The real estate website is the hub of your marketing strategy; it’s where all your lead generation efforts point, where your prospects become clients. Without a high-performing real estate website, you’re missing out on opportunities to grow your business.
If you’re in the market for a new real estate website, we’ve done all the hard work for you and pulled together the six best real estate website builders from across the net, kicked the tires for you, and selected the best ones for just about every agent, brokerage, or team. Here’s what we found.
2021’s Best Real Estate Website Builders
| Real Estate Website Builder | Best For |
|---|---|
| Placester (Best Overall) | Agents seeking a real estate-specific website builder with lead generation tools |
| Propertybase | Agents looking for a great real estate website plus CRM combo |
| IDX Broker | Agents who want advanced tools to help their prospects navigate their home search |
| InCom | Budget-conscious agents looking for off-site marketing and advertising solutions |
| BoomTown | Brokers or real estate agents managing a team |
| Squarespace | Real estate professionals seeking a wide array of 100+ templates and intuitive design |
Updated October 2020
1. Best Overall Real Estate Website Builder: Placester
Placester offers a balanced real estate website builder experience with a great price point and tons of features that make this an easy choice for the leader of the pack. As the only provider on our list with a partnership with the National Association of Realtors (NAR), Placester even offers a discount for NAR members, making this already affordable solution an even better value for cash-strapped agents and teams.
Placester Pricing
Placester’s pricing model depends on two factors: whether you’re a member of the National Association of Realtors, and which package you choose. Their Starter Plan starts at just $64 per month for members of NAR.
Here’s a breakdown of pricing and what they offer at each tier of service.
Placester Pricing at a Glance – October 2020
| Placester Package Options | ||
|---|---|---|
| Starter Plan | ||
| Advanced Plan | / month | |
| Office Builder Plan |
Clearly, membership to NAR has its benefits, especially when you’re building a real estate website. The prices above are for Realtors who opt for a monthly payment plan; if you want to save a little more money, Placester will waive their setup for anyone willing to pay for an annual subscription.
Placester also offers some a la carte add-ons that further enhance this platform’s value, like their Open House Pro Premium app—a fantastic tablet-based service that provides more than just a digital sign-in option for your open house attendees.
The app also syncs with your customer relationship management (CRM) software so any of your event attendees are automatically added to your database, giving you the chance to create customized marketing messages for each event you host.
Additionally, for real estate professionals who have a website that they’re not currently happy with, Placester offers customized data migration services, transferring all the hard work you did on another platform to the Placester platform.
Here’s a breakdown of cost for each of these features.
| Add-on | |
|---|---|
| Open House Pro Premium | |
| Data Migration Services |
Placester Marketplace: Our Favorite Placester Feature
Take it from me, as someone who spends a lot of time working on content for websites, it’s important to know where your own skill set begins and ends and where it’s appropriate to hire someone to give you a hand. The new Placester Marketplace is a perfect solution for someone who needs some creative help but doesn’t know where to start.
Whether you want a basic site refresh, installation of tracking tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel, or maybe you just want someone to help import your contacts into the Placester CRM, you can hire someone for a reasonable price to do it for you, freeing you up to spend your time returning phone calls, showing property, and handling other tasks that directly advance your business.
Placester Templates & Customizability
Placester offers 12 total templates for subscribing agents. Though this number of template options is relatively low compared to others, it’s clear that all these templates have been finely tuned to maximize every inch of, well, real estate.
They’re 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 real differences between the templates are, for the most part, aesthetic, and since there isn’t an unattractive option, you really can’t go wrong here.
Placester IDX Capability
Since Placester is a real estate-specific tool, their websites are all IDX-ready. Just like with any website builder, there is a process an agent has to go through to link their local MLS to their website, including verifying their brokerage information and getting specific data from their local board, but the Placester support team are experts in this area and can provide live support if their large library of self-help resources aren’t answering your questions.
Real Estate Lead Capture on Placester
Placester employs proven lead capture methods for a real estate website by providing a place for visitors to reach out and request more information, including a great 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 period of time. Pop-ups increase lead capture rates consistently, so they’re a great option to have on your site.
If visitors are overlooking 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, providing readers plenty of ways to reach out on their own.
The lead capture strategy goes a step further by providing the option to gate some features like the mortgage calculator with an email address input.
Overall, the Placester lead capture options are robust and provide plenty of chances to turn your readers into clients.
Placester CRM Capabilities
The Placester CRM doesn’t come with a ton of bells and whistles, but the features it does have 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 website, their information is automatically filled into a contact profile, including all their website activity.
In other words, you get to see all the properties they viewed, the blog posts they read, even the criteria they used to search for homes. This sort of insider information can really help nurture your leads with just the right messages from you at just the right times.
This CRM also allows you to import leads from other sources, like Zillow or BoldLeads. The marketing you can do to your contacts is limited to basic email drip sequences, but the system is streamlined and intuitive, so if email marketing is all you need from your CRM, this is a great option.
Placester Support
Placester provides live, U.S.-based phone support Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We tried out the phone support with some basic questions about the platform and were immediately helped with exactly what we needed—our phone rep was friendly and knowledgeable.
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 night and had an email back from a Placester representative by 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning with specific information regarding our request, as well as a link to an article in their library of support knowledge documents.
Overall, our experience with Placester’s customer support was very positive and definitely a benefit, especially when you’re creating a new real estate website.
Where Placester Comes Up Short
Although the design options available for Placester websites are very attractive and definitely 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, limited font choices, and the 12 total templates available.
For agents who are looking for a more robust design experience and total control over the look and feel of their website, a provider like Squarespace should be considered.
Examples of Placester Real Estate Websites for Agents
Here are some great examples of Placester websites in action.
Kim Spears Group, KELLER WILLIAMS® Treasure Coast
NoBedrooms, One Real Estate
Al Waddell, RE/MAX Metro Plus
Placester: The Bottom Line
Placester is a superior product for anyone looking to build a real estate-specific website. Placester knows what’s important to Realtors and has put those features front and center, plus their affiliation with the National Association of Realtors makes them a provider that Realtors can trust.
2. Best Website + CRM Combo: Propertybase
Propertybase provides real estate professionals with a fantastic, all-in-one solution for client acquisition and nurturing with their lead generation, website, and CRM components all working together. Their websites are clean and customizable, trusted by some of our industry’s most prestigious companies, and their CRM is second to none as far as the capability they provide agents to keep their leads moving down the funnel.
Propertybase Pricing
Propertybase offers a number of services for real estate professionals, but the only package that includes a website is their Blue package for $399 per month. With the Blue package, you get an IDX-integrated lead generating machine of a website as well as their best-in-class CRM.
High-performing Landing Pages: Our Favorite Propertybase Feature
Not long ago, Propertybase acquired real estate lead generation platform BoldLeads, a move that has led to significant returns when it comes to landing page lead generation. Using the BoldLeads system, agents place attention-grabbing ads on social media platforms and drive traffic to landing pages that have been endlessly tested and optimized for industry-leading conversion rates.
As a Propertybase website user, you don’t just get access to a fantastic lead-generating website, you also get access to an amazing CRM and to the BoldLeads lead generation system, a very effective 1-2-3 punch.
Propertybase Templates & Customizability
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, the agents can do a lot of customization to make their website feel like their own, as is evidenced by how unique the different live Propertybase websites we’ve found feel. You have full control over photos, videos, and color scheme, and some 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 form.
Propertybase IDX Capability
Like Placester and InCom, Propertybase websites come 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 information about the properties your prospects are viewing on your website without having to tab over to another browser window.
Real Estate Lead Capture on Propertybase
Lead capture on the Propertybase platform is very strong. Not only do you have the typical lead capture tools like form fills and pop-ups, you also have the power of the BoldLeads lead generation system behind your lead generation efforts, putting their high-performing landing pages at your disposal as well.
The BoldLeads options aren’t free, but their return on investment is typically so high that it is a no-brainer to employ them in your lead generation. You can also use landing page templates from Propertybase for free (without the BoldLeads ads driving traffic to them), but you’ll be responsible for getting the traffic to them.
Propertybase CRM Capabilities
If this list was just about the capabilities of the CRM, Propertybase would easily be at the top. In fact, they already were when we ranked 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, tons of automated communication options, and a bunch of 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 Support
Propertybase provides a wide variety of helpful information in their support center: a collection of articles and walk-throughs of the most frequently asked questions. If you aren’t finding your answers there, there is email support available 24/7 and phone support available Monday through Friday during business hours.
Where Propertybase Comes Up Short
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 just want a website are going to be out of luck here; you really don’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 $399 a month.
Examples of Propertybase Real Estate Websites for Agents & Brokerages
Here are some Propertybase websites in action.
Pink Realty
Colorado Group Realty
Ocean, Sotheby’s International Realty
Propertybase: The Bottom Line
Propertybase provides a customizable website with lots of great lead capture options, as well as the best CRM in the real estate industry. If you are looking for a powerful new way to grease the sides of your lead funnel and create more prospect conversations, you should check out Propertybase.
3. Best Real Estate Website Builder for Agents Who Want Advanced Home Search Tools: IDX Broker
If you’re an agent looking for more control over your website visitor’s experience, IDX Broker is a great option for you. Loaded with all the options you’d expect to find in a real estate website provider, IDX Broker delivers on the must-haves for your real estate website while also providing ultimate flexibility.
With the ability to customize how aggressive your lead capture strategies are, allowing visitors to create accounts using popular social media logins, and giving prospects the chance to create accounts where they can customize down to the style of interface how they want to experience your site (information that all gets fed into your CRM for you to leverage later), you are in charge of your visitor’s journey.
It’s important to remember that IDX Broker is built on the WordPress platform, so you need to have some WordPress knowledge (or hire someone who does) to take advantage of what is being offered here.
IDX Broker Pricing
Pricing on IDX is complicated, but once you’re on their website, it makes sense. Pricing is divided into three tiers: Lite (starting at $50 per month, Platinum (starting at $80 per month), and Home (starting at $150 per month). Then, you have options for plans best for a single agent, a real estate team, or an entire office.
Each option within each tier offers more and more features, but all the fundamentals (complete with all the lead capture options, search functionality, and so forth plus a nice back-end CRM) are a part of every package.
IDX Broker Lite Tier Pricing at a Glance
| IDX Broker Plan | |
|---|---|
| Agent | |
| Team | |
| Office |
IDX Broker Platinum Tier Pricing at a Glance
| IDX Broker Plan | |
|---|---|
| Agent | |
| Team | |
| Office |
IDX Broker Home Tier Pricing at a Glance
| IDX Broker Plan | |
|---|---|
| Agent | |
| Team | |
| Office |
Though the Lite tier does offer lots of value, most agents are going to find the Platinum tier to be the place they should start looking.
At Platinum, agents unlock features like automatic market reports, upgrade support and service, advanced map and polygon searching, home valuation tools, and more.
With the Home Tier, you get a WordPress website developed and maintained in-house by IDX Broker, rather than having to work with your own developer to build one with you. Basically, you take all the best parts of IDX Broker and add concierge level support to it.
Customized Lead Capture Strategies: Our Favorite IDX Broker Feature
IDX Broker knows that not every market, office, and agent are 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 without having to ask for them more than a couple of times. In a time like this, you might want to dial back your aggression, making your visitors feel more like they are making the first move.
Other times, when there’s less going on, you may need to dial up the lead production on your website, which is when you can really kick your pop-ups, email solicitation, and lead magnet promotion into high gear.
IDX Broker Templates & Customizability
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 have IDX Broker build your website for you.
IDX Broker IDX Capability
Just the name of this company should give you some indication that the IDX capabilities are very strong with IDX Broker. 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 that a member of our team belongs to, 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.
Note: If you’re located in New York City, this platform won’t work for you, as IDX Broker doesn’t connect with REBNY.
Real Estate Lead Capture on IDX Broker
As we mentioned earlier, the lead capture options on IDX Broker are our favorite part of the platform. You really can create exactly the experience you want for your visitors, such as including, eliminating, or requiring certain fields, pop-ups, social logins, and more.
IDX Broker CRM Capabilities
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 Support
IDX Broker provides standard email and phone support during business hours, and has a decent library of on-demand resources to 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.
Where IDX Broker Comes Up Short
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 who are looking for the Lite or Platinum options too.
Examples of IDX Broker Real Estate Websites for Agents & Brokerages
Here are some examples of IDX Broker websites in action:
Brace Homes, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Michigan
Mello Group
Hood Homes, Starpointe Realty
IDX Broker: The Bottom Line
If you want ultimate control over your website and your user experience, IDX Broker is definitely a place to check out. Visit them today to see which tier, plan, and options are best for your business.
4. Best Website Builder for Budget-conscious Agents Looking for Premium Marketing Features: InCom
InCom provides attractive websites for real estate agents that do everything you need them to do: provide a place for people to search for listed property, give people an easy way to contact you, and provide a platform for them to consume your content online.
But InCom sets itself apart from the rest of the providers on our list because of the extras that they offer, like a makeshift CRM, integration with social media platforms to make lead generation easier, as well as real estate-specific landing pages that will convert your incoming lead traffic better than a generic website landing page.
InCom Pricing
InCom pricing starts at just $39.95 a month for an annual plan, plus a one-time setup fee of $250. InCom’s pricing is very competitive, and unlike real estate-specific competitor Placester, nearly all the essential features of the platform are included in their monthly or annual rate.
InCom Prices at a Glance – October 2020
| InCom Offers | |
|---|---|
| IDX Website With Unlimited Content, Access to 6 Standard Templates | |
| Access to Additional Premium Templates | |
| One-time Setup Fee | |
| Google Ad Words Management | |
| Facebook Ads Management | |
| ReCall Marketing - Silver Package | |
| ReCall Marketing - Gold Package | |
| ReCall Marketing - Platinum Package |
All the integrations, page features, and offers from InCom are included in their base package, so there’s no need to budget for add-ons unless you want one of the premium templates they offer or some of their premium marketing options.
ReCall Marketing: Our Favorite InCom Feature
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’d like to get from 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.
InCom Templates & Customizability
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.
Similar to the customizability of the Placester offerings, the actual layout of the websites themselves is pretty tough to manipulate beyond color schemes and fonts. All of the important elements are in place on InCom websites, so you don’t need to worry about your website missing an important feature. However, 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, unlike Placester, agents have the option of 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 IDX Capability
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.
Real Estate Lead Capture on InCom
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 are viewed or pages are viewed.
This is a little more aggressive strategy than the optional pop-ups that we see on other sites, but will also provide you with more qualified leads, since anyone who is willing to fill out a user registration form is more likely to be a serious looker and not just someone who came to your site because they’re curious.
InCom CRM Capabilities
InCom has a relatively limited built-in CRM to help you manage the leads you get from their website, and 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 does allow for custom alerts to be sent to you whenever you’ve got lead activity on the site, making prompt follow-up easier.
InCom Support
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.
Where InCom Comes Up Short
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 not really any solutions for three or four agents working together. They do have “partner” website templates that start down that road, but customizing a site to really highlight the strength of working with a team and not just a couple of agents isn’t easily achieved.
Examples of InCom Real Estate Websites for Agents
Here are some examples of InCom websites in action.
Michael Steinman, Forest Hill Real Estate Inc.
Mary Cerqua, Right At Home Realty Inc.
Steven Maislin, RE/MAX Realtron Realty Inc.
InCom: The Bottom Line
InCom offers a fantastic website at an affordable price. For agents operating a one-person business, they provide all the elements you need to be successful, and their additional premium ad support and lead generation options are great ways to get your business into growth mode. Whether you’re a new agent or a seasoned professional, InCom is a great option for anyone looking for a real estate website builder.
5. Best Real Estate Website Builder for Brokers & Teams: BoomTown
Larger organizations require a different approach with features like lead distribution, team tracking, pipeline management, and more. BoomTown offers all of this, taking the website building process out of the individual’s hands and making it an office solution.
BoomTown Pricing
BoomTown’s real estate websites for agents and brokerages start at $1,000 per month plus a $750 onboarding fee for their Launch package, ideal for one to three agents. The next step up is their Grow package at $1,550 a month plus a $1,550 onboarding fee, designed for teams or brokerages of three to 10 people.
BoomTown also offers a whole suite of other products including a CRM, lead generation, marketing automation, lead qualification, and pipeline management. Unfortunately, the prices for each of these products is not listed publicly and are subject to change based on the other products you purchase, so we weren’t able to get a clear understanding of all the different BoomTown product prices.
BoomTown Pricing at a Glance – October 2020
| Package | |
|---|---|
| Launch (1-2 agents) | |
| Core (2-5 agents) | |
| Grow (3-10 agents) | |
| Advance (11+ agents) |
Since BoomTown is geared more toward brokerages and teams, the prices of their products are definitely in a different weight class than the other real estate website builders on our list. However, included in these prices are perks you don’t get otherwise, including access to a very competitive real estate CRM, lead distribution tools, and some brokerage level marketing strategies, giving BoomTown a serious bang for your buck.
Lead Generation Ad Management Included: Our Favorite BoomTown Feature
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.
BoomTown Templates & Customizability
As of the writing of this article, there were 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 the BoomTown websites are designed for larger groups, your ability to customize them is somewhat limited, but just like on other real estate-specific website builders, brokers and team leaders have fine 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 made it seem like if there was a team or brokerage that had 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 direction, 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.
BoomTown IDX Capability
Just like the other real estate-specific website builders on our list (Placester and InCom), BoomTown is natively set up to include 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 the 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.
Real Estate Lead Capture on BoomTown
BoomTown offers standard lead capture options on each of their templates, including custom landing pages, pop-ups, lead capture forms, and the like. As mentioned above, BoomTown also offers management of the ads that will draw leads to your website in the first place.
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 doing with each of their leads, allowing brokers and team leaders to provide coaching and counsel to just the right agents at just the right time, upping your conversion of each of those 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 CRM Capabilities
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, 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 Support
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.
Where BoomTown Comes Up Short
While BoomTown is the best option for teams or brokerages, it’s actually hard to see why unless you really dig in deep to the BoomTown website and marketing materials, at least at first. 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 actually be using, so brokers or team leaders who want to kick the tires on their own first are going to have a hard time here.
Examples of BoomTown Real Estate Websites for Agents & Brokerages
Here are some examples of BoomTown websites in action.
Jim Allen, Coldwell Banker Howard, Perry and Watson
Ben Kinney Team, Keller Williams Western Realty
The Duncan Duo, RE/MAX Dynamic
BoomTown: The Bottom Line
If you need a real estate website solution for your brokerage or team, BoomTown is the best place to get it. Yes, it’s a little pricey, but you get a lot for your money, and even though there’s an investment here, running a business requires investment on a large scale if you’re going to support the success of multiple agents.
6. Best Builder for Agents Seeking Attractive Templates & Flexible Design: Squarespace
Squarespace provides, far and away, the most templates, design flexibility, and options for anyone creating a website, including real estate professionals. To be totally clear, Squarespace is not a real estate-specific platform, and as such, they’re missing a couple of website elements like a built-in CRM and real estate lead capture landing pages that you’ll find on Placester and InCom.
However, because the platform provides such a wide array of website design options and they integrate with nearly every major CRM or lead capture platform on the web, these challenges can be overcome if you have a specific vision for how you want your website to look and feel that you can’t achieve with the relatively restrictive templates of the other providers.
Overall, Squarespace is an affordable, open-world option for real estate professionals who want total control over their website’s aesthetic and don’t mind integrating their website with other real estate products like a CRM or email marketing system.
Squarespace Pricing
Squarespace pricing starts at $12 per month when paid annually for their Personal Plan. Though a well-appointed package, most real estate agents will find the Business Plan at $18 per month when paid annually to be the way to go, allowing better on-page lead capture, one year of free G Suite access, and other premium design elements.
Squarespace Pricing at a Glance – October 2020
| Squarespace Package | |
|---|---|
| Personal | |
| Business |
Squarespace also offers pricing options for individuals who are looking to sell things directly on their site, which is something most real estate agents don’t need. However, if you ever decide to offer professional real estate products, coaching, or other services online, Squarespace has options for you to take payments and sell right from your site.
Awesome Design Flexibility: Our Favorite Squarespace Feature
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 literally dozens of design elements you can include—things like contact forms, photo carousels (perfect for featuring properties), blogs, video, calendars for scheduling appointments, just to name a few—there are virtually unlimited ways you can put your website together.
Squarespace Templates & Customizability
As we just mentioned, the templates and customizability on the Squarespace platform are its strongest features. This asset can be especially handy if you have a strong blog with lots of content and content types, you’re a video wiz, or you have some other unfair advantage over your competition—you want a website that will allow you to highlight those advantages.
Also, Squarespace offers 30 different templates for landing pages too, perfect for pairing with your social media-driven lead capture efforts. These landing page templates are already beautifully designed, but tweaking them to say exactly what you want and to gather exactly the right information from your leads is easy.
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, but the customization options on these pages give agents the options you need to shape them into exactly how you want.
Squarespace IDX Capability
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 like a bridge between your MLS and your website, providing a plugin that is installed directly on your website, allowing for 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 from you as the agent to get it up and running.
Real Estate Lead Capture on Squarespace
Since Squarespace isn’t a real estate-specific website builder, lead capture options here are a little more generic, but still very 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 that you can display across the top of your site regardless of how deep 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 does provide 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 personally make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row and your lead data is routed to the right place.
Squarespace CRM Capabilities
Squarespace doesn’t offer any sort of 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, but you don’t get all the benefits of having your website working directly with your CRM to track lead activity.
Squarespace Support
The Squarespace account support team is very responsive and worked great for us. They don’t have dedicated phone support listed on the 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, prompt, and the person helping us was able to answer our question as well as 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 your site, and much more on these forums, definitely a standout resource.
Where Squarespace Comes Up Short
Squarespace is a little frustrating when it comes to your designs translating to a mobile experience. We all know that the majority of traffic coming to real estate sites is coming there via mobile devices, so we’re happy that every single template on Squarespace is mobile-optimized. However, it was our experience that the webpage we spent an hour meticulously assembling on our laptop is a little out of order and not as effective on a mobile device.
After we figured out what was happening, the problem was fixed, but just generally speaking, there is an extra step in making sure that what you’re making is going to look great on a phone as well as on your computer screen, 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, consider those as good alternatives.
Examples of Squarespace Real Estate Websites for Agents
Here are some examples of Squarespace real estate websites in action.
Linda Levin, Sotheby’s International Real Estate
Estates Business Group
Suzanne McMillan, Sotheby’s International
Squarespace: The Bottom Line
Out of all the website builders that aren’t real estate-specific, Squarespace is the clear leader. Their designs are beautiful, their options are virtually limitless, and the prices are very competitive. Though they lack some of the industry-specific touches that a provider like Placester makes available, they are still a very viable option for anyone needing to design a new presence online.
Your Turn
Are there any real estate website builders that we missed? What other providers are worthy of review? Tell us who you use and what your experiences are in the comments below.
Real estate websites are one of the many real estate marketing tools agents need to get more leads and promote their business. If you’re looking for more ideas on how to fill up your lead funnel, make sure to check out our article “37 Underrated Real Estate Lead Generation Ideas for 2021.”
What about Website box?
Hi Patri –
That’s not a provider I’m familiar with. Are you using a website through them?
Chris
I found Placester to be pleasant to the eye but totally lacking as far as service & tech support. It was years & years where they couldn’t get one of the largest MLS’s to work with their product. Every time you’d turn around the IDX didn’t work. Why else would a buyer show up? It got to a point that I just gave up. Don’t waste your money either! Learn from my mistakes.
Hi Lyn –
Thanks for the feedback, we’ll definitely look into it!
Chris
What do you guys think about using WordPress?
Hi Alexiz –
I love WordPress. A TON of the internet is built on the WordPress platform, including The Close, but the problem here is that WordPress requires a certain level of expertise and time that most busy Realtors don’t possess. With WP, you are programming essentially from scratch, and while that does provide you with the ultimate level of customization, most agents don’t need that level of customization, they just want a website that is going to convert their leads.
Chris
Hi Chris, I was wondering if you think that Propopen would be a good addition to this list?
Hi Owen –
Thanks for the message. I am not familiar with Propopen, but I will take a look! Thanks for the tip.
Chris
Hi Chris,
After reading all the helpful info in your article who would you recommend to cater for a small boutique real estate company in Auckland New Zealand for a Website & CRM. Budget conscious to begin with later additional options we can add.
Thanks
Phil
Hi Phil –
Thanks for the question. Honestly, I’m not well-read when it comes to most options outside of the US, so I am not sure how much help I can be here. Feel free to email me directly at chris@theclose.com, let’s start a dialogue there.
Chris
What do you think of Webflow?
Hi Eric –
I don’t have any personal experience with this company, but they look cool! Any time you have a non-real estate specific product, you’re going to run into bells and whistles you aren’t going to need to ring (in addition to some lacking features you wish you had), but if you are familiar with this approach or are interested in trying them out, I’d say go for it.
Chris
Hi Chris,
I’ll be honest, I made an attempt at using Squarespace DIY and found myself frustrated. If I wanted to turn over the complete design, with strong lead generation and IDX access capabilities and preferably with robust CRM, who of the 6 above would you recommend or would your recommend another option other than 1 of the 6? I don’t have the skill set or patience to DIY. Greatly appreciate your feedback.
Hi Chuck –
Thanks for the question. My go-to recommendation here is Placester, but the addition of a robust CRM as a need makes Propertybase or Boomtown your best bet. The thing is, neither of those options are cheap for single agents, so you’re definitely going to pay a premium, but you’re going to get exactly what you’re looking for – which sounds like the concierge-level service.
Good luck!
Chris