The 6 Best Real Estate Website Builders of 2022

Take it from someone who spends a lot of time working on content for websites—it’s important to know the limits of your skill set and when it’s appropriate to hire someone to give you a hand. The new Placester DIFM is a perfect solution for someone who needs to free up some time that could be better spent returning phone calls, showing properties, and handling other tasks that directly advance your business.

Imagine knowing that your website is high-functioning, generating leads, and being managed by experts while you’re busy doing the business of real estate. This affordable concierge-type service could be an industry game changer and we’re excited to follow its progress.

Placester offers templates for agents using the DIY option. Templates are mobile-responsive and they provide everything a real estate agent needs in a website, including IDX search integration, a blog platform, additional landing pages, and more.

The fundamental differences between the templates are aesthetic, for the most part, and since there isn’t an unattractive option, you really can’t go wrong.

If you’re using the DIFM option, you’ll answer two simple aesthetic questions, including your preferred style and color scheme. The team creates a draft site within 48 hours and then you meet to finalize and make changes. It’s about as customizable as you get.

Since Placester is a real estate-specific tool, their websites are all IDX-ready. The Placester team has expertise in this area and can help you with the DIY tool, and will take care of it all for you if you’re using the DIFM option.

Placester employs proven lead capture methods for your real estate website by providing a place for visitors to reach out and request more information, including a proactive, sitewide pop-up (shown above). Pop-ups are very effective at focusing your reader’s attention on a single message, even if it’s for a short time.

Pop-ups increase lead capture rates consistently, so they’re a great addition to your site. If visitors overlook your pop-ups, Placester positions another contact form in the footer of every page and a button to click for more information on listings or services, thereby providing readers plenty of ways to reach out on their own.

The Placester CRM doesn’t come with a ton of bells and whistles, but the features it includes are easy to use and work well. Our favorite part of the Placester CRM is the built-in integration with your website. When you get a lead through your site, Placester CRM automatically converts their inputs into a contact profile that includes all their website activity.

In other words, you get to see all the properties they view, the blog posts they read, and even the criteria they use to search for homes. Granular insider information like this can help you nurture your leads effectively—sending them just the right messages at just the right moment.

The Placester CRM also allows you to import leads from other sources, like Zillow or BoldLeads. Marketing to your contacts is limited to basic email drip sequences, but the system is streamlined and intuitive. If email marketing is all you need from your CRM, Placester is a great choice.

Placester provides live, U.S.-based phone support Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We tested their phone support with some basic questions about the platform. Our friendly and knowledgeable phone rep helped immediately with exactly what we needed.

Outside of U.S. business hours, Placester offers support via email. We submitted a request for technical support at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday and received an email reply from a Placester representative by 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday. They provided specific information regarding our request and a link to an article in their library of support knowledge documents.

Overall, our experience with Placester’s customer support was very positive and helpful, especially when creating a new real estate website.

Although the design options available for Placester websites are very attractive and work for most agents, they don’t offer a ton of flexibility within those templates. Placester customers don’t have much control over how their website looks other than color schemes. They offer limited font choices and 24 templates.

For agents looking for a more robust design experience and total control over the look and feel of their website, you might consider a provider like Squarespace.

We’re also watching the DIFM system. If providing information for regular updates or requesting changes is an onerous process, it might turn a lot of agents off. The good news is that Placester is aware of this potential pain point and will constantly monitor it for efficiency and optimization.

Not long ago, Propertybase acquired real estate lead generation platform BoldLeads, which has led to significant returns for landing page lead generation.

Using the BoldLeads system, you can place attention-grabbing ads on social media platforms and drive traffic to your landing pages. These have been endlessly tested and optimized for industry-leading conversion rates.

As a Propertybase website user, you don’t just access a fantastic lead-generating website—you also gain access to an amazing CRM and the BoldLeads lead generation system—a very effective 1-2-3 punch.

Propertybase offers six real estate website templates for agents to customize and make their own. Though this might seem like a limited number of options, you can do a lot of customization. You have complete control over photos, videos, color schemes, and limited control over layout and display options.

The platform takes this customization to another level with what they call “agent stickiness,” a feature that uses website cookies to create an agent-specific experience on your website once a prospect has filled out a lead capture form.

Like Placester and InCom, Propertybase websites are IDX-ready. All you have to do is turn on the feed from your local MLS.

Propertybase takes this a step further by fully integrating their CRM with the IDX information, allowing you to send listing information and see more about the properties your prospects are viewing on your website—all without having to tab over to another browser window.

[Related article: Still Using Your MLS for Search? Propertybase GO Says, ‘OK Boomer’]

Lead capture on the Propertybase platform is powerful. Not only do you have the typical lead capture tools like form-fills and pop-ups, but you also have the power of the BoldLeads lead generation system behind your efforts, putting their high-performing landing pages at your disposal as well.

The BoldLeads options aren’t free, but their return on investment (ROI) is typically so high that it becomes a no-brainer to employ them in your lead generation strategy. While you can use landing page templates from Propertybase for free (without the BoldLeads traffic boost), you’ll need to drive traffic to them on your own.

[Related article: BoldLeads Review: How Does It Work & Is It Worth It?]

If this list were only about the capabilities of the CRM, Propertybase would easily be at the top. In fact, they’re on our list of the best real estate CRMs.

Propertybase is a CRM based on the Salesforce platform. They have full integration with your MLS via IDX, and they offer an intuitive interface, lead profiles that are automatically populated with your lead’s activity on your website, plus tons of automated communication options. You’ll also get customizations that show you exactly the information you want, right on your dashboard.

If email communication isn’t enough for you (spoiler alert: it shouldn’t be), Propertybase also offers some third-party integrations to allow you to automate SMS text messaging, and even a dialer so you can call your prospects right from your CRM.

Propertybase provides a wide variety of helpful information in their support center, including a collection of articles and walk-throughs of the most frequently asked questions. If you aren’t finding your answers there, Propertybase provides 24/7 email support and phone support from Monday through Friday during business hours.

You get a ton of functionality with Propertybase, but with that comes a hefty price tag. Real estate agents who have a CRM that they love and who want a website are going to be out of luck here.

You really won’t get the most out of the platform unless you are using the website and the CRM together. It would be great to be able to just get the website and the BoldLeads integration for a lower price than $349 a month.

IDX Broker knows that not every market, office, and agent is alike. Some agents prefer a more aggressive lead capture style with required sign-ins, pop-ups, and more touches on the website with each prospect.

Some agents are looking for a subtler approach, preferring to let their prospects browse a little longer before asking for contact information. With IDX Broker, you can choose how aggressive you want your lead capture strategy to be, and you can change it whenever you want.

For example, maybe during the high season, when people are shopping for homes, you’re able to capture leads after asking for contact info just a few times. As such, you might want to dial back your strategy, making your visitors feel more like they are making the first move.

At other times, when there’s less going on, you may need to dial up the lead generation on your website, which is when you can really kick your pop-ups, email solicitation, and lead magnet promotion into high gear.

IDX Broker runs on the WordPress platform, so the number of customization options are virtually limitless. There are seven different themes you can choose from if you choose the Home tier, and you can have IDX Broker build your website for you.

Just the name of this company should give you an indication of IDX Broker’s strong IDX capabilities. The IDX Broker website experience is really centered around search. As such, they need a reliable and complete IDX connection to fill out their list of features.

We tested IDX Broker’s connection with a local MLS, and it connected with every major property category, making the search functionality on the agent website nearly identical to that of the local MLS’ own website platform.

Note: If you’re located in New York City, this platform won’t work for you, as IDX Broker doesn’t connect with REBNY.

As we mentioned earlier, the lead capture options on IDX Broker are our favorite part of the platform. You really can create the exact the experience you want for your visitors, such as including, eliminating, or requiring certain fields, pop-ups, social logins, and more.

IDX Broker doesn’t really offer a CRM for real estate agents. There are some limited real estate lead distribution tools, and some back-office management tools (available on the Team and Office plans). But this platform is designed to be easily integrated with another CRM, connecting with every one of the CRMs on our list of Best Real Estate CRMs for 2021.

IDX Broker provides standard email and phone support during business hours, and has a decent library of on-demand resources so you can help yourself, including an on-demand webinar section we found particularly useful.

Unless you choose the Home tier, IDX Broker doesn’t offer live support for WordPress-related questions.

IDX Broker is great for agents who want a ton of customization, but it comes with the need to hire someone to help you with the WordPress work, unless you are getting the Home tier package or happen to be a developer yourself. It would be great if IDX Broker offered a prebuilt option for agents looking for the Lite or Platinum options.

One of the best parts of the InCom platform is access to their premium marketing features. Yes, you have to pay extra for these, but the upcharge on each of their offerings is significantly less than what it would be if you were working with a standalone marketing agency.

Our favorite is their ReCall Marketing strategy, InCom’s website retargeting service. If you aren’t familiar with retargeting, here’s how it works: When someone visits your website, a small piece of code (or “cookie”) is installed on their browser. Then, when they visit other websites on the internet, they are served ads about your business. These could be ads for particular properties, ads for your services in general, or even for an event like an open house you’ve got coming up.

InCom offers three different levels of ReCall Marketing, depending on how many impressions you want to make on your website visitors after they’ve left your site. While retargeting isn’t new, this is an easy, relatively hands-off approach for real estate agents, freeing up the time and energy of already busy real estate professionals to focus on other things.

You don’t get a ton of templates to choose from with InCom, as seems to be the case with most real estate-specific website builders. With InCom, you have access to six standard templates, and for an extra fee you can get a few more in the “premium templates” area.

While the premium templates are nice, they really didn’t seem to add a ton of value above and beyond what the standard templates offered. All of the important elements are in place on InCom websites, though, so you don’t need to worry about missing an important feature.

Like Placester, website layouts aren’t very customizable and you can’t manipulate many features beyond color schemes and fonts. If you’ve got a particular vision for what a reader will find when they arrive at your site, InCom provides only limited design modifications.

One thing we really liked about InCom was that, unlike Placester, agents can have unlimited pages on their site. If you’ve got grand plans to become the content marketing wiz of your local market, you’re going to need a website that can host all your blog posts, neighborhood feature videos, and checklists for new homebuyers and sellers. InCom offers agents as many internal pages as they’d like to host all the content their heart desires.

InCom’s websites are all IDX-enabled and ready to connect to your local MLS. This is definitely one of the benefits of working with a real estate-specific website builder, rather than going through a generic provider like Squarespace.

InCom does offer a lot of lead generation opportunities through their premium services managing your advertising on other platforms, and they support that ad management with solid lead capture options on their sites as well.

When users are directed to your website, you can send them to one of your custom InCom landing pages, designed to capture lead data before a visitor can dig into what you have to offer. Or, you can send them straight to your site and trigger what InCom calls a “User Registration” after a certain number of properties or pages are viewed.

This strategy is more in-your-face than the optional pop-ups on other sites, but will also provide you with more qualified leads. Anyone who is willing to fill out a user registration form is more likely to be a serious shopper and not just someone who came to your site because they’re curious.

InCom has a relatively limited built-in CRM to help you manage the leads you get from their website. It pales in comparison to the one from Placester or a dedicated real estate CRM product, so you’ll want to partner your InCom website with another platform.

One nice thing about the onboard CRM is that it allows for custom alerts to be sent to you whenever you’ve got lead activity on the site, making prompt follow-up easier.

Customer support on InCom was easy to access and prompt in follow-up. They offer phone support during U.S. business hours and 24/7 email support. We submitted a question via the email support system on a Tuesday morning at 10:00 a.m. and got an answer back within three hours, including an invitation to speak on the phone if our problem wasn’t resolved.

While InCom’s website templates were attractive and useful, their lack of design flexibility is challenging. For example, there is no template that adequately addresses the needs of small to medium-sized real estate teams—very common players in most real estate markets.

They have websites for brokerages and large teams, but no solutions that are ideal for three or four agents working together. They do have “partner” website templates that start down that road. However, customizing your website to highlight the strength of working with a team (rather than just a few agents) isn’t easily achieved using InCom.

Even though the cost to get into the BoomTown club is significantly higher than the other real estate website builders on our list, membership does have its perks. Our favorite is that they include lead generation and ad management in their price.

Yes, that management is a little more automated, but you still have a person on the BoomTown end of things making sure that your ads are going in the right place and performing as efficiently as possible. This extra layer of support for lead generation for your entire team ensures that business is going to keep moving in the right direction and that leads are going to keep coming in.

There are three different templates to select from when building a BoomTown website. Each of the themes is extremely attractive, focuses (smartly) on the local area of your business, and is a place where agents on your team can customize their personal web presence to add to the value of your brokerage.

Because BoomTown websites are designed for larger groups, your ability to customize them is somewhat limited. However, as with other real estate-specific website builders, BoomTown offers brokers and team leaders fine-tuning and aesthetic control over the details of their website—so getting your site to look a certain way is definitely within reach.

Though we’ll talk a little more about this in the “support” section of the BoomTown review, it’s important to point out that the conversations we had with the BoomTown folks were encouraging. It appears that if a team or brokerage has a specific request that couldn’t be achieved within the framework of the existing themes, BoomTown would work with you to try to design a custom solution.

While there would be a cost associated with that service, having a provider offer an exclusive solution to a problem is definitely worthy of mention and a big asset for those who are considering building a website for their brokerage—especially if you’ve got some unique marketing ideas in mind.

Just like the other real estate-specific website builders on our list (Placester and InCom), BoomTown includes IDX in all their base packages.

Like you need to with any IDX integration, there are forms and contacts you have to make with your local board to authorize access to that service for your site, but BoomTown is trained to help you through that, so it’s an easy part of the setup and done during your initial onboarding.

BoomTown offers standard lead capture options on each of their templates, including custom landing pages, pop-ups, lead capture forms, and the like. As we mentioned, BoomTown also offers ad management that will draw leads to your new website.

Where BoomTown stands out among its competitors, though, is in the distribution of these leads among your team members and your ability as the team lead to keep everyone on track.

With a sophisticated lead distribution and pipeline management system, BoomTown makes it easy to see how each of your teammates is progressing with each of their leads. This feature allows brokers and team leaders to provide timely coaching and counsel, upping your conversion rate with leads.

Once an agent has received a lead, it is automatically filed in the BoomTown CRM—a tool powerful enough to be considered worthy of mention as a standalone product. All in all, BoomTown is the most efficient lead capture platform on our list.

BoomTown’s CRM provides a clean, easy-to-use interface for each agent or team leader, it offers their own version of predictive technology, helping agents determine who is a hot lead and who needs more nurturing, and probably best of all, it offers an interface with your MLS through IDX.

This last feature is especially nice—it allows you to create custom email updates for your leads when property of a certain criteria hits the market without having to leave your CRM and actually log on to your local MLS site.

You can do all the typical things a CRM offers: basic email marketing and automation as well as tagging and bucketing contacts, and since you’re linked up to your website, you can see all the activity your leads are engaging in on your site right from their profile.

Since BoomTown is designed specifically for teams, there are also some great lead routing options, team management, even training modules you can set up for new agents to reduce their learning curve and start producing sooner.

BoomTown offers phone and email support during U.S. business hours. We tried out both and had mixed results. We sent an email on a Wednesday morning requesting support on a website template and never received a message back.

Our phone support was a better experience, but there was no explanation as to why we didn’t get an email back on our question.

Other reviews of the BoomTown platform have echoed similar experiences. BoomTown does have a pretty extensive library of resources available to customers to help with questions, so we suggest you start there rather than jumping straight to the phone or email.

While BoomTown is the best option for teams or brokerages, it’s actually hard to see why at first, unless you really dig deep into BoomTown’s website and marketing materials. They are relatively opaque about their prices, and require a demo with a sales agent before you can really get your hands (or at least your eyes) on the products you’ll be using.

Brokers or team leaders who want to kick the tires on their own first are going to have a hard time here.

Do you ever wake up with a specific vision for how a project should look, how your customers will interact with it, and ultimately, how you’ll manage it? When that happens, you want to have a platform that allows you to bring your vision to life.

Squarespace provides over 100 unique and beautiful templates to start building your website, and those templates can be stripped down, changed, and practically broken down to a white screen if that’s where you want to start.

Given the fact that you have dozens of design elements you can include—things like contact forms, photo carousels (perfect for featuring properties), blogs, video, and calendars for scheduling appointments, just to name a few—there are virtually unlimited ways you can put your Squarespace website together.

As we just mentioned, the templates and customizability on the Squarespace platform are its strongest features. If you have an active blog with lots of content and content types, or if you’re a video wiz or you have some other advantage over your competition—you want a customizable website that will highlight those advantages.

Also, Squarespace offers 30 different templates for landing pages—perfect for pairing with your social media-driven lead capture efforts. These landing page templates are already beautifully designed. But you can tweak them to say exactly what you want and easily gather the right information from your leads.

Remember, these aren’t real estate-specific landing pages, so they are less of an out-of-the-box solution than you’ll find with providers like Placester. However, the customization options will let you shape your landing pages into exactly what you want.

Squarespace offers full IDX integration capability. The big difference between the Squarespace IDX process and the included IDX integration in real estate-specific website providers like Placester, BoomTown, and InCom is that you need to first subscribe to an IDX provider like Ultimate IDX.

This provider acts as a bridge between your MLS and your website, providing a plugin that’s installed directly on your website. The plugin enables live searches and responsive design (meaning the interface will adjust to be mobile-friendly if someone is accessing your site on their phone).

In short, Squarespace’s platform allows for all the same IDX capability that you’d find on real estate-specific websites, but there is a little more legwork required at the outset to get it up and running.

Since Squarespace isn’t a real estate-specific website builder, lead capture options here are a little more generic, but still effective. You can create lead capture forms and include them on every page of your site. You can utilize sitewide pop-ups to capture client information, and a handy Announcement Bar displays at the top of your site, visible no matter how someone scrolls on a page.

Since Squarespace isn’t designed just for real estate agents, it will be up to you to effectively manage the data that you capture here. While Squarespace provides easy ways to connect to CRMs or email marketing systems, those connections aren’t automatic like they are on platforms like Placester. You’ll need to ensure you’ve got your ducks in a row and your lead data is routed to the right place.

Squarespace doesn’t offer an integrated CRM. This is definitely a drawback, as it means that all the leads you get through your website have to be transferred and managed somewhere else.

To be totally fair, this migration is pretty easy. Squarespace offers built-in integrations with Mailchimp for your email marketing and Zapier for your standalone CRMs. However, you don’t get all the benefits of having your website working directly with your CRM to track lead activity.

The Squarespace account support team is very responsive and worked great for us. They don’t have dedicated phone support listed on their website, but offer live chat help from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. We tried the live chat help, and it was easy to understand. The person helping us was able to answer our question and fix something in our account very easily.

If you are looking for help outside of the live chat time frame, the email support is similarly responsive. We sent a request for help on a technical issue on a Monday evening at 9:15 p.m. and got an email back with an answer to the question by 12:00 p.m. the next day. Also, given how large and widely used Squarespace is, there is also an active peer-to-peer network of troubleshooting guides available through the Squarespace knowledge base.

We found answers to relatively obscure and complicated coding questions, innovative suggestions on how to customize our site, and much more on these forums. Definitely a standout resource.

Squarespace is a little frustrating when it comes to translating your designs to a mobile experience. We all know that the majority of web traffic is generated via mobile devices. We’re happy that every single template on Squarespace is mobile-optimized. However, the webpage we spent an hour meticulously assembling on our laptop was a little out of order and not as effective on a mobile device.

After we figured out what was happening, the problem was fixed. Ensuring that users will get an equally great experience on their phone and computer screen requires an additional step, which is less than ideal.

A more straightforward template like the ones provided on Placester, InCom, or BoomTown will eliminate this problem, so if these sorts of mobile optimization hurdles are a sticking point for you, consider those platforms as good alternatives.