101 Best Real Estate Websites, Ranked & Reviewed (UPDATED!)

Let’s face it. Most real estate websites are terrible. Like, really bad.

It’s nobody’s fault. Agents don’t have time (and most don’t have the resources) to design and develop a custom, professional real estate website.

The overwhelming majority of real estate websites run on a done-for-you solution like KW’s Placester partnership or any of the other systems licensed by the big franchises.

Those licensed systems get the job done, but they kinda suck. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work in real estate, especially on the web.

So we set out to find 100 examples of great real estate agent, broker, or team websites. We personally reviewed every site listed in this post and we ranked them according to several factors.

Table of Contents

• Why we made this list
• The list: 101 best sites
  • 81-100
  • 61-80
  • 41-60
  • 21-40
  • 1-20
• Bonus: #101
• Takeaways & lessons learned
• Our methods & tools
• Download the list

 

Why we made this list

We had to. There are too many bad real estate websites out there.

With this list, we hope to demonstrate to real estate agents and brokers—and their technology providers—that R.E. websites can be beautiful.

Real estate can be boring. And we all know how the kind of reputation it has. But that doesn’t mean we can’t put out great digital marketing.

Branding, advertising, and digital experiences can go a long way toward growing your business within your market, and improving the whole industry by extension.

So we made this list with 3 goals in mind:

• Celebrate people who did great work
• Showcase the great work they did
• Inspire more people to do great work

 

The list — 101 best Real Estate websites

Without further ado, here’s our list of the 101 best real estate websites listed from 100 down to 1, with screenshot(s), SEO details, and brief description of each.

We contacted someone at every last one of these companies to tell them they’re on our list. Most were very happy to be included.

Make sure you check out the Takeaways section at the bottom of this post to see what lessons we learned by studying these 101 websites.

Enjoy!

 

 

Honorable Mention: TownCville.com

Jump: Intro · The List · Bonus · Takeaways · Methods · Download

 

Download or print the list

Download and print a paper-friendly version of the Top 101 Real Estate websites list. Maybe print it out and leave it on the desk in your broker’s office as a subtle hint :)

 

Bonus: RadPad

Yoooooo you gotta check out RadPad. This site is out of control.

Sure, it’s a rental service website, unlike the other 100 on this list. But we couldn’t leave it out. It’s too good.

A screenshot image of the homepage isn’t enough for this site. We had to do a screencast video.

You want to see a killer example of drone video in real estate marketing? Here you go.

Check this out—

THAT is how you build up your user experience! Extra special super duper brownie points for the “Filmed by RadPad Drone #3 in Chicago, IL” caption at lower left.

Amazing work, RadPad!

Jump: Intro · The List · Bonus · Takeaways · Methods · Download

 

Takeaways & Lessons Learned

Maybe this should have been at the top of the post. This is where the actionable info is. Any data study is useful not for its minutia but for its big-picture patterns.

So what did we learn? What patterns emerge when you study 100+ real estate websites over a few months? Some surprises and some no-brainers.

 

1) Big metros = big budgets = better websites

No shock here. The bigger cities with the highest property values have more sites on this list than the smaller locales.

Locale	Population	Median Home Value	Sites on List
Beverly Hills, CA	34,687	$4,895,400	10
New York, NY	8,538,000	$1,390,000	7
Miami, FL	453,579	$927,692	4
San Francisco, CA	864,816	$1,204,700	4
Vancouver, BC	647,540	$941,100	4

By contrast, there are 40 cities on this list represented only once. Of those 40, the average population is 582,246. We did not bother to research median home values for those bottom 40 locales.

 

2) Big teams = big budgets = better websites

We didn’t collect exact data on how many team members/agents are represented by each site, but there is a clear pattern (with a few notable exceptions).

The big sites are for teams or brokerages, not single agents. In fact, exactly ⅔ of the sites are listed as “multiple.”

Most of the exceptions—the other ⅓—are from Beverly Hills, New York City, San Francisco, Vancouver, and other big metros.

So there’s some causation/correlation confusion here. Are the great sites due to the big teams, the expensive markets, or both?

Or, rather, did the great website cause the big team? (Unlikely that the great website caused the expensive market…but I guess you never know!)

 

3) Use WordPress

We use it. 25% of the web uses it. And apparently like 90% of agents & vendors/service providers use it.

There are even entire cottage industries dedicated to using WordPress for real estate. ThemeForest, the largest marketplace in the world for premium WordPress themes, has hundreds of themes designed specifically for real estate uses.

To say nothing of the millions of generic themes that could and do work well on RE sites.

There are even roundup-style posts showcasing the best WordPress real estate themes, like this pretty great one from WP Beginner.

WordPress is awesome. Use it. End of tip.

 

4) Real Estate Webmasters & Agent Image

These guys had the highest representation of service providers in our list, at 6 and 4 respectively. That was a little surprising to us at first.

We expected to see more examples of agents using these services, especially since they bill themselves as purveyors of excellent real estate websites.

Their sites are good, to be sure. But it sure would be a better testimonial for these shops if 75% of the list were using them.

Another surprise: Easy Agent Pro is missing from this list entirely. Their sites are fairly uniform in look and feel, but they are miles ahead of most real estate website designs.

The biggest takeaway from this is that your broker/franchise’s standard website isn’t good enough. If you want to really win at this game, you need a custom site, done by a professional.

 

5) Classic SEO: referring domains > # of backlinks

This was our favorite lesson. Fitting, since we’re a real estate SEO shop. But mostly it was vindicating that our research confirmed what we already knew about SEO writ large:

Number of referring domains is more important than number of backlinks.

This is a HUGE factor and it’s one that most website authors/owners/publishers fail to understand. To be fair, the SEO industry only recently confirmed it.

But it means that you should aim for as many different websites as possible when researching outreach/link-building options.

Sure, if you can get 10 legitimate links from one legitimate website, take them. But you’ll get more bang for your buck from 1 legitimate link from 10 different legitimate websites.

A no brainer, really. But lots of people don’t consider it.

Jump: Intro · The List · Bonus · Takeaways · Methods · Download

 

 

Our Methods

This one took a long time to compile. Not quite as long as our Best Facebook Groups for Real Estate post, but almost.

We spent days on Google, looking for other lists of great RE sites (slim pickins there). And we followed the trails through social media channels, seeing which sites got shared, etc.

Here’s how it all worked out.

 

1) SEO data by Ahrefs

We chose to use Ahrefs data to analyze each website’s Domain Ranking, Backlinks, and Referring Domains.

We also make heavy use of SEMrush (heck yea that’s an affiliate link!) for research, especially on client projects, but Ahrefs had better data for this task.

As with all SEO data, the Ahrefs stats we quote in this article have a shelf life. They’ll be out of date within a few months.

There’s a lot more we could have done (and maybe will do?) with the Ahrefs or SEMrush data on these sites, but for this article, we chose to focus on the big, tangible metrics.

 

2) Heavy North American bias

We chose to stay almost exclusively in North America for our examples. We’re  in the USA and the vast majority of our audience and clients are too. So we thought USA seemed like a safe bet.

Of our 101 website results, only 3 are from outside North America. Another 3 are Canadian, and the remaining 95 are from somewhere in the US.

There are some distinct differences between US-based real estate and other parts of the world, but this post and list are not the place to discuss them. We’ll save that for another day.

 

3) Ranks are subjective

This might be the biggest weakness of this list. But hey, isn’t that true of every ‘best___’ listicle? We had no truly scientific way of ranking these websites, so we did our best to evaluate based on a few standardized criteria:

• Ahrefs SEO data
• User experience
• Branding
• Uniqueness (ok, this one is hard to standardize)

Based on those elements, we sorted the list into high/mid/low groups, and then re-reviewed each grouping. We repeated the high-mid-low process within each group. This gave us loosely-defined subgroups of ~11 sites.

We reviewed each 11-site subgroup one last time and adjusted final numbers accordingly. This was done by committee (yay!) and it was the closest thing we could come up with to a fair, thorough process—something most clickbaity ‘best ___’ listicles seem to lack.

 

4) CMS & developer stats are educated guesses

We used BuiltWith.com and Chrome’s Web Inspector to look under the hood of each website.

For the most part, that gave us a pretty good understanding of the technology running the site.

For example, WordPress is visible from outer space. Its source code has the same identifiable patterns on every single site.

BuiltWith and Chrome can spot it coming a mile away.

With some of the other platforms, however, it wasn’t so easy. So in cases where Chrome/BuiltWith just listed “PHP” or something similar, we’d look for other clues.

In some cases, we were able to find admin login links which gave away the farm. But there were still plenty of sites which stumped us (which probably means they’re just custom-built without the use of any common CMS or platform).

The same methodology applies to finding the developers. Some left signals in the website’s footer or source code. Those were easy to spot. But many did not.

We even tried looking in some of the sites’ CSS and JS files to see if the developers left notes to each other or to future developers, as many do.

Again, we had some success there, but only limited. Most of these websites were built by mystery (to us, anyway) developers!

Side note: if you own one of these sites and want to give your developer credit, please let us know! We’ll be happy to add them.

Jump: Intro · The List · Bonus · Takeaways · Methods · Download

 

Download or print the list

Download and print a paper-friendly version of the Top 101 Real Estate websites list. Maybe print it out and leave it on the desk in your broker’s office as a subtle hint :)

 

* this post contains affiliate links