Are you a commercial real estate agent broker or agency who is looking to maximize your property listing visibility, attract high quality clients and increase the number of closed CRE deals? If so, having a well-designed website is extremely important to your success! In this article the Cindtoro marketing team will guide you through the elements of high quality commercial real estate web design so you can ensure that your firm’s site is both a lead generation machine and quality sales funnel.
Understanding why web design is important for the commercial real estate industry?
As a commercial real estate agent, broker or agency your firm’s website is like your online business card & resume. For any business a website is often the first impression that a potential client will have of your company. So a poorly designed website may lead to the loss of new business and will also hinder your ability to generate high quality commercial real estate leads for your firm.
As we all know in the world of commercial real estate, leads are the lifeblood of your business and without them you have no business!
Key elements of commercial real estate website design
- clear simple to use navigation
- built for tablet and mobile phones
- contains compelling content
- has multiple forms for lead generation
- commercial real estate focused SEO
- clear useful call to actions
- testimonials and case studies
These are just some of the key elements that make up a quality real estate web design. Without some of these elements laid out here it will be difficult for your firm to gain more clients and close more deals. If you utilize the things in this article from the Cindtoro team your firm will not only be able to attract high quality clients but will also stand out from your competition in the market that you service.
The key elements of commercial real estate web design in-depth
Now that we have all of that out of the way, let’s dive into the indIndividual elements that contribute to a high quality real estate website design!
Clear simple to use navigation
No matter what type of website you have, ensuring that it is both user friendly and provides a great user experience are two critical points that you must take into consideration.
Either before you build a website or as you’re rebuilding one! When a potential client lands on your real estate company’s website, they should be able to easily navigate across multiple different pages so they can find what they are looking for.
The most important web pages need to be easily found, these pages are the ones that are essential to your real estate business. What are these pages specifically? Things such as the about us page, the property listings page, and the contact page. These three should be the easiest to find.
Clear and simple to use navigation means utilizing menus that are both easy to understand while also helping people move around your website.
If somebody cannot find something they are looking for, then having the ability to use a search function will allow potential clients to find real estate properties based on the specific criteria that they want.
Using things such as breadcrumb trails will also help to show people where they are located on your site and make it easier to navigate to previous pages.
Responsive and Mobile-Friendly Design
Have you checked the mobile-friendliness of your website? If not it is going to be something that you should consider doing. Did you know that 60% of website traffic comes from the use of mobile devices like phones or tablets.
Having a website that works well on various different devices is critically important in the commercial real estate world. Your website needs to look good on phones, tablets, and computers! Given the statistic that over half of the world’s website traffic comes from mobile phones now, it is critically important that your site works well on mobile devices.
But despite the statistics that we just mentioned, many web designers build sites only for the desktop version. This could be perhaps because they don’t think about it, or the client did not request to have their website built on mobile.
This is negative for a number of reasons: it decreases the effectiveness of your firm’s CRE marketing strategy and your overall online presence because of overlooked aspects like mobile optimization.
Contains compelling content
a website containing compelling content generates an increased number of leads then those that just provide simple information.
Compelling content means that your site tells people about why they should do business with you and not a local competitor right around the corner.
Commercial or residential real estate is a regional business. Since real estate takes a local focused approach you will want to make sure that your website contains the most compelling localized content possible so you can continue to beat out your local competitors in your target market.
Look to utilize things such as the number of years you’ve been in business, how many transactions you’ve done, the type of commercial real estate that you specialize in and much more!
Using these sorts of things will help set you apart from your local competitors.
High quality imagery and featured listings showcase
We will continually harp on the fact that making your commercial real estate website look as beautiful as possible is extremely important for gaining new clients!
The use of professional imagery, and the color scheme that your site uses can make or break the way that it looks.
Look to utilize the highest quality stock photos as well as professional high quality images of the real estate properties you have listed to better showcase your company.
Here are a few things that you can do to make your website look amazing!
Hire a professional photographer to take clear detailed photos of each property. These photos could showcase the different types of properties, how tall a building is, what the property interior looks like and much more!
Another highly popular thing you can do is utilizing virtual tours or 3D pictures for your most important CRE property listings.
You should also look to organize your best commercial real estate listings using a featured listings section on your most important web pages.
The Importance of Commercial Real Estate Lead Generation
All commercial real estate professionals should be concerned about generating new high quality leads. No matter if those leads come from search engines, social media or other marketing avenues
Lead generation will always be the most important thing for those working in the real estate industry.
Generating leads is especially important for long-term success. In order to do this properly you will need to have multiple ways for people to contact your firm and provide you with their information. a great way to collect contact information from people is to offer the most helpful information in exchange for a methodology to contact them.
We will dive into offering valuable content and resources and lead gen in the next paragraphs
Offer valuable content and resources
Adding additional pieces of helpful information to your commercial real estate website can also help it stand out from competitors who are not providing those sorts of things to their target audience.
Valuable content could be things such as economic updates, Market insights, trends of the local real estate market or even guides on property values. Providing useful information like this helps to give potential clients useful resources they can utilize to make an informed decision.
If you want to be seen as a market leader and stand out within your local community then providing detailed reports, news and blogs about the industry will help show that you know a great deal about the world of commercial real estate.
The valuable content and resources that you produce will do two things for you and your site.
Improve the online visibility of your website through search engines like Google while also helping potential clients trust you more and see your company as a leader in the local community.
overall the additional content you provide will help gain more leads and build stronger relationships with potential clients!
Incorporate contact and lead capture forms
A quality website should have multiple contact forms and places for lead captures. Regardless of the industry you service or the type of real estate you work with the job of a website is to generate new inbound leads.
If you have no way for people to reach you then, you have no way to generate new inbound leads.
Creating multiple contact forms across your website will allow you to reach people no matter where they are. For instance, if you have a contact form on the top of your website, but you don’t have one in the middle or the bottom then a user has to scroll way back to the top of the site to contact you.
So if you do NOT have multiple contact forms and ways to generate leads this can be seen by search engines like Google and others as a negative user experience and could impact the number of submissions that your real estate website receives. Meaning you lose out on potential leads.
Uniquely descriptive property listings
If you want your commercial real estate listings to be found on search engines, then you will need to provide a unique and descriptive property listing for your website. By doing this, you receive two benefits: the first one increased search engine optimization traffic SEO and a better ability to sell the commercial real estate to a potential client.
Potential clients are on your website, searching for the properties you have to offer by providing them with the most information possible. This will help them make a decision if they should buy the property they are looking at.
Use commercial real estate SEO
Have you been looking at ways to increase or gain web traffic? Do you want to know how to get the right type of organic traffic to a commercial real estate website?
You need to use things like CRE focused search engine optimization or SEO.
If you’re new to the world of search engine optimization, it is essentially the practice of getting a website found for keywords that are important to a business.
Ideally speaking, you want your real estate website to show up for CRE based keywords such as
- Commercial real estate lease
- Commercial real estate for sale
- Property type + asset class for lease
- Property type + asset class for sale
- Buy commercial property in X location
- Etc etc
The goal of using commercial real estate SEO as a marketing strategy is to get you found for keywords like the above or other types of keywords that are important to your real estate firm.
Utilizing Call-to-Actions (CTAs) to Drive Conversions
In the digital marketing world, you will hear a lot about increasing the number of conversions a marketing campaign has.
If this is your first time hearing about conversions they are the number of form submissions, as well as phone calls that are generated from a digital or traditional, marketing campaign.
Lead generation forms are an excellent addition to your firm’s commercial property website and overall design. But they mean absolutely nothing if the contact / lead gen forms do not have a call to action (CTAs) that are designed to drive web conversions.
Testimonials and case studies
Building trust is a key part of any business. Companies can do many things to build trust with both current and prospective clients. One of the best ways to build trust between users and a website is to include testimonials and case studies.
These testimonials could be in the forms of Google reviews, or videos showcasing how you have worked with past clients. Every new testimonial that you have will help build trust, improve your real estate website and improve your performance on search engines!
