Real estate website design for your agents, your teams and the streets they know

Who is real estate website design for?

Our real estate website design work is for brokerages and the agents and teams inside them: one office with a handful of agents, a team working under a larger firm, or a brokerage with offices across a region or several states. We work with businesses across the US, and every site starts from how people search in the markets that brokerage serves.

The agent is still the reason most people get in touch. In its 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, the National Association of REALTORS (NAR) found that 88% of buyers bought their homes through an agent or broker, and 91% of sellers sold with an agent’s help, up from 90% the year before. So our website design for real estate company owners and team leads starts from one question: which agent should each visitor reach, and how? The site’s main work is to introduce your agents well and send each inquiry to the right one.

Property managers and commercial brokers come to a website with different jobs in mind, and our pages on property management and commercial real estate cover them. A solo agent needs a smaller version of the plan below, and our page for real estate agents is written with them in mind. The rules and buying habits of the wider sector sit on our real estate industry page.

What does California ask a real estate website to show?

Each state writes its own rules for real estate advertising, so the page plan starts from your state’s. California’s Department of Real Estate (DRE) shows how far those rules reach online. Its advertising guidelines list websites a licensee owns, controls or maintains among the materials meant to be a consumer’s first point of contact, next to business cards and stationery.

For those materials, DRE asks at a minimum for three things: the real estate license identification number, the responsible broker’s name as it appears on the broker’s license, and an NMLS number for anyone who also originates mortgage loans. When a page names more than one licensee, each one’s number appears. In written ads, the type used for the number is no smaller than the smallest type in the ad.

On a brokerage site, that turns into a short set of build rules:

• Each agent page shows that agent’s 8-digit license number with the name.
• A page that names several agents, a team page for one, shows every number.
• The responsible broker’s name appears alongside the agents that broker supervises.
• No license number is ever set smaller than the smallest text on its page.

DRE’s guidelines also say responsible brokers, and the managers they retain, should review the advertising their affiliates and offices run. So before launch, your broker, or the person your broker names, reads every page that names an agent. Other states set their own versions of these rules, and your broker confirms which ones apply.

How do team names work on a brokerage site?

DRE’s guidelines give teams a section of their own. A team name is the brand two or more licensees use when they work together, and California doesn’t treat it as a fictitious business name, so there is no paperwork to file with DRE. The name has to include the surname of at least one team member and the word “team,” “group” or “associates.” It can’t use “broker,” “real estate broker” or “real estate brokerage,” or any term that suggests the team is a brokerage in its own right.

Every team ad shows the team name with the surname and license number of at least one member, plus the responsible broker’s name, or that name with the broker’s license number. DRE’s disclosure chart adds that the broker’s name is to be as prominent and conspicuous as the team name. On a team’s pages, we’d set the broker’s name in the header beside the team’s, at a size nobody has to hunt for, and keep each member’s license number next to their name.

What can a neighborhood page say under fair housing rules?

Neighborhood pages are where a brokerage shows it knows a place, and they are also where wording needs the most care. The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to publish any notice, statement or advertisement about the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates a preference, limitation or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin. The federal rule on discriminatory advertising, 24 CFR 100.75, spells out that this covers “words, phrases, photographs, illustrations, symbols or forms,” and choosing media or locations that keep part of the market from hearing about housing.

DRE’s guidelines say much the same for California and name more classes, among them ancestry, sexual orientation and marital status. They bar words, descriptions or visual aids about a property or its area that indicate a preference, and ads placed or designed to narrow who sees them.

So a neighborhood page describes the place itself: the homes, the streets, the parks and the commute, and what your agents have sold there. It never says who an area suits or who lives there, and its photos show streets, homes and parks. We write each page with those limits in front of us, and your broker has the final say on every one.

Which pages does a real estate brokerage site need?

A brokerage’s page plan usually holds:

• a home page that says where you sell and how to reach an agent
• a page for each agent, with a photo, the areas they cover, their designations and license number
• a page for each team, set up under the team-name rules above
• a page for each office, with its address and its agents
• neighborhood pages for the areas your agents can write about from experience
• a page for sellers and a page for buyers on how working with your brokerage goes
• an about page and a contact page

Neighborhood pages are written one at a time from what your agents know about each area. A page that repeats its neighbor with a new place name gives a buyer nothing new, and our page on real estate SEO explains why search engines treat such pages with suspicion.

Listings are a question for your MLS first: whether members may show its listings on their own sites, and under which display rules. The page plan works from its answer.

How should a real estate site handle buyer and seller inquiries?

Every form on the site has a named person at the other end. A question sent from an agent’s page goes to that agent, and the general form goes to whoever the brokerage picks. If your brokerage keeps its leads in a CRM that takes entries from outside software, the form can file each inquiry there along with the page it came from; if not, the inquiry arrives as an email to the agent. Either way, each inquiry keeps its source, so you can see which pages bring buyers and which bring sellers.

Tour requests need their own thought. NAR’s consumer guide says that since August 17, 2024, buyers working with an agent who is a REALTOR are asked to sign a written buyer agreement before touring a home with that agent, in person or virtually. Visiting an open house on your own, or asking an agent about their services, needs no agreement. So on the site, a tour request reaches the agent as a request, and the agent takes it from there. An open house page can simply list its times.

What is a real estate website built on?

Real estate web design, on our side, means a site coded on Astro or Next.js, in our own system. WordPress, Shopify and Webflow aren’t part of how we build, and a brokerage coming from any of them gets a new site in our system with its content carried over.

Google’s guide to local business structured data asks for the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible, and schema.org has one for this trade: RealEstateAgent, a kind of LocalBusiness. The brokerage and each of its offices get that markup with their own name and address, so search engines can tell the offices apart. Accessibility is a subject of its own, and our page on website accessibility explains how a site is checked against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

What happens to the site you have now?

If your brokerage has a site today, it likely holds agent bios, area guides and market posts gathered over years. A rebuild keeps what still earns visits and retires the rest, such as pages for agents who have left. Each old address worth keeping gets a permanent redirect to its new page. Google’s guidance on redirects recommends a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible when a page moves, and reads the 301 and 308 status codes as a page that has moved for good.

Our pages on website redesign and website migration walk through how a rebuild and a move are planned.

Who keeps a real estate website current?

Agents join and leave, teams rename, offices move. DRE’s guidelines single out long-lived ads such as websites, which can stay up for months or years after they are made, and ask licensees to track their ads and update or remove anything that is no longer accurate. An agent page for someone who left last spring is the kind of page that guidance is about.

Upkeep runs on a monthly plan whose scope your proposal sets, and our page on website maintenance describes that kind of work. What keeps the pages accurate is the news only you have: tell us when someone joins, leaves or changes teams.

What does a brokerage site look like in practice?

The website we can point to is Alvy Logistics’, a rebuild of about 70 pages in our own system, on Astro. Alvy is owned by our co-founder Noah Alvarez, and DSI is an Alvy company. It is a logistics company’s site, so it shows how we plan and build, and says nothing about selling homes.

Web design for real estate scales with the brokerage. For a single office, what we would build is compact: a home page, agent pages, a seller page, a buyer page, about and contact, and neighborhood pages for the areas you sell most. For a regional brokerage with several offices, it adds a page per office with its agents and areas, and groups the neighborhood pages by office. For a brokerage working in several states, each state gets its own section where searches support one, with that state’s license numbers and broker names. The ranges on this page and our website cost guide show where each level tends to fall.

Will a real estate website help you show up in search?

The build lays the ground for search: a page plan drawn from search data, titles and descriptions written for the searches each page answers, a sitemap, structured data, and Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools connected at launch. Work on rankings after launch is a separate service, set out on our real estate SEO page. GEO is the part of our work that makes a site easier for AI answers to find, read and cite, and our GEO page explains it. We do not guarantee search rankings, traffic, or uninterrupted uptime.

A title or escrow company working alongside your brokerage has different needs again, covered on our page about software for title companies. If your brokerage’s site is due for a rebuild, book a 15-minute call and tell us how many agents and offices it has to carry.