WordPress is not just for blogs. It’s for any website. Over 30% of all websites use WordPress, including real estate sites.
WordPress is the best choice for a real estate agent. It’s affordable and can grow with you. You can start small and expand it to a big website.
Building a WordPress site yourself takes effort. You can also hire a developer. But, hiring someone will cost more.
Best Features
City Chic Real Estate
Welcome to our WordPress review for real estate websites!
Here are some WordPress real estate sites and their designs. WordPress is very customizable. You can change it a lot with themes or a designer.
Most people use themes for their designs. Themes are cheaper than custom CSS. But, real estate themes might not be the best or most updated.
City Chic has a modern design. It’s simple and easy to use. It’s great for searching homes or finding sellers.
Norhill Realty has a fun homepage. It also has a blog for content marketing. Its design is a bit busier than City Chic’s.
Norhill Realty
The BREL Team in Toronto, ONThe BREL Team website was a source of inspiration for my own WordPress site early on (their tools and resources section, specifically). This is a fantastic example of content marketing as a real estate agent, and how you can accomplish that with WordPress.
WordPress is the most customizable real estate platform, bar none.
The BREL Team
When building your site, you can select or buy existing themes to create your desired design, or hire a designer to modify your CSS. Anything is achievable.
Regarding website features, WordPress has what are called plugins. Many plugins are free, including all of the ones you would want to get started with. Plugins can add features or modify your site. Examples include plugins for improving SEO, adding columns, integrating your IDX, using maps, creating sophisticated forms, making popups, and more.
WordPress is a perfectly good platform for SEO.
Like all SEO strategies, you likely will have to put some work into it. If you don’t have a designer/developer doing it for you, you will have to learn about technical SEO, on page SEO, local SEO, and more. There are numerous resources for this, including popular plugins like Yoast SEO.
Biggest Pitfalls
Unless you are hiring someone else to do it, WordPress can take some work to set up. You have to choose a host, map your domain, pick a theme, integrate IDX, download plugins, and then start building content and putting pieces around.
WordPress the most widely used website platform in the world. I just typed “WordPress tutorial” into YouTube and got 6,260,000 results. There is an entire industry built just on helping people with their WordPress websites. If you have a question, the answer is out there! WordPress is not only user-friendly for building and customizing websites, but it also offers a robust back office management system. With countless plugins and themes available, you can easily streamline your website’s functionality and design. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced web developer, WordPress has the tools and resources to help you create a professional and effective online presence.
But that’s both a pro and a con. There is such a thing as too much information, and that is a fault of WordPress. There is no central WordPress support or authority. You have to hope that the information you find is current to your version of WordPress, and trust that different plugins will play nicely together.
WordPress is free!
WordPress Pricing
- Your likely bare bones costs would be $400 to get set up and $60/mo after that for your IDX.
- There are lots of optional features you might spend money on after that depending on what you want for your site
- At the enterprise level, you can hire designers and developers to build custom features and get the look exactly how you want it
While that is technically true, you have to buy the tools to actually implement it, including hosting, a domain, IDX, theme, and an SSL. You can get started on the website, a real estate theme, and 3 years of domains and hosting for about $400. $130/yr is pretty great!
IDX is the most expensive aspect of owning a real estate website, and you can expect to pay about $60/mo for your site’s IDX feed so that properties show up. So now we have a startup cost of about $400, and $60/mo after that.
Then, to get the most from it, there are other items you may find yourself wanting subscriptions to, like a stock photo site, premium plugins, analytics software, live chat, and more. These aren’t necessary for your site to function well, but can be.
Then, there are plugins for most things you might want to implement to customize your site. But as you grow, if you want to really fine tune your CSS (your website’s design), or develop sophisticated, custom features and apps for your site, you will likely be looking for website designers and developers. These can cost a few thousand to tens of thousands depending on how much work you have for them.
My Personal Recommendation
You can do that by hiring a designer, or by using a out-of-the-box website solution that is built on WordPress. Below are some website providers who use WordPress for their platform.
I love WordPress as an option because it can be just as powerful as any other website, but you can get started fairly cheap and just put more into it as you have time and resources. You are not stuck with any given provider and can bring folks in to help – or not. It’s all entirely up to you. You completely own your website and everything about it.
But it does take a lot more work if you are going to do it yourself. And while the point of a CMS is so that you don’t have to do coding and HTML, you are likely going to be using and learning a little HTML and CSS along the way. It is not the best solution for agents who are allergic to the computer.
View Other Agent Website Providers
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Customizability
- Agent Image
- BoomTown
- Easy Agent Pro
- Placester
SEO
- You’re on a budget but want something you can get started with and stick with even as you grow
- You are a perfectionist and want to have control over every detail of your website
- You don’t want to be stuck with a particular website provider – your website is yours and moves with you
WordPress Websites
Agent Image
Placester
