Foreclosure Real Estate Listings

Follow me on twitter @Ridwan2906

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

20+ Essential Real Estate Website Templates, Best Practises And Inspiration

In most cases, the online presentation of your real estate company, your products and your services is crucial to the number of customers and their confidence in your company. In this context, real estate website templates and inspiration from the best websites is an essential part of the design process.

When a family decides to get a new place to live, it is often a serious and economically heavy decision. We all know that it is quite expensive to buy or rent a place to live and that it has a significant impact on our private economy. The trend is, therefore, not surprising that property seekers often make extensive research online before they make a decision.

Not surprisingly, it is necessary to have a well thought out and well-functioning website if you are in the real estate industry. This area is, in fact, essential for the activity of your business and determines how much money you can earn.

To do it the right way, we need to think of real estate websites as a funnel, which has to attract and retain potential buyers in such a way that they take the actions, we want them to. This is not going to happen all by it selves. Therefore, I have decided to share some best practice guidelines, and real estate website templates to get you started.

First let’s have a look at the powerful templates that will make your life a whole lot easier building a perfect real estate website.

WP Pro Real Estate 3 Responsive WordPress Theme
wp-pro-real-estate-website-template

WP Pro Real Estate 3 is a powerful responsive real estate theme built to showcase your listings. It is loaded with relevant features like the drop & drag homepage builder and slider, tons of short codes, custom widgets, page templates etc. It can be used for building awesome websites for real estate, vacation rentals, automotive sales and more.

ElegantEstate Real Estate WordPress Theme
elegant-estate-real-estate-website-template

ElegantEstate turns your WordPress blog into a full-feature real estate website. The theme makes browsing your listings easy and adds special integration features for property info, photos, Google Maps and more. With this theme, you can help increase sales by establishing an elegant and professional online presence today.

Openhouse Real Estate & Automotive car dealership
openhouse-real-estate-theme

Openhouse and Automotive are some of the most advanced and full featured themes build for real estate websites. It is very popular and well supported. Have a look at all the advanced features and see if this is what you need.

WP Pro Real Estate 4 Responsive WordPress Theme
wp-pro-real-4-real-estate-website-template

WP Pro Real Estate 4 is a new update version of WP Pro Real Estate 3. It has all the features you need, and it is responsive to look good on any mobile device.

WPestatico – Powerful Real Estate WordPress Theme
wpestatico-real-estate-theme

WPestatico is a WP real estate theme. It embodies a powerful solution for real estate websites with lots of features and functionalities that perfectly fit an online real estate business. The theme has custom fields like title, description, image gallery, featured option, price, year built, living area, bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens number. Plus the address is connected to Google Maps and shows the property on a map.

HomeQuest – Real Estate HTML Theme
homequest-real-estate-website-template

This real estate HTML theme is built for real estate agencies, brokers and directories. HomeQuest HTML has a nice design and a bunch of features that will make your website user friendly.

Home Made: Real Estate Theme
home-made-real-estate-theme

Home Made is a modern type real estate template created with several options, layouts and more features bundled. It includes 20 background patterns, 10 fonts, 15 jquery effects, 12 PSD files, 32 HTML files and 1 PHP file. You can easily change background patterns, change header fonts, change layout from the right sidebar to the left sidebar and also includes full-width page.

WP Pro Real Estate 2 WordPress Theme
wp-pro-real-real-estate-theme

This theme uses WordPress 3.0’s Custom Post Types and Taxonomies offering unparalleled property listing management and search capabilities. The theme has all the relevant features like Google Maps integration, advanced search, custom user/agent profiles, easy image management and more! It is not responsive though.

Royal Estate Real Estate Theme
royal-estate

This site template for real estate websites has a unique design and a lot of features like the flex slider with thumbnails, a “Quick Search Form” with switcher effects, custom carousel for listings, loan calculator (html only), Google Map and more.

Locality – Real Estate WordPress Theme
localy-real-estate-website-template

Locality is an attractive and purpose oriented Real Estate WordPress Theme with all the features you need for your real estate website.

Real Estate 2
real-estate-2-website-template

Real Estate 2 is a good template choice for the niche real estate market with a focus on awesome back-end features while also providing clean looks and great usability. It is not responsive though.

Realtr
realtr-real-estate-website-template

Use WordPress and Realtr to create the ultimate real estate website. The theme has good features and functionality. The completely widgetized homepage offers great flexibility, and it has built-in SEO.

Smooth Real Estate WordPress Theme
smooth

Smooth is a WordPress Real Estate theme, complete with Multi Category Search, Google Maps Integration, Agent Photo and Logo uploader that offers a professional and extremely affordable solution for Realtors and Agents to showcase their properties with ease. Add your listings with the easy and flexible Dynamic Real Estate Framework, edit-add-modify-delete all features, labels and values within the WordPress administration and upload unlimited photos to your galleries with latest WordPress features.

WP Real Estate Plugin
real estate wp plugin

WP Real Estate is a full listing plugin for homes and commercial properties to use in WordPress powered websites. If your WordPress theme is not fully powered to run a real estate website a WordPress plugin like this can really be helpful.

Welocally Places Plugin
welocally

Many plugins let you map places to the standard Google Map pin look and feel, but Welocally Places Map Plugin lets you actually link those places back to your content and categories with maps that stand out and engage your visitors. With rich information such as website, phone number, and driving directions you can improve our site’s reputation as a local referrer.

Best Practise And Inspiration For Real Estate Websites

1. Provide free, valuable information You need to provide free and valuable information to get enough and relevant traffic to your website and become known as a brand that is an authority in the field, your website must contain the relevant information for home buyers. Example from home.yahoo.com.
homeowner help

2. Offer additional, relevant information and get contact information It is crucial for your business to get contact information from interested customers. Once they are comfortable with your company and your website, they are more likely to sign up and exchange their contact information to find additional relevant information. You should provide a sign-up feature that save the homes found on your website and send new listings if visitors sign up.
sign-up

You can also use reports and additional information to make visitors sign up. Remember, to get their attention aroused enough to have their mail address the topics has to hits the spot and answer exactly the question that your segment of home buyers or sellers may have. Example from trulia.com.

3. Use contact info professionally
Be sure to send the promised information right away e.g. via an autoresponder. Also, be sure not to waste the website generated lead. The customer will go on quickly, and you need to make sure he does not forget about your company and the lovely homes shown.

Send relevant, ongoing follow-up mails and consider whether it makes sense contacting the possible customer and offer your advice or other services.

4. Follow real estate web design best practise
Overall, it should be very easy for website visitors to search and find items that meet their desires for a new home. It is important to have a good search function that makes it easy to narrow your search and find exactly the type of property that is relevant. Example from Realtor.com.
find-home

Most real estate websites use a web form with various input fields – such as property type, property features, price range, zip code, etc. They also show listing on a map like this example from homes.yahoo.

Nice pictures of homes for sale are also quite essential to give interested visitors to good impression and create real interest to move forward in the process like this example from Realtor.com.
realtor-images

For more inspiration check out some of the leading real estate websites like Yahoo Real Estate, Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, MSN Real Estate and Homes.com.

I hope you find this information helpful. Please share it to friends and colleagues and remember to give us feedback in the comment section.

By Andy
Andy started writing on Tripwire back in 2010. He is into WordPress topics, Web design, Web-development and also interested in SEO and Online Marketing. He’s also writing for other blogs and he is a passionate blues musician and a family-man as well.

Taken from: http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2012/09/real-estate-website-templates.html
Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments:

Post a Comment

Ridwan RReyza On Facebook