5 Essential Ingredients of a Good Real Estate Portal

Real estate is one of the major industries in the world. Around the globe, people believe in the power of investing in land as it is one of the most significant and lasting commodities. This is why the real estate sector has kept its ground despite its volatility due to impact from various ongoing trends.

Due to its consistent popularity, people not only just invest in the property sector. In fact, a great number of people find the industry as a good business prospective. Over the years, the industry has reached a point of saturation, which makes it lucrative but difficult to penetrate at the same time.

Whenever a business sector gains a level of saturation, stakeholders aim to disrupt it with innovations. In the property sector, one of the latest such innovation has been online portals. It can also be referred to as an extension of the e-commerce trend to the real estate industry.

Digital property portals have been around for some time now, but it is safe to say that these are still taking roots in market as many people still prefer searching for properties physically. This means that if you are interested in starting a business in this industry, then you have chance to be successful with establishing an online property portal.

On the other hand, you must have a really good portal to earn the trust of potential property buyers. For this purpose, you should be aware of the ingredients that create a digital platform that can attract in feasible leads; convertible into buyers.

In the following write-up, you will learn about five important elements that can make your real estate portal a top contender in the market.

5 Ingredients for a Successful Online Property Portal

It is never easy to set up your business website. It requires even more effort to start a portal that will advertise and sell property. Since real estate is an expensive and risky investment, your portal should have quite strong features to convince the buyers. And you will be surprised that how some seemingly minor elements can lead to powerful impacts.

Here are five elements that your online portal must have:

 

• Appealing Design

 

For a real estate website, you must take a balanced approach with its design. It should be simple yet appealing, and must not overpower the actual content.

The design of the portal works beyond just being an aesthetic feature. It conveys the message of your brand, therefore, cementing an authentic image in the viewer’s mind. Additionally, the portal’s design should be functional – providing a user-friendly experience. For this purpose, ensure that the design allows high visibility for all the functional features. These include navigation buttons, search bars, drop down menus, side bars, etc.

On the other hand, you should opt for design themes that integrate your brand’s image and the aim of a property portal. Moreover, this theme should also be able to work with a number of devices as people should be able to use the portal on the go.

 

• Highly Detailed Listings

 

Property listings are the heart of any real estate portal. These are the collections of properties that the portal is advertising and are available for buying. People can put in certain particulars like location, price, size, etc., and the portal will pull up listing featuring properties that match the criteria.

Now, the more detailed the listings are, the better will be their ability for lead generation. Whenever potential buyers click on a property, they should be able to view useful information about it. For example:

• Basic facilities it offers
• Availability of nearby amenities
• Exact location shown on map
• High-quality images

These are only a few of the features that a listing can offer details about. For a stronger impact, you can add virtual tours, information on the property/listing owner, contact information, etc.

 

• Professional & High-quality Images

 

People do love to read up on details, but images always have a stronger appeal. Visual information not only proves the authenticity of a property (especially over a digital platform), but it is easier to absorb for the mind.

One of the reasons the public still prefers physically visiting the properties is because they can clearly see what is one offer. With high-quality and professional images, you can provide the interested buyers with an extra layer of convenience.

This does not mean that they will not visit the site anymore. However, they will have the time and will to actually inspect for deeper issues than just focusing on appears easily. This will obviously strengthen your image of reliability with your clients too, given what you showed matches what actually is.

For authenticity, ensure that the images are clear and sharp, and captured by an expert. In many cases, where a property is under construction, property portals provide 2-D images of floor plans and 3D-images of building elevations.

 

• Search Engine Optimisation 

 

Commonly abbreviated as SEO, this is significant for online discovery. A well-thought SEO strategy brings a website up in search results, therefore, increasing traffic towards it.

For a real estate portal, the SEO should be strong enough that whenever someone searches for property online, the search engine should direct them to the relevant listing page on the portal.

SEO is a complicated element but for basics, your portal must focus on appropriate page titles and meta descriptions. For setting up a comprehensive SEO foundation, you will have to hire an expert in the field.

 

• User-friendly Search Feature

 

Apart from discovering the portal through search engines, the visitors should have access to a search feature as part of the website.

The reason real estate portals are gradually attracting the attention of the people is because they find property search to be tedious. A portal allows them to shortlist relevant properties without wasting too much time and physical energy.

Therefore, the portal’s search feature should be user-friendly (easy to use and navigate). Potential buyers should be able to easily filter through a variety of property tags (city, locality, area, price, residential, commercial, etc.) to access information only on properties that are feasible for them. As a good example, consider Prop, which is a Pakistani property portal.

These five ingredients are some of the essential inputs for establishing a good real estate portal. There are a number of other elements as well as further tweaks to them.

If you execute these elements thoroughly, then you have a greater chance of quality lead generation, and eventually, lead conversion. Furthermore, you should keep the portal well-maintained and updated according to changing trends of the market.