Websites for real-estate agencies

What goes wrong with most agency sites

It usually goes like this. The site is built once, the agency that built it owns the listings, and every change means an email and a wait. Three months in, half the properties are already sold and still showing. Six months in, nobody opens the site and the whole operation has moved to Facebook and the portals.

The agency has then lost the one platform it owns, and pays the portals commission on its own listings. Not because the site looked bad, but because it was built to be looked at rather than used.

Your team posts the listings, not us

Your agents add and edit listings themselves, from an ordinary browser, through Vertex Portal. A new property is online in minutes. A sold one comes down immediately. Nobody waits on anybody, and there is no email with photographs attached.

That is the single decision that determines whether an agency site is alive in a year or dead. Everything else on this page depends on it.

Every property is its own page in Google

People do not search for an agency. They search for a flat in a particular neighbourhood, with a certain number of rooms, up to a certain price. If every property has its own address, its own title and structured data, those searches can find you directly instead of going through a portal.

Search and filters on the site are the other half: neighbourhood, type, price, floor area, number of rooms. A buyer who can filter stays. A buyer scrolling forty listings in a row leaves.

The enquiry reaches the right agent

Each agent has a page of their own, with their own properties and their own contact details. When someone sends an enquiry about a specific property, it goes to the agent handling that property, not into a shared inbox somebody checks in the afternoon.

The difference is response time, and in real estate response time is close to the whole job. The buyer who asked about a flat at half past eight in the evening has already asked two other agencies.

What comes after that

Once the foundation works, these are the things we build next for agencies:

• Automatic posting: the listing is entered once in the portal and goes out to Instagram and Facebook on its own
• A Viber and WhatsApp responder: answers the availability, price and viewing questions immediately, at night as well, then hands the conversation to an agent
• Buyer matching: buyer requirements are kept, so a new listing tells the agent there are already people waiting for it
• Documents from listing data: offers and reservations are generated from what is already entered instead of being typed out again

None of it goes into the first version. The site launches, the team starts using it, and then we build what is genuinely missing. Systems built before anyone has used the site usually solve the wrong problem.