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It’s easy to overlook property pages on your website. Every real estate agent and brokerage has property pages, usually pulling from the MLS listing data — and so how unique can you really get with yours?
If it’s your listing, then you might be surprised! There are some opportunities to inject information and images into your listing page that buyers can’t find anywhere else. Considering that 41% of buyers begin their home search online looking at homes for sale, these are opportunities you really don’t want to overlook.
Consider including all of these features in your next property listing. If you’re struggling to capture high-quality images or video, or listing descriptions are really not your thing (let alone turning seller questionnaires into compelling content), then remember you can outsource the things that challenge you! Talk to your marketing team and investigate whether any of your vendors might be able to fill in some skill gaps for you.
First things first: Gorgeous images
It’s a truism that you want your listing images to be top-notch in 2024, but when it comes to the property pages on your website, if you can, it’s a good investment to go above and beyond. Especially after the pandemic, touring homes online became a real thing, and giving visitors the ability to experience this home vicariously through their computer screens feeds into this trend.
Maybe this buyer found the property through social media. Maybe they were clever enough to Google the address, and your SEO is good enough to pop your listing to the top of search results (well done!). Or perhaps they found your listing page through your website, using the IDX search function.
If they were on social media, it’s quite possible they’ve already seen at least a few photos of the house. And if they’ve already looked at the MLS listing through a portal, then it’s possible they’ve seen everything linked to the listing. So what else can you include?
Always try to use a professional photographer to shoot your listings, who can take close-up detail photos that might not make sense to include in an MLS listing, as well as multiple angles and shots of the most interesting (to buyers) rooms and areas in the house. The best possible place to showcase these? Your property listing page.
As well as still photos, you can embed more dynamic or interactive elements into your property page: videos, virtual tours, floor plans, and other visual assets that can help prospective buyers understand why this house might be the perfect fit for them.
From a user experience standpoint, your property page should have user-friendly display options. The CMS you use to build your website ought to have these built in —for example, an image rotator at the top of the page that visitors can expand to fill the entire screen, with zoom capabilities so they can get a detailed, close look of the home that piqued their interest on Facebook or Instagram.
Listing description
Like listing photos, there are enough bad listing descriptions in the world that there are even tropes and tongue-in-cheek memes about what listing descriptions “really” mean: We all know that “cozy” is typically a euphemism for “uncomfortably small,” for example. And unlike listing photos, there isn’t a huge amount of attention paid to the listing description — even the most avid lookie-loos online probably aren’t going to read a bunch of text about the house they’re scoping.
If you think about it, this is exactly the reason why you should craft a listing description that helps the reader feel like they’re already home, especially on your property landing page. When you’re promoting your own listing, you have access to a treasure trove of information about what at least one person or household loved about the house: your sellers. Even if they’re leaving because the house no longer fits their lifestyle, at some point, they fell hard enough for it to make an offer on it and live in it.
Ask your sellers about their fondest memories in the house, then use their responses to write an ode to the house that you make available exclusively on your property page. Here you can find a worksheet to help guide you that you can download and use — Placester also has writers who can help with this project if you’ve collected the responses but aren’t up for the writing part! Ask for blog post assistance, then reuse some or all of the post on the property page.) Embed it as a pop-up on the page so that you’re not creating a wall of text that not everybody wants to read, and then entice your followers on social media to visit the property page in order to get the inside scoop on what makes this house special.
Property details
Bed and bath count. Square footage. Lot size. Basic amenities. Yes, the MLS listing (and real estate portals) will have much of this information available, and you might not be telling buyers anything they don’t already know. However, if they overlooked some small piece of knowledge that’s relevant to their decision to buy or not to buy, then you don’t want them navigating away from your page to track it down!
Displaying all of this granular background on a house is both critical and can look terrible; even the real estate portals struggle to display it in a way that’s clear, intuitive, and clean. Talk to your CMS provider about your options here; you might want to include some kind of pop-up that appears when visitors hover over a “property information” box, and then pick and choose the most relevant information to include on the page.
If this is your listing, then try to collect as many of those tiny, seemingly insignificant details as you possibly can. Yes, most of the listings in the MLS only meet the minimum standards for data entry — and you’re busy, and you have other listings and other clients, and it’s a hot market, so why bother? Giving potential buyers all of the information about a home that’s available (instead of the bare minimum)
A CTA that makes sense
Even a property page should have some kind of call to action, and although this isn’t a landing page in the truest sense (you’ll want to give readers an escape from the page via a way to search for other, similar homes in case this one isn’t quite what they want — more on that later), you will still want to craft a careful CTA for property page visitors.
A serious buyer is probably going to want to walk through the house if they possibly can before making an offer. Instead of creating a more generic “contact the listing agent” CTA, consider crafting a lead capture form that’s essentially a contact form, but framing it as a way for buyers to learn more about seeing the house in person. For example:
- Want to tour your dream home? Tell us when you’re available! (Include a field for the user to enter a schedule.)
- To book a private tour, contact us through this form.
- Schedule your home tour today: Give us your details and we’ll set it up!
Do you have an open house scheduled for the house, and are you trying to funnel prospective buyers to it? You can also offer to send any information about upcoming showings, including virtual ones.
A pathway back to search
If your visitor lands on your property page and decides they love the house—amazing! Your job here is done.
What if they don’t like the house, or if they think it might be a fit … but they’re curious what else is out there? One way you can provide an additional service to those users is by creating a search button or redirect that asks visitors if they’d like to see more homes like the one that’s currently displayed on the page.
This simple but smart inclusion will keep visitors on your site for longer, possibly tell you more about their home preferences, and offer more opportunities to get to know this lead if they aren’t quite ready to commit to this particular house.
Consistent design
It’s the last item on this list, but it’s not insignificant: Your property page should look (more or less) like the rest of your branding and marketing collateral, so that visitors can immediately identify it as yours.
Typeface, color, spacing, and other considerations can all reflect (or not!) your brand. If the property pages appear wildly unfamiliar to and disconnected from your website (or brokerage’s website) as a whole, then visitors are going to feel disoriented and unsure.
Work with page designers (or within your site CMS) to ensure that these property pages align with the rest of the branding and marketing materials you’re putting forth online and elsewhere, to prolong the user sensation that wherever they are, it feels cohesive and comfortable … like a home!
What not to include
Even if you don’t have time to create dazzling property pages that give visitors a sense that they’ve arrived at their next permanent residence, there are a couple of things that all experts agree you should not do on your pages.
If your listing photos are blurry or poor in quality, then don’t put them on a property page that will feature them prominently. It bears repeating: Bad photos are bad for business, and a little bit of cleaning and staging (removing furniture, clearing surfaces, and adding flowers can work wonders in a space), plus some decent photos taken with a high-quality phone camera or a DSLR setup — pay attention to wall lines, and use stools or crouching positions to get wider angles of rooms — are well worth your time investment if you truly cannot afford to hire professional support.
On a similar note, if your property description paints a written picture of a mansion with an outdoor kitchen for the stars, and visitors see a cute (but unassuming) bungalow with a grill near a canopy out the sliding glass doors … they’re going to wonder what’s going on. Avoid this awkwardness by describing the property in glowing terms that manage not to set anyone’s pants on fire.
