A property site that ranks, loads fast, and captures leads cleanly
Real estate site with clean search, IDX integration, and a lead pipeline wired to your CRM. Built by the engineer behind Imohub's 120k-property portal. From $2,000.
Who this is for
Real estate broker, boutique agency owner, or proptech founder running an MLS-embedded site that is slow, ugly, and losing leads to a third-party CRM black hole.
The pain today
- MLS or IDX-embedded site is ugly and slow on mobile
- Site cannot rank on Google against portals and big-brand brokers
- Lead forms bounce to a third-party CRM where they vanish
- Agent bios are thin or missing, no clear brand
- Photo-heavy listing pages destroy Core Web Vitals
The outcome you get
- Fast real estate site in three to five weeks from $2,000
- Clean property search with sub-second results on mobile
- Lead forms routed to your CRM with attribution intact
- Agent profiles that actually close
- Core Web Vitals in the green across listing and search pages
Why real estate sites underperform on SEO
Most broker sites run an MLS iframe or a white-label CMS that was never optimised for search. Duplicate content from the MLS feed, canonical tags pointing at the portal, thin local pages, and slow mobile loads — every box Google hates gets checked. Meanwhile Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin dominate the SERP with purpose-built indices. The fix is to own the content on your own domain. Unique local pages, clean schema, fast loads, and internal links built around neighbourhoods and property types. It is work, but it compounds.
What actually converts visitors into leads
Three things. A fast, clear property search that lets people filter without reloading. Saved-listings and alerts that require an email — the single highest-converting signup on a real estate site. Agent bios with real photos, short videos, and direct contact buttons — buyers want a person, not a firm. Everything else (mortgage calculators, market reports, school data) is optional. I build the three essentials first and add the rest once we see what actually gets used. Most of what brokers ask for on day one is never clicked after launch.
MLS and IDX integration options
Three routes. Option A: iframe the provider's widget (iHomeFinder, Showcase IDX). Cheapest, ugliest, slowest. Option B: use the provider's API to render listings in your own site's design. Middle ground — clean look, still relies on their data refresh cadence. Option C: pull MLS data directly (RETS/RESO) and build a proper listings index. Most expensive but the only path that ranks on Google for serious broker sites. For brokerages under $100M in annual sales, Option B is usually the right call. For portals and larger brokerages, Option C pays back in SEO traffic alone.
Pricing and timeline
Starter $2,000 — agent or small-broker site with embedded IDX, up to ten pages. Business $5,000 — custom IDX integration, agent directory, saved searches, CRM wiring. Corporate $10,000+ — full portal with direct MLS feed, neighbourhood hubs, advanced search. Three to five weeks start to launch. 14-day money-back guarantee. 1-year bug warranty. 100 percent code ownership under Work Made for Hire. Hosting on Vercel or AWS — you own the account. I do not lock client sites into my infrastructure.
Case: Imohub — 120k+ properties, sub-second search, top 3 rankings
As CTO of Imóveis SC I rebuilt the portal as ImoHub — 120,000+ properties indexed, query responses under 500 milliseconds, 70 percent infrastructure cost reduction, and top three Google rankings on priority terms. The stack: Next.js, React, Laravel, MongoDB, Meilisearch, AWS, Docker. The lesson: a real estate portal lives or dies on search speed and SEO depth. Same principles apply to a single-broker site at smaller scale. Fast search, unique content per listing and per neighbourhood, clean schema — and you outrank portals for local queries where they have no ground truth.
When you need a full portal vs a marketing site
A marketing site (Starter or Business tier) is right when you have under 500 active listings and lean on brand and agents to convert. A full portal (Corporate tier or Applications subscription) makes sense when you have 5,000+ listings, multiple offices, and SEO is a primary acquisition channel. The Imohub build was a portal — Applications-scope work over months, not a fixed-price project. Most brokers should start with a strong marketing site, capture the rankings and leads it can, and move to portal scope only when the traffic justifies it.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rebuilt a real estate portal at a fraction of the cost
Rebuilt Imóveis SC's real estate portal as ImoHub — a faster, more scalable successor — handling 120k+ properties with sub-second search and drastically reduced AWS costs.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- Which IDX or MLS provider do you work with?
- I have shipped with iHomeFinder, Showcase IDX, and direct RETS/RESO integrations. I work with whichever your MLS approves. For US brokers, the major aggregators (iHomeFinder, Showcase, Realtyna) are fine for Starter and Business tiers. For Corporate tier portals or brokerages that need SEO-owned listings, I set up direct MLS access. Licensing and MLS approval take one to three weeks on top of site timeline — factor that in.
- Will my leads flow to my CRM correctly?
- Yes. I have integrated sites with Follow Up Boss, LionDesk, kvCORE, BoomTown, Salesforce, HubSpot, and custom CRMs. Every form fires both to the CRM (via API or webhook) and to your inbox, with UTM attribution intact so you know which campaign drove which lead. Round-robin routing between agents is supported. Lead source, property ID, and search criteria all get passed. If your CRM does not have a documented API, we use Zapier or Make as a bridge.
- How do you handle photo performance?
- MLS photos are usually oversized and slow. I run every image through a CDN with automatic resizing, WebP or AVIF conversion, lazy loading, and priority hinting for above-the-fold shots. Result: listing pages that load in under 2 seconds on mobile even with 40 photos. For Corporate tier portals, I set up a full asset pipeline with variants per device. This is the single highest-ROI performance fix on most real estate sites.
- What about map views and map performance?
- Map views are expensive on mobile data and slow to render. Default is static map thumbnails on listing cards, interactive maps only on search results and listing detail. Provider: Google Maps, Mapbox, or OpenStreetMap — I pick based on your traffic and cost tolerance. Mapbox is usually the right balance for mid-size brokers. For portals at Imohub-scale we cluster markers and render tiles server-side to keep performance under control.
- Is the site mobile-first?
- Yes. Real estate is a mobile-first category — over 70 percent of buyer traffic is on phones. Every layout, search form, map, and photo gallery gets designed for mobile first, then scaled up to desktop. Tap targets are sized correctly. Forms are short. Saved-listings works with a single tap. I test on real devices, not just Chrome DevTools. If the mobile experience is broken, the rankings and the leads both suffer.
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