Depending on which real estate website designers you speak to, the answer to this question can vary quite significantly.

Template websites (where you apply your branding to an existing website template) can cost as little as $2,000 upfront + $100 p/month in ongoing hosting and support. While template real estate websites are quite affordable, they are very restrictive when it comes to customising them with more advanced features and integrations.

Stepps does not offer template real estate websites. 

Custom websites can cost as little as $8,000 – $10,000 upfront + $300 p/month in ongoing hosting and support. However, in this price range, you are likely still limited when it comes to functionality and integrations.

If you want unlimited possibilities and a development team who can build anything and everything, with full integration with your existing systems i.e. CRM provider, data providers, social media advertising and more, these custom websites can cost as little as $20,000 up to $100,000 or more for larger scale multi-office website platforms.

There are many factors that go into how long a real estate website will take to build.

These factors include, but are not limited to:

• The technology and integrations being built into the site
• Templated websites versus custom websites
• The speed at which content can be generated by you or your copywriter
• The number of people involved in the decision-making/approval process
• And more…

Template real estate websites might typically get you up and running in 4-6 weeks.

Custom real estate websites can take anywhere from 3 months up to 12 months, depending on all of the factors mentioned above.

It absolutely should!

This is where it pays to work with a specialist real estate website design and development company that understands the complexities of integrating real estate CRM platforms with real estate websites.

There are countless stories of design agencies (with little to no real estate industry experience) who have designed and developed a real estate website, only to leave the real estate client with headaches because listing feeds or CRM integrations don’t work properly.

Stepps works closely with all major real estate CRM providers as well as many smaller less-known CRM providers. Beyond listing feeds, we’ve developed all sorts of interesting integrations for our clients to get more out of their CRM and website together.

This comes down to the type of website you’ve built and the level of expertise your website provider can offer.

Template websites are very restrictive to basic integrations and ‘plugins’.

Custom websites can integrate with your other platforms and technologies in many different and interesting ways but these typically need to be custom-built into your website. The only thing holding you back here is your imagination, your budget and the ability of your developer to build it!

We’ve built many unique website integrations for real estate businesses of all sizes, including:

• Price estimate tool (Domain API)
• Dynamic suburb profiles (Domain API)
• Advance by Stepps (Social media ads platform)
• Buyer lead pages (Various CRM APIs)
• Leaderboards, to showcase agent performance data (Various CRM APIs)
• Live auction & live video applications
• Off-market portals
• Custom Google Analytics/GTM integrations
• And much more…

The security of your website is often an afterthought for most real estate businesses. The focus, for the most part, is on the look and feel of the website.

But the security of your website should be taken very seriously as there is no shortage of horror stories where real estate websites have been hacked or brought down by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.

Stepps uses a platform called Cloudflare to protect all websites under management – which provides our clients with enhanced website security and performance upgrades.

If your website provider is allowing direct access to their servers without a firewall and CDN (Content Delivery Network) in front of your website, your site is at a significantly increased risk of attack.

Stepps also operates under a security methodology known as ‘Zero Trust’.

Zero Trust is a security framework requiring all users, whether in or outside the organisation’s network, to be authenticated, authorised, and continuously validated for security configuration and posture before being granted or keeping access to applications and data.

Some website providers deliberately spend little to no time on SEO prior to your website going live – resulting in poor search engine rankings and broken links when it does go live – so they can wedge you into expensive monthly SEO plans to fix these issues.

At Stepps, we have a dedicated SEO team who specialises in real estate SEO and we apply more than 80+ hours of SEO treatment (both technical and front end) before a website goes live.

This allows our clients to drive traffic, leads and sales from the day their website goes live which enhances their search engine rankings – instead of dealing with broken links and declining rankings.

Stepps also offer ongoing SEO treatment, exclusively to our website clients, for those who want to constantly stay ahead of their competitors on Google and other search engines.

Stepps is the only real estate website provider that offers all of your digital marketing services in-house including:

• Content marketing
• Search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Social media advertising 
• Digital marketing training & consulting
• Public speaking
• Online courses

Stepps is an AWS (Amazon Web Services) partner with all servers and infrastructure located in AWS data centres in Sydney, Australia.