Estate agent website design: listings, portals and vendors

The website was hooked up to the CRM in March. Since then listings publish themselves, the whole portfolio is on there and the catalogue updates every night without anyone touching a thing.

And still nothing. Eight months later, viewings keep coming from the portals and from the board outside, and practically none from a Google search for a specific property.

The sync works. What doesn’t work is what arrives at the other end.

Estate agent website design is won or lost almost entirely on one piece that hardly anyone looks at closely: the property page. Not the homepage, not the search design, not the contact page. The property page.

The same listing, twice

I’m going to put the same home on two different websites. The property is identical and so is the CRM.

Before. The URL is /properties/?ref=VLC-2231. The browser tab says ‘Properties’. The description is the one uploaded to the portal, copied word for word. The thirty photos weigh four megabytes each and all load on arrival. The price and the floor area get painted in with JavaScript once a call to the CRM finishes. There’s no heading, just some big bold text. And when the flat sells, that URL will return a 404.

After. The URL is /flat-for-sale/valencia/russafa/3-bedroom-ref-2231/. The title names the area, the type and the bedrooms. The description is written for that website and doesn’t exist on any portal. The photos are in a modern format, sized properly and lazy-loaded from the third one onwards. The price, the floor area and the energy rating are in the HTML before any script runs. There’s a real H1. And when the flat sells, the URL stays live, marked as sold and linking to what’s available in that same neighbourhood.

The second listing competes. The first is a brochure with a web address.

What the portal can’t say and you can

The description copied from the portal is the most expensive mistake on this list, and the easiest to fix.

When you upload the same text to your website and to a property portal, two pages are fighting over the same search and one of them has ten years of authority and a marketing budget you don’t have. Yours doesn’t win. What you rescue from that fight isn’t the text: it’s everything the portal won’t let you put in.

A portal won’t tell people the building has no lift but does have loft space, that the tube station is a seven-minute walk, that the block has major works already approved until 2028 or that on that street the flats facing out sell in half the time of the ones facing in. You can.

That’s the content that turns a listing into something people save and forward to their partner. And it’s what gives the page a reason to exist that isn’t being a copy on a weaker domain, something worth checking every so often along with the pages that are getting in each other’s way.

What happens when the property sells

This is the quirk of the sector and the one that breaks the most estate agent websites: your whole catalogue turns over every year or two.

When a flat sells, the CRM pulls it and the page disappears. Multiply that by a portfolio of two hundred properties and in two years you’ve got hundreds of dead URLs, plenty of them linked from social media, emails and portals. All that ranking work goes in the bin.

Deleting the page of a sold property is like shredding last year’s invoices because they’ve been paid. The money came in. The bookkeeping didn’t go away.

There are three sensible ways out and one bad one:

• Keep the URL live and mark it as sold, with a block linking to similar properties in the same area. It’s the best one: it keeps the rankings and catches whoever turns up late.
• Redirect to the search for that area and type, if you’d rather not have pages for sold properties. You lose some detail, you don’t lose the authority.
• Turn the page into a real price reference for the area, with the sale figure anonymised. It’s the content homeowners search for most.
• Leave the 404. It’s what almost everyone does, and it means binning the one thing your website was building up over time.

Decide this before you connect the CRM, not once you’ve spent three years piling up gaps.

The search that churns out rubbish

The property search is the other source of trouble, and it’s a quiet one.

Every filter a visitor ticks usually creates a new URL. Area, type, bedrooms, price, lift, terrace, parking. Combined, those boxes produce tens of thousands of different addresses, almost all with zero or one result, and all of them asking to be crawled.

The rule is simple to state and rare to see applied: only index the combinations someone actually searches for.

‘Flats for sale in Russafa’ and ‘detached house in Paterna with a pool’ are real searches, so they deserve a clean URL, a title of their own and an introduction written by a person. ‘Two-bedroom penthouse between €180,000 and €190,000 with a storage room and an east-facing aspect’ is something nobody searches for: that filter applies without changing the URL, or gets marked so it isn’t indexed.

That decision is about architecture, it’s made on paper and it shapes everything else, as you can see in how to organise a site so every page has its own search.

The other half of the business has no page

An estate agency lives on two things: selling properties and winning properties to sell. The average website spends ninety-five per cent of its effort on the first.

Winning instructions from homeowners hardly ever gets a page of its own. At best there’s a valuation form tucked into a corner of the menu, with no content around it.

What a homeowner thinking about selling wants to know before leaving their phone number:

• Which documents they need to gather and which ones take weeks to get hold of. The title register, the energy certificate, proof the service charge is paid up.
• How long it takes to sell in their area and their type of property, with your judgement and not a national average.
• What your fee includes and at what point it’s due.
• What you do that the neighbour listing it on a portal by themselves doesn’t. This is where the instruction is won.

That page ranks almost by itself, because hardly anyone works on it, and it brings in enquiries with far higher intent than any listing. And if you’re also paying for ads to win homeowners, sending them to a page like that instead of the homepage changes the result completely, which is exactly what was going wrong in ads that send traffic into a broken funnel.

The photos, which is where the performance goes

A property page is a gallery with some text. There’s no getting around it.

Thirty photos at camera resolution, served without resizing and without lazy loading, make the page slow enough to appear that the visitor heads back to the portal, which does optimise them. And that mostly happens on the train, with one bar of signal and time to kill.

The fix is mechanical: modern formats, several sizes per image, the first three with priority and the rest deferred, and space reserved so the gallery doesn’t jump around while it loads. The exact thresholds and how to measure them are in what each Core Web Vital measures and what to do about it, and how visitors arriving on a phone behave is in what changes when the search comes from a phone.

No galleries that weigh more than the flat.

What to demand from whoever connects your CRM

Most of these decisions aren’t made by your designer. They’re made by your property CRM provider, and they’re made by default.

That integration shapes an estate agent website project more than any style decision, and it gets signed without being read.

Before you sign off that integration, ask for four things in writing: that property pages are served with their content in the HTML and not painted in by JavaScript, that the URL structure is yours and readable, that there’s a configurable rule for withdrawn properties and that you can write your own description, different from the one that goes to the portal.

If the answer to any of them is ‘that’s just how it works’, you know what you’re buying. It’s the same kind of conversation you need to have with any supplier, and I went into it in what to ask before you hire whoever’s building your website.

So, does your website sell homes or just display them?

An estate agent with a properly built website stops depending on the portal to get the viewing and starts competing for its own patch, with listings that survive the sale and a vendor page that works while you’re showing people round.

One with a badly built website pays the portal, pays for the ads and pays for the design, and still wins its instructions from the board outside.

Which of the two are you, and how many of your listings from two years ago are still standing?

You can see projects where that structure was rebuilt and what changed afterwards.