According to a survey by global statistics consolidator Statista, real estate website visits were more than 120 million times each month. Another study, according to a 2019 National association of Realtor’s profile of home buyers and sellers, states that 52% of buyers purchased on the internet. To put this in perspective, only 29% found the home they bought through their realtor, and 6% from a yard sign.
The dynamism and interactive nature of the web have influenced every possible business domain. This includes the highly competitive real estate domain as well. The real estate industry has seen both individual customers and businesses line up to buy, sell, rent, or lease properties online.
On the other hand, customers have become increasingly techno-savvy as well. They are choosy and require multiple options as far as seeking information from online sources is concerned. Property portals come to the rescue of real estate firms and help them address the requirements of both the customer segments.
A robust and trendy web portal can help you stay competitive. Your property portal should be highly engaging, SEO friendly, and feature-rich to address the needs of both buyers and sellers. In this article, we are going to discuss certain important features that a real estate portal must have to meet the competitive edge in the current market. Without further ado, let us begin:
I. High-definition Display
Pictures speak louder than words. They’re easy to understand and friendly to the ears. Especially when it looks like your next dream house. It is the first thing that buyers scan through. Therefore, you’ll always benefit from using high-quality images.
Good images help gain the confidence of prospective buyers. The importance of proper, relevant images can emphasize that graphics are easier to browse through than reading long descriptions.
Therefore, your real estate portal must store, save and display high-definition images. You should make sure that different dimensions and parts of the property are visually represented through high-quality visual media.
II. Comprehensive Listings
The property portal you choose should have extensive listing features. Make sure you view every detailed listing with the template for your property page. Your listings are the direct reflection of the best features and amenities. You can ease your listings and make your properties more visible through the following two aspects:
Flawless Navigation
Flawless navigation is a must for real estate portals. You lose a client if your potential buyers cannot reach the listings that they might be interested in. Information scattered over the page, wrong CTA placement, menu not properly designed, and so on, contribute to failure in navigation.
The navigation system of your website will make it possible to guide visitors to their pages of interest seamlessly without having to click on various links. Make sure you get an interactive and stunning menu. The menu must be well-arranged and well-tied with menu titles and submenus.
Listing Categorization
Pick a property portal that allows you to divide your listings into various categories and subcategories. Categories help the buyers find properties faster. Implement a comprehensive categorization in terms of the type of property, the number of rooms, garage, balcony, as well as other details like amenities, etc.
III. Seamless User-Onboarding
Make sure your real estate portal has comprehensive user onboarding and management features. You must be able to add, manage and define access to various sellers, brokers, customers, and agents. Provide a simple sign-up and two-step verification process and let your users join your real estate portal within minutes.
Categorize your users accordingly and provide access based on it. You can also provide flexibility to your users and let your brokers, agents, and sellers manage their profiles as they want. Let them add details like name, contact information, properties, documents, and more.
IV. Omnichannel Communication
Omnichannel communication simply means providing multiple options to your buyers to reach out to you. Choose a property portal that lets brokers communicate with potential buyers in real-time through multiple ways. You can integrate a live chat option for customers to solve all their queries. You can also put contact details through various CTAs and let them communicate easily.
Having multiple channels of communication also contributes to building your brand identity. It makes sure that the buyers reach out to the brokers in one way or another, and you don’t lose potential buyers because of the communication fiasco.
V. Secure Data Management
Data management is an integral part of a real estate portal. Hence, secure handling of large-scale data is important. Handling the portal, CRM, and multiple other tools to quantify the data may result in data loss. Make sure the portal you choose provides secure data management features.
Choose a Synchronized Solution
Make sure that your CRM integrates with the portal, and you can transfer data easily. It saves you a lot of manual data-related tasks and gets seamless sync between your database and portal.
Secure Access to Everyone
As discussed earlier, make sure your property portal allows you to define role-based access to control data mismanagement. Enhance security and manage operations better with the right role-based structure and defined access privileges.
Unified Interface
A unified interface simply ensures that you do not have to switch between multiple tools while managing your property portal. Select a portal that lets you collaborate with other third-party tools from a single interface. This way you will be able to manage the real estate listing, sales, marketing, and lead funnels from a single place.
CRMJetty’s real estate portal is known for its security and seamlessly personalized workflow. It lets users perform all the operations from a single interface through a custom dashboard. It integrates with your CRM easily and allows you to add multiple roles and categories. Its extensive listing section creates a win-win scenario for both buyers as well as sellers. Would you like to take a look? Get in touch with our experts today!
VI. Neighborhood and Amenities Guide
The quality of life depends on the surroundings and the availability of basic amenities. Aspects like access to basic transportation services, nearest local stores, and so on make a huge contribution to the buyers’ decision-making. Therefore, adding a few lines about neighborhood areas adds more meaning to your property listing.
Whether it is a rental property or a new house on sale, buyers are always curious about the neighborhood and localities. Therefore, you must provide detailed information regarding the neighborhood, the locality, the nearby landmarks, and so on.
Also mention the quality of life in the area, and the size of the family it is best to fit for. You should always try to include all the property features and amenities for the sake of clarity. More information about the property helps the visitors decide better. Even a minor feature that might not look like a highlight of your property may attract potential buyers.
VII. Personalization
It is important to understand the subtleties of design, UX, and UI for a real estate portal. Users will not prefer your property portal if it is identical to every other portal out there. Hence, portal personalization comes into the picture.
Personalization builds a unique brand identity that sets you apart from your competitors. Therefore, your real estate portal must provide you customization features. You must be able to design templates, layouts, and components of your real estate portal identical to your website. Give your real estate portal a personal touch with ready-to-use standard design components with custom data binding.
VIII. Analytics and Reporting Features
Tracking analytics to identify the most effective marketing strategies, trends, roadblocks is important in an ever-changing industry like real estate. Look for a portal that provides a well-arranged admin dashboard. See if you can set and save quick links to widgets like recent activity, counter block, etc. for any required entity. You can also go for portals that provide customized dashboards. This way you will not have to keep switching between various interfaces and tools. You will simply be able to manage and control all entities from a single well-arranged custom dashboard.
IX. 360-Degree Entity Management
You must exercise full control over entities such as sellers, buyers, customers, properties, and so on. 360-degree entity management is necessary from both sides, i.e., your CRM as well as the portal.
User Management
You can use all the available default entities in your CRM and configure them as per your business requirements. As an admin, you must be able to manage properties along with brokers, sellers, and agents. You must be able to add, edit, delete, approve and reject properties added by brokers and sellers based on set criteria.
Allow brokers/sellers to create customized tags from the backend to manage potential buyers. Let them manage their lead data as they want, to keep a clear understanding of where they stand with a particular customer.
Media Management
Your property portal must allow your agents to add high-quality property photos and videos. They can upload high-definition 3D and VR tours to give a detailed idea about the property’s features, space, floor plans, outer space, and so on.
X. Mobile-Responsive
Since more customers use their smartphones to browse the internet, a mobile responsive site helps to reach out to customers on the go. The main objective is to let your potential customers seamlessly access the properties listed on your site from any type of device.
Therefore, it is important to get a fully responsive and engaging mobile interface that enriches the customer experience by allowing them to access the portal whenever and wherever they want.
Bonus Features
So above were the ten must-have features for a real estate portal. However, there are some other trending features that you must consider integrating with your real estate portal. These features can prove to be a bonus in building a brand identity as they’re rich with the latest digitization trends.
I. Video tours
Video tours have become a common thing nowadays. You can compile interesting videos of the properties to provide a better idea to the buyers. You can let sellers add videos of different areas of the property, a testimonial video, etc.
II. VR Features
These days virtual tours are becoming popular. It is almost equivalent to visiting the premises personally. It is a digital tour where potential buyers can see the entire property and experience it as if they’re physically visiting it. They can do all this simply by sitting on their sofa. Hence, embedding VR features into your property portal can be a plus for your real estate business.
III. Rental Property Features
You can include a listing of rental property on a real estate directory website. Make sure you provide all the necessary details that a tenant would like to know. This includes approximate apartment rent, included appliances, amenities, and whether they’re supposed to pay extra for certain facilities.
Make it more detailed by mentioning the type of tenants the home is best suited for. For example, a property with multiple rooms is suitable for big families, while single rooms are great for students.
IV. Google Maps Integration
You can integrate Google Maps along with the location details in your property listings. This way, potential buyers can track the exact location. You can also include guidelines on how to reach the place. They can also see the area surrounding the property, distance from schools, hospitals, public transport, etc.
V. Social Media Sharing
Integrate your property portal with popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. These links can help your site visitors share property information and listings to their social media profiles. As more people share it on their social media, the popularity of your property portal and real-estate website increases. This helps your site to garner favorable search rankings as well.
Ramp Up Your Real-Estate with Latest Digitization Features
Property portals have, without a doubt, become the most popular home search method. A well-crafted property portal can bring lots of opportunities for your business. And only experts can bring together a well-crafted property portal.
With 14+ years of experience in portal development, we bring you CRMJetty’s real estate portal. It is a one-stop centralized solution that overcomes all real-estate challenges and caters to B2C and B2B businesses. It is embedded with multiple trending features that help you solve problems like scattered information, mismanaged task flow, inefficient communication, and dispersed databases that seem to hinder the current real estate industry. Innovate and adapt synchronized technological solutions. Let’s get in touch.
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