With the immense growth of technology, people are searching everything online, thanks to the feature-enriched online platforms and marketplaces. Real estate is one of the sectors that has seen extensive growth in the last few years. Despite the pandemic in 2020, the prices of properties grew constantly. Searching for homes online delivers a great deal of flexibility to the users as they can apply filters, compare properties, and sort them as per price, area, and more.
Entrepreneurs and realtors have mapped the growth of these online real estate portals; they attract a lot more users than any form of promotion. Choosing a perfect house can be a difficult decision, and these platforms help users sort out their needs and get the perfect price and location. If you are thinking of developing a real estate web portal, market figures propose it is the best time. All you need is a clear vision, a reliable development partner, and diligent market research. In this blog, we will discuss the real estate web portal development portal along with features, tech stack, and more.
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Why Should You Invest in Real Estate Web Portal Development?
Real estate is a dynamic sector with an abundance of opportunities. Despite the progress, it is important from a social point of view as it answers the most significant question of people’s lives: where to find the perfect home? It helps users by providing them with a lot of options and allows them to sort, filter, and book the one that satisfies their criteria of a perfect home. Users can immediately get in touch with the agents and schedule a visit.
Apart from the perfect search, it also saves time for the users by delivering detailed research of a property. The real estate web portal development allows you to build a platform where the users can find a property to rent or buy. From a market perspective, the global real estate market size is projected to cross the valuation of 8662.2 billion USD by the year 2026. It has been found in a report that more than 40 percent of home buyers comprise millennials.
Apart from the market scenario, here are some of the benefits that real estate web portal development delivers to businesses.
Detailed Customer Database
Developing a portal on a particular niche helps you get a detailed database of potential prospects as they will have to register themselves on the portal before searching. Remember, the more prospects you have, the more you can convert them into actual clients.
Enhanced Brand Value
When your real estate business is online, it will automatically enhance its reach, enabling more people to notice it. With more prospects and verified properties, your brand value will automatically increase.
Extreme Feasibility
With an online real estate web portal, you don’t have to visit every property to verify them manually. You can ask the listers or realtors to simply upload the documents and the photos of the property and even sign documents online.
Optimized Property Management
The best thing that you get with an online real estate web portal is the feasibility of managing properties listed on your platform. You can edit, remove, add, or update them within a few minutes.
Optimum Customer Experience
You can’t help your customers save a property for reviewing late with an offline business, but with an online real estate web portal development, you can allow them to wishlist properties, review them, find out details of a particular property, offer consultation, and more. Remember, a business with a high customer satisfaction rate has the most loyal customers that pay in the long run.
Enhanced Search Engine Visibility
Building a website opens up opportunities for your promotion online. You can market your website online on various channels and drive traffic to your website, which means more potential prospects.
Types of Online Real Estate Portal Development
Real estate web development can be of various types; it’s up to you which niche you want to target. Not all people want to buy a property, some want to rent it, and some want to flip it to make a profit. There are realtor agents out there who want their website and list the properties they have under their clientele. Here are some of the most important types of real estate web portal development.
Marketplace
A real estate marketplace web portal is a platform where anyone can list their properties, and anyone can make them an offer. Your platform just acts as a mediator between the two parties. This model not only helps customers find different properties, but it also gives a chance to everyone with a property to directly deal with customers without any mediator.
Property Renting Website Portals
As the name suggests, these portals deal only with the renting part of the real estate. It is a defined niche and only targets the customers that are looking to rent properties for various purposes. It can be a vacation rental or a term rental plan. These websites have been quite popular in recent times due to their work.
Property Listing Websites
Property listing web portals are the most popular form of real estate web portal development in the market. On this platform, people list their properties for buying or renting, and customers get to avail those properties with the help of agents or realtors.
Realtor Agent’s Website
These kinds of website portals deal with an agent’s firm. These platforms are displayed as a brochure where agents display what properties they have under them and what are the various facilities they can deliver to you easily.
Development Timeline of Real Estate Web Portal
Developing a portal for selling properties requires a lot of planning and a strategic process. You have to figure out various details about the market decide on features, tech stack, and more. The first thing you should be deciding on is a development partner. You can hire a freelance team of developers, but the problem is freelancers are always occupied with more than one project at once. It may affect the quality of work, and also communication can be a little tricky with a freelance team of developers.
You can also hire a full-fledged web development company. These companies have a lot of resources and infrastructure required to build a robust web platform. They have a team of developers with diversified experience and these organizations. From a financial point of view, it is the most feasible option.
Apart from the decision of selecting a development partner, you need a strategy for a perfect strategy. Let’s dig into the process.
Market Analysis
The first thing in the development process of any project requires diligent market research. You have to get an idea about the current market trends and the business strategies of your competitors. Gathering all these data sets will not only help you create a perfect roadmap but also help you in creating a path for the success of your platform. Learn as much as you can about your competitors, the features they have in their platforms, the tech stack they are using, the monetization models they are following, and more.
In order to gather these data sets, you can set up a marketing department and assign these tasks to them. But setting up a whole department for a single project might shake up your budget and might not deliver the exact results. The second option is that you can hire a marketing company and ask them to perform detailed research on your behalf. There is also a third option: you can simply buy an in-depth marketing report from an online marketing website. They have all the data ready with them for every field.
Plan Everything
After you have access to the detailed data sets, it is mandatory for your team to form a detailed plan. It should reflect the path of the development process along with the post-development marketing strategies. Planning should be your first priority before moving ahead in the development process. You can ask your development partner to help form your roadmap that consists of a number of features, tech stack, and various other parameters. This is the stage where you might want to decide on your budget. Let’s get to know the number of features you should consider.
Features to Consider
| Registration | Allow users to get themselves registered on the website by providing a few details about them, such as name, age, contact details, and more. |
| Social Media Integration | Allow users to sign in through their social media details and also share various property listings with their friends and family. |
| Advanced Search | Allow users to search the desired property by applying a list of filters such as budget, area, locality, and more. |
| Compare Listing | Allow users to compare various properties at once to make a better decision about their purchase. |
| Listing Detail Pages | Allow users to get to know about a particular property and learn more about the facilities available in that neighborhood. |
| Google Maps Integration | Allow users to get an idea about the location of the property and get directions to the location in case of a site visit. |
| Email Alerts Features | Allow users to let them know about the updates on their selected property and when the selected property is available. |
| Mortgage Calculators | Allow users to get an idea about the mortgage estimate of a property so that they can plan better. |
| Live Chat and Messaging | Allow users to get in touch with the owner of the property or the agent in case of any query about the listing of a property. |
| Virtual Reality Tours | Allow users to visit the property virtually and get an experience about the look and feel of the listed property. |
| Review & Ratings | Allow users to rate and review various properties on their listing for others to judge better. |
| Payment Gateways | Allow users to pay for various things on your web portal easily, such as booking fees, consultation fees, and more. |
Tech Stack to be Consider
| Application and Data | JavaScript, Node.js, React, HTML5, NGINX, PostgreSQL, ES6, GraphQL, Redux, Elixir, Erlang, Google Cloud SQL |
| Utilities | Google Analytics, Twilio SendGrid, Mixpanel, Google Cloud DNS |
| DevOps | GitHub, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Webpack, Docker Compose, Babel, Terraform, Sentry, CircleCI, BrowserStack, Pingdom |
| Business Tools | Slack |
Development & Testing
The next part of the development process consists of the design and coding part. Ask your development partner to assign the best UI/UX designer to your project and keep the design simple yet interactive. People often complicate the design, which results in low user visits. You should keep in mind that users will be on your portal for buying the property, not anything else. You should make sure to make the site ergonomic and place all the necessary buttons or links handy.
After the development part is completed, ask your developers to test the project inside out. An iterative way of testing is most feasible in such project development processes. Remember, no one likes a project with errors or bugs that makes the website looks incompetent. After the testing is complete and your project is free from any kind of error and bugs, you are ready to start the preparations for post-development marketing strategies.
Ready to Develop Your Real Estate Web Portal with Matellio?
Real estate is one of the evergreen sectors of the global market, and the progress of this sector is unmatchable. In order to get your properties on the top, you need to have a robust real estate web portal. Matellio can help you in fulfilling your dreams with scalable and feature-enriched real estate web portal development.
Our team of dedicated developers and experts is highly skilled and stays up to date with every market trend. Our flexible engagement models deliver you the feasibility to keep your budget under control. Feel free to reach out to our experts over a 30-min free consultation call to know more!
