Having a website is a must for anyone who’s in the luxury real estate business. However, just having a website isn’t going to solve all your problems. In the modern-day, a website is a tool for a company to sell its products and services. And you too should consider this before you decide to get a new website or redesign the old one.
If you’re new to web design or don’t know how it can impact your luxury real estate business, here are 6 important web design tips that you should take into consideration.
1. Ensure the basics first
Before jumping into the real estate part of the discussion, you must first ensure some of the most basic principles for a modern-day website. These include a responsive design, consistency in terms of alignment, colors and texts, and easy navigation. Apart from all this, you should also check the functional aspects of your website, like loading speed, database and query management, security, etc.
2. Use high-quality photos
As a realtor, if you want your visitors to get a good idea of how the property looks without visiting it in person, you must have quality photos of it on your website. The photos must capture every single aspect of the condo or house, including the surrounding areas.
Before uploading the photos to your website, make sure to compress them. Otherwise, if you end up uploading heavy images to your website, they’ll reduce the website loading speed to a great extent and will also lead to problems with search engine optimization.
And don’t worry about a drop in image quality. If you follow the right steps, compression won’t lead to such drops.
3. Don’t complicate things
Visitors won’t spend much time on one particular website, assuming that they’re going through multiple real estate websites to find a good deal on a luxury apartment or house. Thus, you have to keep things simple so that they can go through your content with ease.
If you have to describe a lengthy process, don’t just write a 1500 word essay on it. Instead, use small icons or visuals, and one-line descriptions for each step in that process. In case you need inspiration for this, check out the way Maser Condo Sales talks about their selling process. The whole process is quite lengthy, but they managed to cover all of it with some simple visuals and one-line descriptions. That’s how you should plan your content as well.
4. Keep the UI clean and simple
A real estate website must have a clean and simple user-interface. It shouldn’t be anything fancy, nor should it have functionalities that are hard to work with. The home page should display any new or hot listing, recent purchases that others have made, properties you’ve sold in the past, etc. However, while adding these sections to your homepage, don’t make things look confusing. Separate each section by a header, and avoid clusters.
The navigation bar should be placed at the top. You can have a sticky navbar, but don’t try to place it on the sides. A lot of people, especially those who’re a bit old, don’t appreciate this.
5. Display the property’s location on an interactive map
The interactive map will help people understand the area surrounding the property. It’ll also help them realize how close they are to necessary and emergency services, like banks, schools, day-care centers, hospitals, police stations, etc. After all, the property they’re planning on buying will be their new home, and they wouldn’t want to live in an area that’s far away from such important services and facilities, no matter how exclusive the location is.
6. Knowing what to write and how to present it
Quality visuals and pictures will be enough to attract potential real estate buyers, but they can’t sell the property on their own. For that, you also need the help of quality writing and presentation.
The writing needs to be top-class; don’t settle for anything less. However, it’s the way you present it to your visitors that matters the most. When someone visits the listing page for a property, they should immediately get an overall picture of what they’re looking at. Thus, under the image or name of the property, you should include key facts about it, like its location, size, room arrangements, and of course, the price.
These few points will help them realize whether or not they want to know more about the property, and they can then carry on reading the rest of the description if they like.