Estate Agent Website Design Built From the Ground Up

Who this is for

This service suits agencies that are starting from nothing or from a site so far from what they need that patching it would cost more than starting again. In practice that means a new independent agency opening its doors, a long-established firm whose site was assembled piecemeal over a decade, or a lettings business that has grown a sales arm and needs one site to carry both.

If your current site already brings in valuation requests and ranks for your town, read the redesign service first. Throwing away pages that already earn their place is a common and avoidable mistake.

What the build includes

Every agency is different, but a full build is assembled from the same set of parts. The scope document lists which of these you need and how many of each.

The design itself

Agency sites tend to fall into two traps. Some look like every other agency in the county because they were built from the same template. Others chase a look so hard that the listings become difficult to use. We aim between the two: a visual identity that is recognisably yours, applied to layouts that put properties, prices and next steps first.

In practice that means we design from your existing brand where you have one, including your logo, colours and the photography style your listings already use. If your brand is thin, we can propose a typographic and colour system as part of the build, but we will not invent a new logo without a separate conversation. Design is shown to you as working pages in a browser rather than flat images, so you can judge it on a phone as well as a laptop.

Listings at the centre

For most visitors the website is a way to look at property. Everything else supports that. We plan the listing template before anything else, because its fields decide what your CRM feed must supply and what your negotiators must fill in.

The practical starting point is the set of facts Trading Standards first named for property listings in 2022: the price or rent, the council tax band and, for sales, the tenure.^[1] That guidance has since been withdrawn as the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 took over.^[2] The duty behind it remains: the CMA's guidance treats leaving out material information as a prohibited misleading omission where it is likely to change the average consumer's decision.^[3] A template that has a clear home for these facts, and that makes a gap obvious, is the simplest protection we can build.

Speed and accessibility

Property pages are heavy. A gallery of twenty photos can easily outweigh the rest of the site combined. We plan image sizes, modern formats and loading order so that the first photo and the price appear quickly, and the rest load as the visitor scrolls. Google's Core Web Vitals give a useful yardstick: the largest element on screen should render within 2.5 seconds, a tap should get a visible response within 200 milliseconds, and the layout shift score should be no higher than 0.1, with each target judged on the 75th percentile of page loads.^[4]

We build to WCAG 2.2 level AA as the target.^[5] For an agency site that has very practical effects: filter buttons large enough to tap, photo galleries that work with a keyboard, price and status text with enough contrast to read in sunlight, and forms whose labels make sense to a screen reader.

Your CRM and the portals

Your listings almost certainly live in property software that already sends them to the portals. The new site reads from the same source. During scoping we confirm what your provider offers, whether that is a published feed, an API or an export, and we plan the site around it. If the only option is manual entry, we will tell you before you commit, because that changes both the build and the workload afterwards.

What you own at the end

The finished site belongs to your agency: the design, the code, the written content and the domain. It is built so another developer could pick it up. If you take our care and hosting service, we look after it; if you prefer to host it yourself or with someone else, we hand over everything needed to do that.

How long it takes

We plan for five to nine weeks for a full build once the scope is signed, or seven to eleven weeks counting discovery and scoping. The range depends mostly on two things outside our control: how quickly content and approvals come back from your team, and how much work the CRM feed needs. The process page breaks the time down by stage.