Your estate agency website represents your business brand and professionalism online.
In today’s competitive environment, having a modern and impressive online presence is an important prerequisite for a successful estate agent or property lettings business. How you present your business to potential property renters and buyers online will affect how much they are impressed with you, and if they can trust you and choose you above your competitors. Having a good estate agent website design for your estates or letting agency business is essential.
Web technology is constantly changing and evolving. In order to improve your estate agency’s professional image online and maintain a top-notch performance, one must not only have the best website design for estate agents that meets the requirements of modern technology standards, but is also easy to use and manage on your own.
If you haven’t already, it is in your best interest to update and upgrade to a good estate agent website. Surely you would not want to fall behind from your competitors (including online estate agents) because of using outdated and poor quality technology, or not having a property website at all.
A list of essential features of a high quality estate agent website design are summarised as follows:
1. Modern, responsive estate agents website design (mobile and tablet friendly design)
With most people now accessing websites through mobiles and tablets, a responsive property website design is based on modern and advanced technology that ensures that your website is fit to be viewed appropriately on all devices – desktops, laptops, tablets and mobiles. Each device has a different screen size, so a responsive website is automatically resized accordingly based on the used device. It is built in such a way that it provides the viewer with an optimal user experience without any hassles whether on the portrait or landscape viewing mode.
In line with the modern technology, a responsive design is Google’s search engine ranking signal, thus Google prioritises responsive websites above all other types of websites and ranks them higher in search engines.
If you want to test how a responsive estate agency website design looks and resizes on different devices – mobile, tablet, laptop or desktop, check out the responsive estate agents website templates from QuantaTec.
2. Estate agent website cloud CMS (Content Management System)
A property website CMS (Content Management system) enables you to edit your website pages, add property listings and edit other content on your website on your own. Modern technology has enabled the user to update their website without the need to know or learn coding skills. It is essential to have a CMS-based property website design since you will need to constantly add properties and put up to date information, images, documents, news, videos or Blog on your website without the need to hire someone with coding skills to do the job for you.
A good estate agent website CMS is user-friendly, fast and secure, and gives you full control over your website, and a complete peace of mind to edit anything by yourself. QuantaTec’s Property Website Software Suite CMS enables you to easily update your property listings, website pages and content. It makes website editing simple and seamless since it also includes additional ready made page modules for better content presentation so you can manage and edit all the page contents, properties, videos, documents and Images with ease.
3. Detailed property listings with map view and good quality property photos
If you want your listed properties to gather attention and interest from potential property renters or buyers, it is essential to have a detailed information about each property on your estate agents website. This must include property features and summary, with fields such as: for sale or rent, price, furnished, unfurnished, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, garden or garage, property floor plans, brochures, EPC’s, virtual tours or any other relevant detail.
Property maps are a key feature as they give the interested parties an idea of the property location and surroundings. A full property address is also important to include for people to view it on an embedded map on your website or Google Street View for the property.
A picture can speak a thousand words! Attractive property photos gather more attention and people will surely show more interest in good and professional quality property images. A photo gallery that includes a full screen or a large slideshow is a must have.
More in-depth information about each property can be easily stored and beautifully displayed using QuantaTec’s Estate Agents Website Software Suite.
4. Advanced property search, filter and sorting facility
Property search is the most important feature on an estate or letting agent website, it should be included on the home page where it must be visible easily and be able to quickly return accurate property search results.
It is always best to have an advanced property search facility with the option to filter results. Potential renters and buyers looking for properties have different requirements. It is always helpful to have property filtering options included, so they can narrow out their choices based on their search criteria, without going through time-consuming and lengthy search results.
QuantaTec’s estate agents web design offers grid view (magazine style), list view and map view of your property search results, as well as advanced property search and filter options to provide you with smooth search results.
5. Receive property enquiries from the property page and store it in a database
A vital feature in a good property website design ensures that potential property renters and buyers should have the option to contact you directly from the property page in which they are interested. It is convenient for people to get in touch with you straight from the property of their choice to save them time, rather than contacting you from a generic contact page or email.
Enquiries made on properties from buyers and renters via your estate agents or lettings website can be sent to you via email, and you should be able to see which property the enquiry was relating to, view details of the enquirer, and assign it to a negotiator to deal with.
When a enquiry is received through your website you should also be able to send auto-responders containing a customised message and similar properties. Potential buyers and renters may also have the option to ‘save’ their favourite or shortlisted properties or share or send to a friend an earmarked property.
It is worthwhile to have your property enquiries stored in a database so that you can keep a track of all of the enquiries ever made about the property in question. This also makes it quick and easy to provide feedback to owners and landlords how much interest their property has received since it’s been on the market. QuantaTec’s estate agents property database system includes this important functionality.
6. Property applicant registration, database and automatic property alerts
Interested property renters and buyers (applicants) should be able to register themselves through an online registration form on your estate agents website. Applicants should able to create an online account when registering, where they can login any time to manage their contact details and requirements using a user-friendly account area.
The applicant registration database system should also allow you to store and edit the applicant’s’ details on your own. Each applicant’s requirements including information such as preferred price, bedrooms, locations and property types can be stored.
Automatic email alerts feature is quite useful, once a matching property is listed on your estate or lettings agency website, applicants should be able to receive automatic emails regarding the property based on their chosen preferences.
QuantaTec’s property web design and software suite offers a quick, efficient and secure solution to register potential property buyers and renters, maintain your registration database system and send automatic property alerts.
7. Download and print property brochures
It is handy to provide visitors of your property website the ability to print or download a printer-friendly version of the properties they are interested in, straight from the property page. This includes all the property details containing photos, floorplans, descriptions, a map, obligatory EPC etc. You can also use this feature to print and display your properties in your office shop window for any passersby to see.
Each property agent website design from QuantaTec incorporates the download and print property brochure feature, where you or your website visitors can print beautiful colour property brochures with the click of a button.
8. Google friendly and SEO ready property website design
It is vital to make sure that your estate agency website is built on a modern technology, where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are incorporated into the design and build of the websites. There are numerous companies selling websites to estate agents and letting agents that do not support or include this feature, someone who does not have coding skills will not be able to tell the difference because they cannot check the code of the website. Nowadays, having an online presence on Search Engines is important as it is the first point of contact for people to search for a business on Google or other search engines.
QuantaTec’s estate agents websites and property templates are built with the best practice, modern and advanced technology that is compliant with the latest Google and other Search Engine algorithms, where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques are incorporated into their design and built.
If you require or would like to upgrade to a modern and responsive estate agent website design with advance features, CMS, databases and property portal feeds then get in touch for a FREE Website Mockup and demo in your own branding.
