The modern Real estate team needs a website that is full of content and resources for current & prospective customers. To achieve this you need a website builder that gives you the freedom to create content, posts & landing pages when you need without having to pay a development company to do so.
What are the key features that make up a real estate website builder?
- Page editor
- Automatic content uploading
- Blog posts
- Menus & navigation
- SEO tools & meta data
- Support
Page Editor
A page editor is what determines how much flexibility you will have over the content that shows within each page on your website. You need a page editor that gives you control over the content on the page without having to be a website developer to make changes to the content.
A good page editor will let you do the following;
- Edit & add content (text, images, buttons, links, videos, etc)
- Add new sections
- Include functional items like forms, menus and calculators
- Include dynamic content like listings, team members and reviews
Automatic content uploading
The great thing about having a real estate website is that your listings are fantastic content. Your website builder should support an integration with a bulk uploader to ensure that all of the listing updates you make in your CRM are automatically posted to your website. This will give you a never ending stream of new content. Bonus points if the website builder automatically displays things like Team members, reviews, office details, open home times and auction times.
Blog posts
Posting regular content should be quick and easy. Regular content updates on your website are imperative for strong SEO rankings and engagement with your website visitors.
Menus & navigation
You need to be able to change the Menus & navigation on your website so that the content you create is accessible and laid out in a way that makes sense to you and your customers.
SEO tools & meta data
On top of writing relevant content your website needs some tools in order for you to have the best possible chance at ranking for your target search terms.
Here are some of the SEO tools you should expect from your website builder
- Access to meta data (title, description, keywords)
- Automatic sitemaps
- Ability to install tracking scripts for things like Google analytics, Facebook, Google tag manager, etc
- Automatically structured data for Schema and OGP
Support
Let’s face it… you’re in real estate not website development. Chances are you are going to get stuck from time to time and will need some support to keep you moving. A good website builder should come with support to help you not only resolve any issues you may have but do it as quickly as possible.
The top 5 website builders for real estate
- Arosoftware
- WordPress
- Squarespace
- WIX
- Drupal
1. Arosoftware
The Aro real estate website platform is a managed website builder built exclusively for real estate agents to bring your simplified page editing and powerful automatic content integrations to ensure that your website is always changing and meeting SEO requirements. Create landing pages in minutes, insert forms that are integrated with your CRM, add blog posts and much more.
The best bits
- Page editor built for real estate agents
- Phone, chat & email support
- Automatically displays your listings, team, reviews, open homes, auctions, contact details and social media profiles.
- Automatically generates SEO data
- Ready to use real estate templates
- Managed services means no hosting or maintenance headaches
2. WordPress
WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites on the internet and is an extremely powerful website builder. It is a fantastically powerful solution with no shortage of functionality. You can use a tool like Easy property listings to get your listing data imported automatically and with a huge range of plugins available for install you will be able to set up and configure your website to do everything on the list above.
You will need to set up or purchase hosting to run wordpress and stay on top of regular updates.
The best bits
- Huge range of plugins
- Lots of templates available to purchase
3. Squarespace
Squarespace is a great cost effective option for launching a website quickly. With a large range of ready to go templates you will be able to create an account and have something to launch within days or even hours. Like Aro, it is a managed service so you don’t need to worry about server setup, hosting and security and the maintenance that comes with it.
Unfortunately there is no way for Australian real estate agencies to get their data into squarespace automatically so you will need to enter this manually.
The best bits
- Managed service
- Super fast to get started and launch a new website.
- Cost effective
4. Wix
A very similar solution to squarespace with many of the same benefits. Wiz comes with a great drag and drop editor and a massive range of ready to go website templates.
Like squarespace, Australian real estate teams will need to manually enter listing data as there is currently no listing integration for bulk uploaders.
The best bits
- Managed service
- Huge range of apps
- Cost effective
5. Drupal
Drupal is the second open source system behind WordPress and is a great option if you are looking for a foundation to build a custom website from the ground up. There are a range of templates available to install or you can buy out of the box templates from a range of online stores.
There is no current plugin for automatically importing listings via REAXML so again you will need to do this manually or build a plugin to do it for you.
The best bits
- Open source
- Very flexible
Choosing a website builder for your real estate business
Making the choice can be challenging, one solution is unlikely to tick absolutely every box. You need a solution that is going to give you the platform to create a website you are proud of whilst also allowing you to produce content quickly to ensure that your website helps grow your business.
If you need any assistance, check out the FAQ below or book a consult with our team and we will guide you through the process.
Frequently asked questions about website builders
It varies from solution to solution. For example, wordpress is free to download but will cost you money to host. Aro is a managed service where everything is set up and managed for you in all plans.
CMS stands for content management system software. A CMS lets you edit & manage a website without the need to learn hot to write code.
You can set most website builders up without a domain name but when it comes time to make your website live you will need a domain name.