The era of business digitization has dawned. Companies of all kinds are going online because their CEOs see it as the only way to survive and thrive in a highly competitive environment. The pandemic also influenced this trend by forcing us to look for ways to remain effective without leaving houses and apartments.
Of course, the real estate market is no exception to the rule. The sector is anticipated to grow at an annual rate of 3.41% (CAGR 2024-2028), resulting in a market volume of US$729.40tn by 2028.
And no wonder, in the end, online tools make the process of buying or selling property much faster, more transparent, and more convenient. They allow realtors to work more efficiently and make their services quite affordable. As to ordinary customers, they're allowed to manage deals from the comfort of their homes.
We've compiled a list of the best real estate websites considered top resources in the modern US market. You can read about them in our article and draw your conclusions. Maybe you'll get inspired too, why not?
In other words, let’s discuss the main things to bear in mind when starting a real estate business online.
Why Do We Need Real Estate Websites?
Today we cannot imagine life without technological advances and the benefits they give us. But that wasn’t always the case…
The difficulties of the pre-Internet era
Before the advent of digital technologies and, accordingly, real estate websites and applications, people had a hard time buying or selling a property. And by people, we mean both ordinary homeowners and professional realtors.
Of course, even today, real estate deals aren't exactly cheap, and sometimes they're rather labor-intensive, but IT innovations have greatly simplified the whole thing, that's for sure.
In the old days, a certain John Smith, who, say, wanted to sell his house, had to make an appointment with a realtor and discuss all the details of the future deal with him during the meeting (which is much longer and more hassling than arranging everything at home with a couple of clicks). And the realtor, before proceeding with the sale of the property itself, had to conduct a market analysis in order to offer the client the best terms (and the best price).
Today, such a realtor usually resorts to great real estate websites like Zillow, which provide him with the necessary market information and give him a place (a listing platform) to promote the property in sale. And in the past, he had to look for a potential buyer on his own (‘manually’, so to say) or enlist the help of specialized companies and share a part of the profit with them. As a result, the property sale process became longer and more complicated, and the total price grew. All the parties involved lost.
A new digital era
Now you understand what caused the growth in popularity of various sites and, later, applications. But anyway, here are the main benefits each participant in the real estate deal gets (in case if the reasons are still unobvious):
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Agents find it easier to manage customer orders. And while they have to pay site owners a commission to place ads, the costs are still lower than they used to be. And the work itself is simplified too because some of the tasks are being performed by digital algorithms now, which cheapens the process.
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Ordinary people who want to buy or sell property are also happy to order required real estate services through online platforms:
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Buyers get the chance to view dozens of homes in the shortest possible time, without ever leaving the couch. That's quite possible since each object of sale is usually supplemented with high-quality photographs and a detailed description. So choosing the house to buy isn’t so difficult.
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Sellers (homeowners) can find the right agent to get them through the deal in a very user-friendly way (and also without leaving the home or office).
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Most often, each realtor has his own profile with a rating and reviews, which allows customers to understand how many deals he has concluded and whether buyers were satisfied with his services.
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Owners of web platforms get their profit, which means they also win.
Okay, let's say you'd like to build your own real estate website. But what kind of features to include in it? And what IT trends should you follow to get the most out of it?
We cover these and other related questions with great pleasure.
Key Real Estate Website Features
Above, we indicated (and even illustrated) which features are in special demand today (according to surveys and research). However, they’re clearly not enough to make your real estate website work properly. So you should implement the following:
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Registration and account creation depending on the group to which the user belongs. Your users will include homeowners, property buyers, realtors, and each needs a different profile. And if the buyer of a property can do without registration at all and directly contact the agent through the special form, the realtor must have a personal page with experience identification, ratings, reviews, status update, and so on.
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Database (information on the real estate market). Yes, the extensive database is one of the main conditions for starting a real estate business online (at least with a true chance of success). And keep in mind, the more often your database is updated, the better your resource works.
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Map with the determination of the user's location. No need to explain why such a site requires a map, right? Among others, the buyer would be able to use it to choose the area in which he wants to purchase the property.
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Calendar, which would make the deal course more transparent, time-bound, and deadline-following.
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Search with filters and sorting. Below, describing the best real estate websites, we tell you what type of search engines your competitors have created. You should offer your users something similar (or better).
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Diverse photographs of real estate objects, so that the buyer can evaluate a particular house whenever and wherever he wants (without leaving his own home).
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Information on the property (the more, the better), which plays just as important a role as the photographic image thereof.
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Push notifications to keep users up to date. Let's say a new house for sale has appeared in the area the client is interested in, and it fully meets his requirements. The user will immediately receive a notification inviting him to visit a website and take a look at this new property.
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Online communication. Online chat, feedback forms, chatbot, and other features of the sort will help the user stay in touch with you around the clock. So he'll be able to solve emerging problems in real-time (as much as possible).
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Rating & Reviews. And we mean not only the ratings clients give to realtors but also the reviews they leave to your online service. Let users express their opinion about your platform and how it works. Does it meet their expectations? After all, in order to make your resource named one of the best real estate agent websites, you have to work on its optimization and improvement on an ongoing basis. And user reviews are just the thing to help you find the right line of development.
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Real estate value calculators. Zillow has its famous Zestimate (which is discussed below), you also need to come up with an equally effective feature.
If your development budget allows you to get creative, try implementing some of the high-demanded features (see infographics above). They're more expensive to build (except, perhaps, notifications via email, which needs to be included in the basic functionality anyway), but they're worth the money and effort spent (if approached properly).
Digital real estate trends to follow
When starting a real estate business, be prepared to compete. And don’t forget, your opponents have been on the market for years and know how to attract and retain customers. How can you overcome their experience? Only by proving your perseverance and commitment to excellence! Among other things, we advise you to pay attention to the latest digital industry trends, such as:
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Big Data Technology. Information is the key to prosperity, and Zillow's example is the best proof of this (in the next section, we'll go into more detail on how big data helped Zillow succeed).
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AI algorithms. Make your real estate website evolve and improve day by day thanks to machine learning mechanisms.
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Virtual 3D tools. By giving the user the opportunity to virtually “visit” this or that house, to evaluate it in three-dimensional reality (in volume), you increase the chances of him making a real purchase. And your income is also growing.
Best Real Estate Agent Websites
There are now 3 main players in the modern US real estate market: Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor. These are your competitors, and they're also your sources of inspiration.
Let's analyze each of them... who knows, maybe you'll like some of their ideas (which might come in handy if you're serious about starting a real estate business in the digital space).
Zillow
Without any exaggeration, Zillow is the main leader in the modern real estate market (at least, in the US). It has managed to force the competition out of business and become indispensable when it comes to buying, renting, and selling property in the United States.
Zillow boasts nearly 30 million unique visitors every month, from ordinary people and real estate agents to mortgage companies and property developers. Still further, Zillow covers all areas, one way or another related to real estate. So now it is a true entry point to the market in question.
Surely, today Zillow belongs to great real estate websites... but when and where did it get started? How did its owners achieve such howling success?
The history of Zillow
Zillow came into being a long time ago (in 2004). Its creators were Rich Barton and Loyd Frink. Both had achieved considerable success in the IT industry by that time (for example, Mr. Frink was once the head of divisions at Microsoft).
The guys didn't really think about starting a real estate business... they just wanted to create a simple listing service and get a source of steady income. And they got it... and soon found out that their product was in high demand. However, users (mostly US residents) weren’t 100% satisfied, they needed more. So, it was time to improve the resource to fully meet their expectations.
The goal was set, and the guys began to bring it to reality. They developed a special algorithm, which allowed Zillow to collect and process information about US properties from a huge variety of official sources. The data obtained were being converted into user-friendly schemes and offered to customers in a grouped form, something like this:
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analysis and dynamics of the value of property objects in accordance with certain criteria (say, houses in prestigious areas are much more expensive);
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the comfort of the area (availability of schools, cafes, catering establishments, parking lots, and other things increases the level of comfort and also affects the real estate price);
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ethnic characteristics of the area;
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crime rate as a percentage;
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and other stuff like that!
And so, step by step and year after year, Zillow has become what it is today: a top resource and powerful market leader, the first among the best real estate websites.
Zillow & Big Data
Surely Zillow wouldn't have achieved its incredible success had it not managed big data so skillfully and efficiently. You have something to learn from its experience!
Let's imagine the huge number of houses and other properties existing in the United States. In fact, there are more than 100 million of them, and Zillow has detailed information on each. And as we've written above, this information is diverse and detailed and includes even the history of the building's renovation! Cool, isn't it?
However, collecting data is half the battle. It's also important to handle it properly, and Zillow knows how to do it (or rather, it learned to do it). That's why its real estate services are so wanted.
But we're a bit distracted from the issue at hand. So Zillow is collecting a lot of useful data. And, more importantly, it's skillfully managing the information received. Here is a simple example: if there is a Starbucks within half a mile of a property object, Zillow increases its value by 20-30%. And if there is a popular health food supermarket like Whole Foods, the price can be increased by 50% (and sometimes even 60-70%).
The algorithm is clever enough and rarely wrong (almost never). It even has a name, which is Zestimate.
Figuratively speaking, Zestimate is a patented pricing formula and a real-life trademark. And over the last years, this trademark (a special calculation algorithm) has been actively influencing the pricing of real estate in the United States.
Yes, Zillow has created a unique algorithm, and, in general, its business is booming right now. But none of this would have been possible without Big Data. And if you're eager to join the ranks of the best real estate websites like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor as well (we'll talk about the latter two in due course), you'll have to work with a huge array of information too, there is no way to avoid it.
How does Zillow make money?
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Commission. Of course, the main thing is the commission that agents pay for placing their property ads on the resource.
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Zillow Advice. The Zillow owners showed some imagination and found another (and rather original) way to make money, namely, paid expert advice on property issues.
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Premier Agent. If a real estate agent wants more options to promote himself as a professional, he must buy access to a premium account.
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iBuying. Do you want to sell your home in no time? In the shortest possible term? Zillow's real estate services offer what you need, namely, an iBuying feature. Of course, you'll receive less money than you could if you agreed to wait, but sometimes the time factor is more important than money.
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Zillow resells your property to other real estate companies and earns on the price difference.
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Top results. Do you want your real estate ad to be at the top of search results? It's quite possible if you're willing to fork out!
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By the way, it's not just about the search engine of Zillow itself. The company has partnered with Yahoo, so we're talking about a more scaled approach to promotion.
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Paid real estate market reports. Knowledge and information can and should be monetized, the creators of Zillow believe, and they sell advanced reports to all interested parties.
Zillow's business strategy
Now let's see how Zillow became one of the best real estate agent websites, and what steps its owners took to conquer the market. Maybe you can adopt some of these practices too, who knows?
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Internal promotion. It is useless to fight with competitors if your site has no visitors. So Zillow started out by attracting buyers and sellers of properties. It acted as follows (the scheme is simple but effective):
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real estate agents were attracted by classical methods: through contextual advertising and promises of a huge number of ad views and leads (and promises were fulfilled, actually);
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ordinary users were invited through SEO marketing and multi-stage retargeting.
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External promotion. After gaining some prominence among agents and property owners, Zillow went on the offensive against its competitors. And it acted quite aggressively: to make a long story short, the company bought and absorbed all similar projects (other real estate websites), including Naked Apartments, RentJuice, Dotloop, and even Trulia (which is discussed below).
Zillow pros
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excellent search, enhanced by a variety of filters and sorting systems. The user can easily find the desired property according to the required criterion, be it price, neighborhood, etc.
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Zestimates advanced price calculator, which allows you to get an idea of the level of real estate value in a specified location;
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access to the most detailed information on real estate agents (so if there is no risk of choosing a fraudster if you're looking for a specialist to cooperate with);
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useful and customizable notifications. Interested in a specific area? Zillow will send you a notification if something suitable appears in the location you choose.
Zillow cons
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there are many other great real estate websites that offer an even better description of the property's location (neighborhood information) than Zillow does;
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Zestimates is a wonderful and easy-to-use tool, but it's not 100% accurate; after all, even digital algorithms sometimes make mistakes;
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homeowners who post ads on Zillow charge unreasonably high prices on their properties.
Trulia
Trulia was created almost at the same time as Zillow (only a year later). And over the next 10 years, the resource had been picking up steam of popularity. It became a dangerous competitor to all US-based real estate websites, leading Zillow's company to buy it in early 2015 (as we mentioned above). Trulia hasn't ceased to exist, though, it's just that other people are in charge of it now.
Trulia and Zillow may seem very similar, and so they are. However, Zillow is more focused on real estate agents and offers them a lot of useful features for running their business, while Trulia mainly deals with homeowners. They are its key audience.
What is Trulia today?
According to research, Zillow and Trulia are among the best real estate websites. And the fact that Trulia has a new owner doesn't change a thing. The resource is still top-notch and in demand (20+ million unique visitors per month speak volumes, right?). Might even say Trulia benefited from the deal by gaining access to Zillow's vast database.
Trulia is intuitive and easy to work with, no special skills or knowledge are required. Moreover, you can choose any device to view real estate properties: smartphone, laptop, netbook, PC... Trulia has both a website and a mobile application, which means the interests of users have fully been taken into account.
Once on the main page of the Trulia real estate website, you're welcome to start searching. All you have to do is clarify your purpose (sale, rent, purchase of property) and indicate the desired area; click Search and get a list of suitable results.
BTW!
Rather than displaying results in a boring textual list, Trulia offers users a string of colorful property cards with a short description of each. Also, you can click on an object marker on the map and see its card too. It depends on which option suits you best!
How does Trulia earn money?
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Monetizing real estate agents. By becoming part of the Zillow company (more precisely called the Zillow Group), Trulia got access not only to the information collected by the famous resource but also to its income from agents. They (agents) pay to place their ads and, optionally, promote their real estate services through special channels (see Zillow's description).
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Advertising. Previously, in the pre-Zillow period, Trulia used advertising very heavily, as that was its main way of making a profit. Users, of course, were unhappy (ad banners can be rather annoying, especially if there are too many of them). Zillow changed the approach to advertising monetization and made ad banners more unobtrusive, almost native.
Trulia Pros
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Search results visualization. We've already covered how easy it is to search for properties with Trulia. But the main thing is that the search results are very visual (again, see the picture above). No point in long and boring descriptions that few people read if you can illustrate a property!
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In-depth information on property objects. All the top real estate websites offer a lot of details about a particular property, but Trulia is almost unique in this regard. It provides not only the usual data (such as schools, parking lots, cafes) but even gives feedback from local residents and indicates a rating of loyalty to the LGBTQ community.
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High user ratings. In addition to the website, Trulia has an application, and users really like it (which is confirmed by their reviews and ratings on Google Play and App Store).
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By the way, Trulia offers several app options (depending on the type of user). There is even a version called Trulia Rentals (aimed at renters, as the name suggests).
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Lots of details about agents. There is so much information about each agent that you cannot go wrong when choosing a real estate specialist.
Trulia Cons
Trulia has few cons, the main one being imperfect real estate pricing. Mistakes are rare, but they do happen.
However, let’s face it: even the best real estate agent websites miscalculate the value of the property from time to time, including aforesaid Zillow.
Realtor
Realtor.com cooperates with the National Association of Realtors and operates data from 550+ MLS sources (MLS stands for Multiple Listing Service, it’s a system, which interacts with a database of real estate objects with exclusive contracts).
It's safe to say that Realtor.com is providing the most accurate property information. That’s why it’s one of the hottest, sought-after, great real estate websites.
Briefly about its history
To begin with, the resource has existed on the market for a much longer period compared to its competitors. It appeared at the end of the 20th century, in the second half of the 90s (impressive, isn't it?). At first, it only offered a web version but now it is supplemented by a mobile application.
Despite the increased competition, Realtor.com keeps attracting a large number of users. And there is hope it stays that way.
Of course, there remains the challenge of Zillow's dominance, but the owners of Realtor.com are doing their utmost to make sure the resource is still at the top. And so far they have succeeded. But only time will tell how it ends.
How does it work?
The real estate website is user-friendly, its UI literally explains to you what to do to buy, sell, or rent the desired property.
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Need to buy a property? Indicate the desired location (or other criteria), and get suitable options. If you like one of them the most, you can contact the agent, and he'll provide more information.
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Planning to sell your property? Realtor.com offers you a ton of options: you can sell your house on a fast track if you need to do it really quickly. Or you may buy a new house first and only then start selling the old one. Choose what suits you best!
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And, of course, you’ll be asked to pick a real estate agent who will help you make your dream deal come true.
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To learn more about the cool services the company provides, you have to visit the resource yourself and browse it thoroughly, from A to Z.
How does it get its money?
Since the resource is focused on realtors and acting through them (which is easy to guess, given its name), the company earns profit by monetizing these experts. Besides, some of the real estate services offered to homeowners willing to sell their property are also paid (say, if they want to shorten the sale time or sell the house under certain conditions).
Pros
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Convenient search for real estate objects and intuitive display of results;
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Easy-to-use application (4.5-4.7 stars rating and even higher);
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Working with MLS databases;
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Help in finding and choosing a suitable expert (realtor).
Cons
The main disadvantage of the resource is that the homeowner cannot sell his property himself. He has no choice but to act through a realtor (which is rather inconvenient, to say the very least).
Summary
Are you impressed with these examples of successful real estate websites? Maybe it's a sign you have to go into your own business of the same type too, what do you think? If you agree, start by involving a team of real estate specialists and finding a development company to create your resource.
And speaking of the development company... we don’t mind becoming one. Moreover, we’d be honored to assist you. We have a huge experience in building custom real estate development solutions and other websites and applications.
