Real estate website design with IDX integration, sub-second property search, and lead routing wired to your CRM. Built by the engineer who rebuilt Imohub's 120k-property portal. From $2,999.
- Design
- Build
- Launch
fixed-price project
Who this is for
Real estate broker, boutique agency owner, or proptech founder running an MLS-embedded site that loads slowly, ranks nowhere, and loses leads the moment someone fills out a contact form.
The pain today
- MLS iframe makes the site slow, ugly, and impossible to rank
- Zillow and Realtor.com own the first page for every local search term
- Lead forms route to a third-party CRM black hole — no attribution, no follow-up
- Photo-heavy listing pages destroy Core Web Vitals and mobile load times
- Agent bios look like stock templates and build zero trust
The outcome you get
- Real estate site live in three to five weeks, from $2,999
- Property search under half a second on mobile
- Every lead routed to your CRM with source, property ID, and search criteria intact
- Neighborhood pages that rank for local queries Zillow cannot target
- Core Web Vitals in the green across listing, search, and agent pages
Why real estate sites lose to portals on Google
Most broker sites hand Google three reasons to ignore them. First: MLS iframes load off-domain, so the listing content belongs to the portal, not to your URL. Second: thin local pages with no original copy — a neighborhood description that is six words and a map embed does nothing for rankings. Third: slow mobile loads that push Core Web Vitals into the red before a buyer even sees a photo.
Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin win because they built proprietary indices with unique content per listing and per market. You cannot out-Zillow Zillow on national terms. But you can beat them for hyper-local queries — a specific neighborhood, a school district, a street name — where the portals have no ground truth and your local knowledge does. That is the SEO angle I build around. Unique neighborhood pages, clean schema per listing, internal links organized by property type and area, and a fast enough site that Google does not penalize you before the content even lands.
Real estate site live in three to five weeks, from $2,999
What actually converts visitors into real estate leads
Three features do the heavy lifting. Fast, filterable property search — buyers will leave a site the moment a filter reload takes more than a second. Saved listings and email alerts — asking for an email in exchange for property alerts is the highest-converting lead mechanic on a real estate site, consistently, regardless of market. Agent profiles with real headshots, short bio videos, and a visible phone number — buyers want to call a person, not fill out a contact form.
Everything else is lower priority. Mortgage calculators, market reports, school district overlays — useful once a buyer is warm, but not what drives the initial email capture. I build the three core mechanics first and ship them well. Extras get added once we can see from analytics which pages actually get used. Most brokers add a lot on day one that nobody clicks six months after launch.
120k+: Properties indexed and searchable.
Local SEO: the real estate angle portals cannot copy
The one place you can genuinely outrank a portal is local. Zillow does not know which streets flood in heavy rain. It does not know that one condo building has a two-year special assessment coming. It cannot write a page about the Saturday farmers market two blocks from a listing. You can.
I build neighborhood hub pages — one per key area, with original copy, a curated listing feed, and structured data. Each page links to relevant listings and to area-specific guides. Done well, these pages rank for searches like "[neighborhood] homes for sale" and "[city] real estate agent" where the portals have generic or no content. This content compounding takes three to six months to mature in search, but once it ranks, it delivers qualified, intent-rich leads at zero marginal cost.
IDX and MLS integration: three paths
Option A is iframe embedding — iHomeFinder, Showcase IDX, or similar. Cheapest setup, but the listing pages are served on the provider's domain. Google sees them as the provider's content, not yours. Fine for agents who want listings visible without the SEO benefit.
Option B uses the provider's API to render listings inside your own site design. The look is clean and branded. The data refresh is still on their cadence, typically every few hours. For most brokers under $100M in annual sales, this is the right call — you get ownership of the presentation, the lead capture is yours, and the incremental SEO lift over iframes is real.
Option C is direct MLS access via RETS or RESO endpoints — you pull the data, store it, and build your own listings index. Most expensive, highest maintenance, but the only path that gives you full ownership of listing content and the best shot at ranking individual property pages. This is what I built for Imohub. For portals and high-volume brokerages, Option C pays back in SEO traffic alone within twelve months.
Case: Imohub — 120k properties, sub-second search, top 3 Google rankings
As CTO at Imóveis SC, I rebuilt the portal as Imohub from scratch. The result: 120,000+ properties indexed, query responses under 500 milliseconds, 70 percent infrastructure cost reduction, and top three Google rankings on priority terms across Brazilian markets.
The stack was Next.js, React, Laravel, MongoDB, Meilisearch, AWS, and Docker. The search performance came from a proper search index — not an SQL LIKE query on a listings table — with faceted filters pre-computed on write, not on read. The SEO gains came from unique content per listing, per neighborhood, and per city, with clean OpenGraph metadata and structured data on every page.
The lesson applies at any scale. A single-broker site with 200 active listings can use the same architecture principles at a fraction of the cost. Fast search and owned content are the two levers that matter.
Pricing and what fits your situation
Starter at $2,999 covers an agent or small-broker marketing site with embedded IDX integration, up to ten pages, Core Web Vitals tuned, and lead forms wired to your inbox.
Business at $7,999 adds custom API-rendered IDX, an agent directory, saved searches with email alerts, and CRM integration via API or webhook. This tier handles most brokerages up to 500 active listings.
Corporate at $11,999 and above covers a direct MLS feed, neighborhood hub pages at scale, advanced search with map clustering, and a proper listings index. This is portal-scope work and takes eight to twelve weeks.
All tiers ship with a 14-day money-back guarantee, a 1-year bug warranty, and 100 percent code ownership under Work Made for Hire. Hosting on Vercel or AWS in your own account. Timeline is three to five weeks for Starter and Business. I take one to two projects per quarter by design, so the work gets the attention it needs.
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.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
You cannot beat Zillow on national or city-level terms. The angle is hyper-local: neighborhood pages, street-level guides, and listing pages with original copy that portals do not write. Zillow has no ground truth on which buildings have HOA disputes or which streets have noise issues. You do. I build neighborhood hub pages around that local knowledge, with clean schema and internal linking. Those pages rank for queries the portals ignore and deliver intent-rich leads.
I have shipped with iHomeFinder, Showcase IDX, and direct RETS/RESO integrations. For US brokers, the major aggregators work fine for Starter and Business tiers. For Corporate-tier portals where SEO ownership of listing content matters, I set up direct MLS access. MLS approval and licensing adds one to three weeks to the project timeline, so factor that in when planning your launch.
Yes. I have wired sites into Follow Up Boss, LionDesk, kvCORE, BoomTown, Salesforce, and HubSpot, as well as custom CRMs. Every form fires to the CRM via API or webhook and to your inbox simultaneously, with UTM parameters, property ID, and saved search criteria passed through. If your CRM does not have a documented API, I bridge it with Zapier or Make. Round-robin agent routing is supported.
MLS photos are almost always oversized. I route every image through a CDN with automatic resizing, WebP or AVIF conversion, lazy loading, and priority hints for above-the-fold shots. Listing pages load under two seconds on mobile even with 40 photos. For Corporate-tier portals, I set up a full asset pipeline with device-specific variants. This single fix is the highest-ROI performance change on most real estate sites.
Map views are expensive on mobile data and slow if handled carelessly. My default is static map thumbnails on listing cards with interactive maps only on search results and listing detail pages. Provider depends on your traffic and cost tolerance — Google Maps, Mapbox, or OpenStreetMap. For portal-scale sites I cluster markers and pre-render tiles server-side to keep map interactions under 100ms. Mapbox is usually the right balance for mid-size brokerages.
Starter and Business tiers take three to five weeks from kickoff to launch. Corporate-tier portal work is eight to twelve weeks depending on MLS integration complexity. MLS paperwork and approval from your board adds one to three weeks on top of development time — that is outside my control, so I recommend initiating it at the same time as the project kickoff. I take one to two projects per quarter, so availability is limited.
Yes. Over 70 percent of buyer traffic arrives on phones, and Google uses mobile-first indexing. Every layout, search form, map, and photo gallery is designed for mobile before desktop. Tap targets are correctly sized. Forms are short. Saved listings work with a single tap. I test on real devices. If the mobile experience is broken, rankings and leads both suffer — so mobile is non-negotiable, not an afterthought.