Are you an experienced website designer looking for ways to grow your business in real estate website design? If you completed some projects for real estate professionals, you probably realize you could produce more websites if you had ways to automate some of the website setup and features needed for your clients’ websites. While some aspects of a website will be unique for each client, there are plenty of other aspects you can automate to save time. In addition to setup automation, the IDX service you choose to use will impact how efficiently you can complete your client website projects.
Streamlining Your Real Estate Website Design
While each client will require different customizations for their websites, there are always common features across all the real estate websites you design. If you choose to partner with iHomefinder for your real estate website services, you can access API’s and web services to automate and streamline the setup of these common features. This eliminates repetitive busy work and saves you time so you can turn around more clients faster.
Starting A New Website
Before launching a new site project for a client, it’s a good idea to create an intake form that you complete for each new client to capture key information that you’ll use to set up their website. This would include any customizations they request as well as the information you’ll need to streamline and automate some of the work. If you have an e-commerce signup form for your services, you can capture this information and automatically create a new IDX account that you’ll use on the client’s website.
IDX Account Features Setup
Here are just some of the automated setup features you have access to using iHomefinder IDX account API’s and web services:
- Create a new IDX account from your ecomm website
- Set basic IDX account information, including clients’ contact information, username and password
- Populate your client’s billing information
- Enable/disable different lead capture features within the IDX search experience
- Configure the appropriate MLS in a client’s IDX account for the MLS real estate listing data to populate the client’s website
- Set the agent and office ID’s related to your client so their own listings (or their office’s listings) automatically appear as Featured Listings on their website
- Provide accurate account fee quotes on your e-comm site including fees that may be required by your client’s MLS
- Create galleries of listings for specific areas and price ranges on a client’s website
Wow Factor
You’ll really set yourself apart from other website designers when you tell your real estate clients you can help them start engaging their leads with automated email content. No matter where their list of leads lives, our Client API lets you instantly add those leads to relevant email campaigns such as market reports, upcoming open home reports, and new listing and sold listing reports. Once they sign up for your service, they’ll be instantly impressed with how you are transforming their business to help them close more clients.
Website Platform Choice
When adding IDX service to a real estate website, the process of adding the IDX features for property search, lead capture, and other features is often different for each service. And the process could be different depending on the website platform. Some services will be more cumbersome and less flexible to add than others, and there will be differences in options for things like shortcodes for WordPress websites. All of these things will impact how quickly you can complete your real estate website designs for your clients. For example, shortcodes can place important IDX features like listing galleries and search features anywhere on a site with a single line of code. Some will even include parameters for the search and listing data so you have instant control over these important aspects.
Make sure you can get a demo account from the IDX service you’re considering to understand all the integration options available for your chosen website platform such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or custom HTML.
Original source: https://www.ihomefinder.com/blog/web-developer-resources/grow-your-real-estate-website-design-business/
