Long Gone

Before we get started, we have one more important caveat for you. While it might have been possible to “trick” Google by stuffing a bunch of keywords on one page, or ranking for keywords that are not real estate related, those days are long gone. Instead, focus on finding keywords that will get you local traffic, and will also be of interest to your potential leads.

2. Research Keywords Your Competitors Already Rank For (DIY or Freelancer)

The first step to doing keyword research is the research your local competitors. Are they ranking on Google for local keywords? You might be surprised to learn that many real estate companies, even very successful ones, don’t bother trying to rank on Google.

While you can always gather a list of keywords and run Google searches to see who ranks for which keyword, there is a much easier way to figure out what your competitors rank for: SEMrush.

All you need to do is plug your competitors domain name into SEMrush, scroll down to the ‘Top Organic Keyword” section, then click on “View Full Report.”

Now you have a list of all the keywords your competitors rank for on Google. You can even sort by an estimate of how much traffic they get from ranking certain keywords, the article that ranks, and of course the search volume and difficulty rankings.

Once you have lists run for your competitors, you can either save as a spreadsheet or save in SEMrush. If you’re working with a Fiverr keyword researcher, be sure and ask for a spreadsheet like this from competitors.

One caveat here is that SEMrush’s search volume and difficulty ratings are not quite as accurate as Ahref’s or Moz’s. Since most hyperlocal keywords will only have a handful of searches per month, accuracy is pretty important.

3. Research All the Keywords You’ll Need for One Year of Content (DIY or Freelancer)

Fire up Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and start plugging in some general search terms about real estate, then try and drill down to local and hyperlocal searches.

Ahrefs will of course give you pretty accurate search volume and keyword difficulty, as well as an estimate of cost per click for social media advertising, parent topic, related questions, as well as keywords using similar terms and SERP features.

Once you find keywords or groups of keywords that have relatively high search volume and relatively low difficulty, then save as a spreadsheet to use in Excel or Google Sheets, or save to Ahrefs as a keyword list. Just remember that hyperlocal keywords with search volume of only 20 or 20 searches per month might only get you 10 page views, but since these will be “down funnel” results (people who are closer to making a purchasing decision) that traffic will be worth its weight in gold. Even better, difficulty should be low enough that ranking quickly is possible.

What to Search Ahrefs for

One of the tricky things about Ahrefs is that the results you get back are only as good as the information you plug in. Here’s some tips for what to look for to get better results:

• Hyperlocal keywords
• Keywords that offer specific types of local property (waterfront, Victorians, etc.)
• Common questions your leads ask
• Real estate search terms + your farm area name
• Instructional keywords (how to buy a house, how to get approved for a mortgage etc.)
• Questions about your farm area
• Questions about working with a Realtor
• Questions about types of homes
• Questions about common home repairs
• Questions about home values and what affects them

If you’re working with a keyword researcher, ask them for keywords using similar criteria.

4. Research SERPs for Your Keywords (DIY or Freelancer)

While you should get this automatically when you run keyword searches in Ahrefs, sometimes you might want to check for yourself. One reason why checking the SERPs yourself is important is that Google changes its algorithm regularly, which might change who ranks for your keyword, or what SERP features there are like snippets, local pack, “People also ask” drop downs, videos, and more.

Search Intent

One thing you should pay particular attention to when looking at SERPs is trying to figure out what the search intent is for people searching for those keywords. For the most part, Google will try and rank articles, videos, or other content in order to provide the “best” answer to the question searchers are asking.

For example, if someone searches for “How to Market My House,” and you find lots of how-to guides on the front page, then it’s likely that searchers are clicking on how-to guides. If someone searches “Best Realtor in Los Angeles” then you’ll be more likely to find list posts. Take note of what kinds of articles rank well for your keywords, and remember to bookmark the top five to take a deep dive into later.

4. Plan Your Content For the Year (DIY)

OK, by now if you’ve followed along with our keyword research strategy, you should have a list of keywords with search volume and difficulty from Ahrefs, a list of what your competitors rank for and an estimate of how much traffic they get, as well as a basic overview of what kind of content is ranking for those keywords.

The next step is to sit down and prioritize the content you think will have the biggest impact on your audience. There are two main strategies for prioritizing content. Prioritize the content that has the highest search volume and lowest difficulty, or prioritize the content that is most important to your audience.

For beginners, we recommend prioritizing content that is important for your audience. You will probably not rank right way, but you can also blast this content out via email, social media, paid ads, etc.

How SEO Experts Use Real Estate Keywords in Their Content

Of course even if you spent a ton of money or time finding amazing keywords, they will be useless for your business unless you know how to use them. While this topic will be covered in more detail in later articles, here’s a quick best practices guide for using real estate keywords.

Useful Tool:

Yoast WordPress plugin

What it does: Keyword optimization, schema data, robots.txt + more
Cost: $89 one-time cost for premium version (recommended)

1. Write for Your Audience First, Google Second

Always remember that your main goal here is to educate your reader first, and show up on Google second. In fact, if your article is spammy, it won’t rank on Google for long as Google regularly tests how many people click on articles on the front page and even how long they stay on the page. If everyone bounces from your article right away, Google will rank other articles above it.

2. Pay Specific Attention to Titles, Meta Descriptions & H2s

There are three key places you want to add keywords to your blog posts. In order of importance: The title, the meta description, and the H2s of your article. Try to use the keywords naturally in all three places. Don’t jam them into sentences or articles that don’t match the search intent of the reader you spent so much time researching in step 4!

3. Don’t Use a Real Estate Keyword For More Than One Blog Post

If you download the Yoast plugin for WordPress, this is one of the first warnings you’re likely to get. Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to write more than one article targeting the same keyword. Even worse, NEVER try and rank subtle variations of the same keyword in different articles thinking you’ll trick Google. You won’t.

4. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

The idea here is to use keywords naturally in your articles which should give you something like a 1% keyword density. In other words, if your article is 100 words long, you should use the keyword one time in the body copy. As long as you have the keyword in the title, meta, and H2s, then you don’t need to worry about how many times you use the keyword in the body copy. Just use it whenever it’s natural to use it in a sentence or paragraph.

5. Remember to Include EAT Signals

Since you want your articles to signal EAT to Google, you should always include EAT signals in your articles. At a minimum, your WordPress author bio should have your credentials including designations, and you should quote and link to other real estate experts in your articles.

6. Link to Your New Blog Post From Older Blog Posts

Linking to your new blog post from other blog posts can help you rank better as it helps Google “read” and categorize the content on your site. This is another thing the Yoast plugin will recommend.

7. Review Keywords & Update Your Blog Post Once per Year

Finally, if you want to rank on Google long term, you’re going to want to update your blog posts at least once a year, more often for important pages. Go back and change the date, add relevant new information of news, and try and make your article more readable and useful for your readers.

Your Turn

What did you think of our guide to researching and using real estate keywords? Let us know in the comments.

The post How to Use Real Estate Keywords to Get More Leads From Google appeared first on The Close.

These sites offer new agents a turnkey solution that offers pretty much everything they need to get started generating leads online.

The only problem is that with so many options, choosing the platform isn’t easy. In order to make your life easier, we did an in-depth comparison of four of the leading real estate agent website options available today; Chime, Easyagent PRO, Real Geeks, and Boomtown.

Before we dive in, here’s a quick comparison of pricing and main benefits for each platform:

Real Estate Agent Website	Best For	Pricing
Chime	Best looking websites	$218—$338 per month (+$218—$338 setup fee)
Easyagent PRO	Best lead capture	$159—$259 (+setup fee)
Real Geeks	Best for Teams	$299 + $25 for each new agent
Boomtown	Best for Brokerages	$350—$999 per month (+$199—$499 setup fee)

Best Looking Real Estate Agent Websites: Chime

A Real Estate Operating System 

Offering a fully featured CRM, lead generation, an IDX website, and even basic transaction management, Chime is positioning itself as a “real estate operating system” offering almost everything an agent or team needs right out of the box.

Amazingly, according to users we spoke with, Chime manages to package all of their tools in a well designed, easy to use package that is very new agent friendly. Everything they offer looks great, is intuitive to use, and even better, comes with an actual app instead of a mobile website.

For today’s mobile only agents and leads, having an app that just works is a huge selling point. This will increase agent adoption, and help individual agents integrate the system into their daily workflow.

Pricing for Chime is also pretty reasonable for what you get. PPC advertising for lead generation is also fairly and transparently priced starting at $500 per month+ 15% ad management fee.

Gorgeous IDX Websites

Although many might disagree with us, we thought that Chime offers the nicest looking IDX websites of the four platforms. Layouts are clean and well organized, and best of all, great looking. Check out California’s the Boyenga Team’s site for an idea of what we’re talking about.

Unique Features:

Since most of the platforms offered somewhat similar functionality for their CRM and IDX websites, here are a few standout unique features for Chime:

Dialer

Chime’s dialer let’s agents click to call their leads as well as leave voicemails, send pre written texts and more. It even offers suggested scripts for reaching out to the leads it suggests for you every morning.

Transaction Management

Another cool feature Chime offers is transaction management. You can create custom automated workflows, store documents, team management tools, and basic accounting tools.

Chime also integrates with Dotloop if you’re already using Dotloop or plan to in the future.

Chime Pricing for Website & CRM (+onboarding)

	Professional	Accelerator	Enterprise
Price	$218 per month + $218 setup fee	$338 per month  + $338 setup fee	Call
Discount	10% discount for Professional package if paid for year up front	15% discount for Accelerator package if paid for year up front	15% discount for 10 or more seats

Chime Buyer Lead Generation Tools	Chime Seller Lead Generation Tools
IDX Website	Home Evaluation Landing Page
Example Chime IDX websites: http://janetbesheer.com/ http://www.bistateteam.com/ https://www.boyengateam.com/	Example Home Evaluation landing Page: https://www.morrisonteam.com/evaluation

Chime PPC (Pay-Per-Click)Lead Generation Pricing (They advertise on social media for you)

Buyer Lead Generation	Seller Lead Generation
16-20 leads: $500 per month +15% ad management fee	6-8 leads: $500 per month +15% ad management fee
32-40 leads: $1000 per month +15% ad management fee	12-16 leads: $1000 per month +15% ad management fee
48-60 leads: $1500 per month +15% ad management fee	18-24 leads: $1500 per month +15% ad management fee

CRM Capability and Lead Nurturing

Professional	Accelerator All above features+
Bulk email	Round Robin and Blast
Bulk texting	Action Plan Library
Custom sales pipeline	Smart Dynamic Lead Scoring
Mobile CRM	Full Funnel Business Forecasting
Automated smart actions	Team Performance Analytics

Integrations

Mail Chimp, BombBomb, Zapier, Dotloop, Brokermint, Zillow, Realtor, Trulia, (Skyslope and ziplogix coming soon)

Customer Support/Training

Phone support: Monday-Friday 9-5 EST

Email: 24/7

Visit Chime

Best Real Estate Agent Websites for Mobile & Lead Capture: Easyagent PRO

Mobile First Design

One of the best things about Easyagent PRO is that their IDX websites are not only great looking, but have a mobile first design.

Fonts are big and easy to read, layouts make perfect sense on mobile, and everything just seems more mobile focused that the other platforms. It’s so mobile focused that some design elements look a little bit odd on a desktop.

Considering a huge number of buyers are switching their home search to mobile, this is hugely important.

Unique Features:

Done for you blogging

One of the coolest features that Easyagent PRO offers for the leadsites are “done for you” blog posts. The team at EAP will write two posts to your blog every week. For busy Realtors who don’t have the time or resources to blog, this is a great feature.

Automatic Text Followup

Using EAP’s Texty app, you can send automated text messages every time a lead opts in on one of your landing pages or lead capture form. Text messages are a great way to get your leads attention.

Unlimited Landing Pages — point and click editing

EAP also offers the ability to create unlimited landing pages with their point and click landing page creation tool. You can even add a tracking pixel to show ads to leads who didn’t sign up across the web.

Easyagent PRO Pricing for Website and CRM (+onboarding)

	Leadsites	Leadsites Plus
Price	$159/month (CRM not included)	$259/month (CRM not included)

Easyagent PRO Buyer Lead Generation Tools	Seller Lead Generation Tools
IDX website	Home valuation landing page
Example Easyagent PRO IDX Websites: https://lasvegasrealtyreport.com/ https://bartleyrealty.com/ https://thejacobsrealty.com/	https://thejacobsrealty.com/home-value-analysis/

PPC (Pay-Per-Click)Lead Generation Pricing (They advertise on social media for you)

N/A

Features: CRM Capability (N/A) and Lead Nurturing

Automated text messaging

Integrations

Liondesk, Mailchimp, Top Producer, BombBomb, Hubspot, Realty Juggler, Follow Up Boss

Customer Service/Training

Phone: M-F 9-5 MST

Incredible training and “office hours”

Visit Easyagent PRO

Best Real Estate Agent Websites for Teams & Value: Real Geeks

Great Value for Solo Agents and Teams

Starting at just $299 per month for 2 agents and just $25 extra per new agent, Real Geeks is a great deal for growing teams. While Easyagent PRO comes in at a slightly more affordable $159, they don’t offer a CRM, and the site is designed for one agent only.

They also offer a ton of team friendly features like round robin lead assignment, idle lead reassignment, text autoresponders, and the ability to text with multiple leads in one window with auto replies.

You can send out a mass text, then carry on multiple text conversation from your desktop with those that reply.

Home Valuation Tool & Market Reports

Although the other platforms also offered variations of home valuation landing pages, Real Geeks is the only one to offer instant valuations. The other platforms just ask for leads to wait for a call or email from an agent.

This is important because many seller leads just want to get a quick valuation. They’re also perfectly willing to give away some contact info for that valuation.

However, many are not willing to offer contact information just so an agent can call them for a home valuation. Using Real Geeks, you can capture partial lead info, e.g. just an address that you can send postcards too.

The site will also create and send out market reports to nurture seller leads. Like Easyagent PRO, you can also create unlimited market reports.

Unique Features

Facebook marketing tool

Real Geeks Facebook Marketing Tool let’s agents easily and quickly create Facebook ads right in the Real Geeks platform. It helps agents create Facebook ads through their website, and also allows them to easily include a tracking pixel to advertise to site visitors across the web.

Idle Lead Reassignment

Another cool feature offered by Real Geeks is their idle lead reassignment feature. If a lead is assigned to an agent who doesn’t take an action in a specified time frame, that lead gets sent to the next agent in the rotation.

That means ALL leads in your system have a much better chance of being followed up with quickly. No more micromanaging. Just tell your junior agents that Real Geeks will reassign the lead if they don’t act.

Real Geeks Pricing for Website and CRM (+onboarding)

	1-2 Agents	Addititional Agent
Price	$299/month (2 users incl.)+ $250 onboarding fee	+$25 for each agent

Buyer Lead Generation Tools	Seller Lead Generation Tools
IDX website Market report drip emails	Home Valuation Landing Page (instant)
Example Real Geeks IDX websites: http://www.thebarticgroup.com/ http://www.dallashomerealty.com/ http://www.chinattirealty.com/	Example home valuation landing page: https://www.hawaiianrealestate.com/cma/property-valuation/ Market report drip emails

PPC (Pay-Per-Click)Lead Generation Pricing (They advertise on social media for you)

Google PPC: Starts at $300 per month + ad spend

Real Leads Facebook Marketing: Starts at $300 per month+ ad spend

Features: CRM Capability and Lead Nurturing

Email & SMS notifications	Prioritize Leads' Motivation
Live Feed	Lead Scoring
Track Lead Activity	Automated Email Drip
Email Integration and Sync	Email Blasts
Lead SMS Autoresponders	Social Profiles
Agent Activity	Lead Source Tracking
Advanced Search Filtering	Email Templates
Agent/Lender Lead Routing	Mobile Optimized
Idle Lead Reassignment	SMS Templates
Follow-ups and Reminders

Integrations

Zillow, Realtor, Bold Leads, Lion Desk, Zapier, Wise Agent, Dotloop, Mojo Dialer, Riley, Velocify

Customer Support/Training

Email and phone
8 am CST – 11 pm CST, 7 days a week

Visit Real Geeks

Best Real Estate Agent Websites for Brokerages: Boomtown!

Highly Flexible Sites for Brokerages

Designed (and priced) with growth in mind, Boomtown is a great option for larger teams and growing brokerages. Big names like Adam Hergenrother, and Pearson Smith Realty rave about the robust features that Boomtown offers their brokerages.

Unique Features

Agent subdomains

One of the coolest features Boomtown offers for teams and brokerages is the ability to create agent subdomains right from the platform. Being able to offer custom websites (on your domain) can be a huge selling point for recruiting new agents or team members.

Data gathering popups

Boomtown also put a lot of time, testing, and effort into creating popups that don’t just try and gather contact information, but useful data as well. For example, one popup discreetly asks site visitors for their time frame for buying a home.

This means more data to segment leads and less time spent qualifying leads. Instead, you can route leads to the right agent quickly and easily before they’ve been screened.

MLS Hotsheet

The MLS hotsheet is a feature that all CRM’s with MLS integration should offer. It shows your agents the “hot” new listings in the system that are getting a lot of attention. This means less time spent on your clunky MLS interface and more time in Boomtown.

Boomtown Pricing for Website and CRM (+onboarding)

	Launch	Grow	Advance
Price	1-3 agents: $750 + $750 onboarding fee	3-10 agents: $1500 + $1500 onboarding fee	Price varies by number of markets

Buyer Lead Generation Tools	Seller Lead Generation Tools
IDX website	Home Valuation Landing Page (limited)
Example Boomtown! IDX Websites https://www.i35group.com/ https://jray.keatyrealestate.com/   https://www.analuxuryhomes.com/	https://www.irealtyar.com/sell/

PPC (Pay-Per-Click)Lead Generation Pricing (They advertise on social media for you)

15% of Marketing budget ($250 minimum spend, $750 minimum spend for AdWords and Social)

Features: CRM Capability and Lead Nurturing

Actionable Insights	Lender Access
Hot Sheet with MLS Updates	Lead Routing
Smart Prospecting Tools	Drip System
Automated emails, texts	Marketing Automation
Lead Scoring	Email Templates
Property Alerts	Email Templates
Predictive Intelligence
Listing Analytics

Integrations

Zillow, Trulia, RPR, Mojo Dialer, BombBomb

Customer Support/Training

Email and phone

8 am EST – 8 pm EST,
7 days a week

Visit BoomTown

The 30,000 Foot View

Choosing the right real estate agent website builder for you or your growing team or brokerage is not easy. However, most of the platforms on offer today offer something unique that might help you close more deals. Chime, Easyagent PRO, Real Geeks and Boomtown all offer a great combination of features at several price points.

The post Best Real Estate Websites: Chime vs Easyagent PRO vs Real Geeks vs Boomtown! appeared first on The Close.