Elevate your luxury listings with the spotlight they deserve. Single property websites position your listings to make a stunning first impression.
We all know the saying about first impressions. These days, staging and listing a home don’t just boil down to a few professional photos and some fragrant cleaning products. More than likely, the first glimpses that potential buyers steal of your listings won’t be from a drive-by or a tour—they’ll probably take place online.
High-end real estate websites pull attention and intrigue to your properties, attracting the buyers you want for your luxury listings. Creating property websites sets you and your properties apart from the swipe-based, “onto the next” platforms that keep buyers looking for the next best thing. Instead, impress your sellers when you showcase their listings on a streamlined platform that gives buyers a true feel for the unique draw of the home.
What is a property website?
A single property website is just as it sounds—a website dedicated to a specific property that’s listed for sale. It’s a one-stop-shop where potential buyers can find everything they want to know about a home on the market, presented the way you and the seller want it to come across.
Conglomeration sites like Zillow and top-down sites like MLS platforms can be difficult to navigate and don’t always follow a logical flow of information. Potential buyers can end up swiping right past a listing without even seeing its best features simply because of the way these sites are constructed and organized. With single property websites, you’re in control of what information shines through and the way that it’s organized.
Understandably, many real estate professionals hear the word “website” and envision hours upon hours of coding work or expensive outsourcing for every property site. In reality, partnering with a professional service makes creating high-end real estate websites attainable and efficient.
Why create one for each listing?
From the listing appointment to closing day, single property websites set you apart as an agent who knows the high value of the luxury homes you work to promote. Treating each listing as something special—exactly as you want buyers to see them—communicates your expertise and attention to detail.
Dazzle Sellers
Property websites aren’t the norm quite yet, which means now is the perfect time to use them to establish yourself as a cutting-edge realtor. Show up to a listing appointment with a few of these in your portfolio, and you’re automatically the agent who goes above and beyond.
No seller wants their home to be just another photo on a quick-swipe website. Taking this solid step to do their listing justice communicates that you care about attracting the right buyers and serving them well. Creating a single property website shows sellers that you understand the value of their offering and that you’re expert enough in the real estate space to elevate it appropriately.
As your relationship with a new client progresses, and you’ve got the home out there on the market, your capability to provide needle-sharp analytics and targeted takeaways will not only impress the seller but will also help you understand the market and audience. Once the site is up and running, you’ll have detailed numbers that illustrate how many people are checking out the property, how they’re finding the site, and which pages they’re focusing on. These takeaways become long-term learnings and market research that will benefit your business far beyond that specific listing’s closing.
Illustrate the Character of Each Listing
Once you’ve gotten to know each property you’re listing, you can likely put your finger on the main draw of the house. Is it charming? Cozy? Modern? Spacious?
The true personality of a home simply won’t come across on a stock listing database. Of course, the best way for potential buyers to get familiar with a listing is to come for a tour—but they’ve got to be convinced enough about its potential that they want to spend the time to do that. Especially during the pandemic, making as much information and charisma available online for each listing can mean the difference between obtaining the asking price and twiddling your thumbs for months with no bites.
Beyond the actual photos and videos you post of your listings and the copy for the listing itself, property websites provide ample opportunities for customization that simply doesn’t arise elsewhere. Everything from fonts and descriptions to easily digestible blurbs and captions plays into a potential buyer’s perception of a property. A property website allows you to feature different photos on each page and create a visually appealing layout that gives buyers a true feel for the house.
Improve Buyer Experience
Buyers searching for luxury real estate seek out a sleek, quick, stylized experience. When searching online for the property of their dreams, no one wants a half-hearted collection of meaningless statistics or history. By curating the truly important information and top-notch photos for each listing, you’re cutting down on the unnecessary effort for potential buyers and making their first impression of the property a positive one.
Plus, the average person spends increasingly more time browsing on their phone nowadays, so mobile optimization is a huge leg-up on the competition. There are few things more frustrating than trying to navigate a page that is simply not mobile-ready from your phone. Be sure you won’t lose out on those mobile leads by providing an optimized site that’s as beautiful on a phone as it is on a desktop.
Single property sites leave room for storytelling, authenticity, and logical organization. You get the chance to curate the experience each potential buyer will have when they find your site. Ensuring fluid navigation, quick loading, and intuitively-designed pages on your property site brings you one step closer to matching the perfect buyer with your listing.
Run Ads and Optimize SEO
Apart from the hands-on benefits for your seller and potential buyers, property websites also allow for more precise and efficient inbound and outbound marketing. From a technical standpoint, you need a site to drive Facebook Ads and other paid ads back to—and there’s nothing better than a site specifically dedicated to the listing! This will allow potential buyers to click straight through to the content you want them to see instead of getting lost on some compilation site or having to click through your personal page.
If you were listing a beachside home in San Diego with a pool and a rooftop and someone were to search “San Diego house beach pool,” you’d want your listing to pop up on that first page of results that Google will return. They’re literally searching for your listing! Often referred to as SEO, ensuring that your listing appears in Google when people are searching for matching criteria is an important inbound marketing strategy. Property websites make this possible where most other real estate listing sites simply don’t get detail-oriented enough, nor do they provide the opportunities to post quality content that will drive up your views.
What to include
In deciding what specific details to include in a property website, think through the qualities that make the home special. People don’t seek out luxury real estate because they want to blend in with the status quo. What makes the property unique? What’s different about it? How would it feel to live there?
Appeal to potential buyers’ emotions as you curate your descriptions and photos. Allow the website to become a storytelling platform. Anyone visiting the site should be able to picture themselves living in the home once they’ve browsed the blurbs and images. How do they feel? Does the house scream innovation and edginess, or is it a peaceful oasis? Is it a classic spot for hosting or an escape? Paint a picture that appeals to what your ideal buyer is seeking in their next home in a way that is true to the home itself.
To paint that picture, include those unique details of the listing along with each of these basic aspects (they don’t all need to be listed on the homepage):
- Photos of the inside of the home
- Photos of the outside of the home, including any landscaping features, pools, and fences
- A 3D Tour
- Video walkthroughs
- Well-written descriptions to emphasize special features
- Details about the surrounding area (Are there attractions or landmarks within walking distance? What’s the neighborhood like?)
- Key specs like square footage, lot size, and property history
Best practices
When partnering with a provider to put together property websites for you, double-check that they follow best practices for making the most of the site.
To optimize return and make your advertising process efficient, there should be an easy way to collect leads straight from your website so that anyone visiting and interested can easily get in touch with you to take the next steps. Also, look for website products with built-in, streamlined analytics reporting so that you can get the full picture of how your site is performing and what you may need to change.
Since the design of the website needs to reflect your specific listing and unique offerings, be sure to partner with someone who’s designing truly custom, distinguished sites that live up to the homes you list. Look for HD video capabilities and virtual tour integration to be sure that you can properly showcase all of your assets.
Most importantly, be sure that you’re partnering with communicative professionals on your property websites since your sites are bound to need some back-and-forth support and tweaking.
Every home is unique. Your listing pages should be, too!
