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5 Web Design Mistakes That Real Estate Businesses Make

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Like any other business, real estate companies rely heavily on their website to generate new leads. When people are looking for a house or planning to sell up, the first thing that they will do is go online and do a search online and start looking at local real estate agencies. Your website is your chance to impress them enough that they give you a call and you get that listing. Unfortunately, a lot of real estate agency websites do the complete opposite and they put people off. Competition is fierce and there are plenty of websites for people to look through, so a few simple mistakes can put them off for good, which is why you need to make sure that your site is perfect. 

If you find that your website isn’t really generating many leads, it’s likely that you’re making some basic mistakes. The good news is, they can usually be rectified quite easily as long as you know where you’re going wrong. If your website isn’t working, you’re probably making one of these mistakes. 

Bad SEO 

Every business owner knows that search engine optimization is crucial if you want your website to perform well. If you don’t appear on the first or second page of results, it’s not likely that anybody will ever find your site. However, a lot of real estate agencies get it wrong when it comes to SEO because they forget the most important thing; target locally. This sounds obvious but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t do it well. You need to hire an SEO company that can help you to target users in the local area and find the right keywords to direct people in the local area to your site. One of the more common mistakes that people make is focusing on the state, but that’s too wide of an area. If people are an hour away by car, they’re not likely to go with you. You need to put your efforts into a smaller area if you’re going to get the right people coming to your site, and that means changing your SEO strategy to target more locally. 

Unresponsive Websites 

The internet is supposed to make life easier for people, but sometimes, it does the exact opposite. If your website runs slowly and it’s unresponsive, people will quickly become frustrated and they won’t stick around to go through your listings or find your contact information to discuss selling their house. It’s so important to have a responsive site that is easy to navigate and works correctly without any broken links or dead pages. It makes you look incredibly unprofessional if your site is broken and when people are trusting you with something as important as buying or selling their home, that doesn’t bode well for you. Usually, this comes down to poor design and cheap websites, so make sure to invest a bit of money in a professional web design agency and find one that has good experience making sites for real estate companies. 

Bad Search Functions

Search functions are important on any website but they’re especially important on a real estate site. People have a clear set of criteria when they’re looking for a house and they don’t have much room for compromise. They will know how much space they want, what their price range is, and roughly what area they would like to live in. You need a detailed search function on the website that allows people to select all of their chosen criteria and only see listings that meet them. If people have to search through all of the listings to find what they’re looking for, they will probably just look elsewhere. 

Too Much Focus On The Story 

In general, it’s important to tell a story when trying to market any product. Consumers don’t just want a list of product specifications, they want to know how the product will improve their life. That is applicable to real estate as well, but some people take it too far on their website. When writing a property listing, it’s important to talk about the idyllic views and the close knit community in the area when trying to sell a house, but people still need to know the basic information about the property. First and foremost, people need to know how big the house is, how many rooms it has, what kind of outside space there is, and most importantly, how much it costs. You still need to tell the story of the property but it’s important that all of the basic information is front and center. People don’t want to spend a long time reading through a listing, only to find that it isn’t big enough or it’s out of their price range. It’s all about finding that balance and making sure that all of the information people need is easily accessible. 

Bad Photographs 

The most important thing that you need to include on a property listing is the photographs. They are your one opportunity to impress a potential buyer and get them to arrange a viewing, so if they aren’t perfect, you’re going to lose a lot of sales. A good photograph can make an average property look amazing, but a bad photograph can make a great property look awful. It’s important that you pay a professional photographer to take good quality photos of all of your properties. Lighting is key as well, because if the photos look dark and dingy, people will assume the property is the same. When deciding how to stage your photographs and which angles to use, you need to consider the features of the property. What does it have that other properties don’t? What are your biggest selling points? As long as you can take well lit photographs that highlight the best features in the property, you will get a lot more viewings. 

It’s also important that you don’t try to mislead people with your photographs. Some real estate agents will use tricks like a wide angle lens to make a space appear larger than it is. That might work to start with and it will get you some viewings, but when people arrive and see that the property is nothing like the photos, you’ll get a bad reputation and start to lose business. 

If you’re making any of these mistakes on your real estate website, it could really hurt your business.

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