Congrats, you’re a new broker! I’m excited for the new challenges, wins, and learnings this will bring to your real estate career. Now, you’re not just any real estate agent closing transactions and building your pipeline of clients. You have a team! How’s your real estate broker website though?
With great power, comes great responsibility. Aside from providing leads, marketing collaterals, and training for your team, you’re also responsible for your member agent’s online branding.
Your old real estate website isn’t gonna cut it.
It’s time for an upgrade.
Here are 5 Additions a Real Estate Web Design Needs for a Broker
1. Write a Kick-Ass Profile for Your Newly Upgraded Real Estate Website
When you’re learning how to build a real estate website, you’re probably going to spend most of the time on the home page and services page.
It’s understandable. These are the main pages prospects will look at when they’re deciding on who to hire. A great service page, and a home page filled with testimonials and listings will build up your credibility.
There’s one more important page you overlooked though— the about page.
When a prospect is looking for an agent, they’re looking for someone professional, someone who has experience in their field. So it’s only natural that they’ll want to read up about you.
This is true in many service based businesses, as mentioned in an article at Foundr Magazine.
When people are buying a service— a real estate agent’s service— they know that they’ll have to like working with that person. They will want to get to know that agent before committing to their representation.
This getting to know you process starts in your real estate website’s about page.
Here’s an example of an about page for a Web4realty member broker:
Even if the about page is, well, about you, it should include details your prospects will be interested in, such as:
- Real estate accolades
- Team sales
- License information
- Your market expertise – condos, townhomes, first time buyers, etc
Boost your prospect’s confidence in your brokerage’s ability by listing awards and team sales on your about page. Here are some examples:
Team sales:
Awards on Chris Richie’s real estate broker website:
For best results, Richie included an image of the award and a description. This is great because it tells prospects what the awards mean.
Reading “10 years of service” and “10 million in commissions” sounds good, especially for a seller looking for someone to represent them in the market.
Bonus: Include a video of your agency at work
Virtual tours are great for property listings but why stop there? Include a video telling a story about your background as an agent, and how you came to level up and start your brokerage too.
Not everyone will read what’s on your website. So tell people about your background as an agent on a video to capture their attention instead.
2. Include A Bio for Every Member of Your Team
As a broker, you’re no longer working alone. In fact, if you’re like most brokers, many of the transactions will come in from the agents in your team.
Give them the recognition they deserve when you’re building your real estate website.
Doing this will also seal your team member’s credibility when they represent your brokerage.
And don’t just include a picture with their job title and contact information. Include a bio and information about their past sales, and industry awards, if any.
Here’s a great example from the website of real estate broker, Re/max in the Hills:
Don’t worry about having to write a bio for each of your agent. Many agents have bios of their own already written up.
And if they don’t have any, just have them write a short bio. It can be as short as one paragraph, or up to five paragraphs.
Pro Tip: Need a template? Here’s a comprehensive tutorial on how to write a bio that I wrote a few years back. (Check out the fill-in the blank templates)
3. Offer Value Added Services
Now that you’re a real estate broker, it’s no longer enough that you provide the same level of service an agent does.
You have to up your game to get more prospects, and show other agents why they should join your team.
So aside from giving expert real estate advice, how else can you add value to clients and other agents?
Examples of value added-services include:
- Professional photos for listings
- Professional video for listings, that can also be used for virtual tours
- Home staging
- Pocket listings: Perfect for competitive markets like Aspen and Silicon Valley
- Market analysis reports
- Home clean out services: for people moving out after a sale
- Concierge services: Recommendations for moving trucks, cable company, utilities, baby sitter, schools, interior design, etc.
4. Invest in Real Estate Marketing Tools to Automate Your Team’s Lead Generation Follow-Ups and Admin Tasks
For real estate agents, one of the many benefits of working with a broker is reducing overhead costs on office space, paperwork, and marketing.
For brokers, these expenses can be a huge drain on their profits.
Since you’re a new broker, the first thing you may be tempted to do is to amp up your subscription on real estate marketing tools.
After all, in most cases, a more expensive subscription usually leads to more credits, which means more emails sent, more space for contacts on your real estate CRM, more leads. The same goes for document management tools.
Before you do that though, you should first streamline the services you already have.
For instance, some CRM for real estate also provide a lead scoring and lead management software to go along with their email tools. This two for one combo could save you a lot of money, especially now that you’ll be taking on the email costs for your agents.
You should also invest in good accounting software. This isn’t just to streamline your bookkeeping records and keep them accurate. It will also keep the recording format of all transactions consistent, making them easier to reference come tax season.
Another way for you to save money on tools is by using real estate automation.
Here are some ways you can automate the back end process and lead generation process for your new real estate brokerage:
- Automate sending of paperworks for new clients or the closing of a property through an automation tool, instead of having it sent manually by an agent or an assistant
- Automate emails for new buyers that come into your website
- Send a pre-determined follow-up email sequence to sellers and buyers
- Send anniversary and closing thank-you postcards on schedule
Related: Check out more ways to automate your real estate lead generation and marketing on this blog post.
5. Hire Talented Agents with a Winning Recruitment Page on Your Realtors Web Design
Property Brothers is great because of their partnership. Selling Sunset rose to fame because of the ambition and desire to succeed of every agent in their team.
Find people who share your values and get them on your team, too.
To do that, you need to create a recruitment page with complete details about:
- Who you are as a broker
- Company culture: The core values and mission statement of your brokerage
- What you look for in your team members
Every real estate brokerage company is more than the sum of its parts, or its agents. It’s not really a team unless there’s one clear mission unifying your team.
To that end, the mission statement and story of who you are as an agent should include:
- Inspirational story of your overarching goals: Not just in terms of income but who you want to be known for
- Explanation of how you define success: Again, not just in commissions, but agent work lifestyle information and information about the clients you want to serve
- Support systems: The guidance and mentorship your potential team members will get from you
Of course, this is all non-tangible. While a laid back, close-knit team culture sounds great, it’s not enough to convince everyone.
Some people are more attracted to tangible stuff — things that are quantifiable and easy to appreciate, so you have to include those, too:
- Easy transaction management: Do you provide assistance for CMAs, emailing paperwork, and handling appointments?
- Marketing collaterals: These include flyers, open house set-up, “for sale” or “sold by” signs, etc
- Digital marketing: Do you provide a real estate CRM, or email marketing tools for your agents? Do you invest in real estate SEO for your website to make sure your brokerage team gets more leads from online property searches in your area?
- Training and personal advancement: Do you provide access to sales training, real estate certification training, and other relevant career advancement opportunities?
The more you can do to help agents save time, the more they’ll love you for it. Real estate agents do their best work when they’re not bogged down by admin tasks like closing paperwork and following up on leads.
Here’s an example of a real estate website for a broker with an awesome recruitment page:
features
contact
company
realtor
resources
broker
agent
videos
brokers
realtors
sell
tools
beautiful design
marketing
brokerage
images
new home
houses
sites
impression
testimonials
pictures
seller
articles
associates
licensed
news
firm
reviews
firm’s
map
communities
sold
searches
criteria
mls
serves
review
informative
walk
highlights
