I build websites for real estate agents, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt: most agent websites are doing a job that does not need doing.
Here is the thing nobody says out loud. Almost nobody is going to find your site by searching for a house. That race was over a decade ago and Zillow won it. If your homepage strategy is an IDX search bar, you are competing with a company that spends more on engineering in a week than you will earn in a career.
So what is the site for?
It is for the person who already has your name. Someone gave them your name, or they saw you on Instagram, or they got your mailer, and now they are checking whether you are real before they call. That visit lasts somewhere between fifteen and sixty seconds and it has one question behind it: is this person credible, and are they the right person for my specific situation.
Build for that visit.
The four things
Who you are and what you specifically do. Not "serving all of Los Angeles." The agents who convert say something narrow: a neighborhood, a property type, a kind of client, a transaction that is unusual. Narrow does not lose you business. Narrow is the only thing that makes someone think "oh, that is exactly my situation."
Proof. Recent sales with addresses, real numbers, and ideally a sentence about what was hard about each one. A testimonial that names a specific thing you did beats five that say you were professional and responsive. Anyone can be professional and responsive. Fewer people can get a 1920s duplex through a contested probate.
One way to contact you, prominent, on every screen. Not a form with eleven fields. Phone, text, email, or a booking link. Pick the one you actually answer and make it impossible to miss.
Something worth staying for. This is the one almost nobody does. A neighborhood guide. A market note you actually write. A blog, which, yes, I am aware of the irony of saying that here. Something that gives the visit a second page.
The things to delete
The rotating hero carousel. Nobody has ever read slide three.
The mortgage calculator. Every lender on earth has one and yours makes your site slower.
The stock photo of a couple receiving keys. Everyone has seen it. It is on four thousand agent sites. It communicates that you bought a template.
The four-second testimonial slider. Either the testimonial is worth reading, in which case give the reader time, or it is not, in which case cut it.
The "Our Team" page with headshots of people who no longer work there.
The mobile point, which is the whole point
The majority of people landing on an agent site are on a phone. Not most of your visits. Most of your important visits. The referral check happens in a car, in a kitchen, in a text thread.
So the test is not whether the site looks good on your 27-inch monitor. It is whether, with one thumb, on a phone, in four seconds, a stranger can tell who you are, what you do, and how to reach you.
Open your own site on your phone right now. Do not scroll. What does that first screen say about you?
If the answer is "nothing specific," that is the project.
One last thing
Speed is a design decision. A homepage with a background video, three web fonts and an IDX widget loads slowly on cellular, and a visitor who waits four seconds is frequently a visitor who does not wait.
White space is faster than video. It also prints better and reads better on a phone, which is most of why I keep pushing clients toward it.
