Real Estate Website Design Principles: The 80/20 Rule

There are endless possibilities on your real estate website. You could easily go down a rabbit hole, tinkering minute details on everything from your listings to your roster. But there is only so much time in the day to craft your website, and is it worth spending so much time on elements that aren’t necessarily a major factor for the people using your site? Welcome to the 80/20 rule.

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is the concept that 80 percent of the interaction on your website comes from 20 percent of the functionality. I’ve spoken at length in the past about defining your website goals and getting the most out of your website based on the needs of your company and your users.  Using the 80/20 rule will maximize your investment in your website and focus on the most important elements impacting your business.

As you begin the design process with us, you’ll find that there are numerous pages that come with TRIBUS’ custom real estate brokerage websites.  All are very important, but there is a common theme of interactivity that links everything together — and it ultimately revolves around capturing leads, the lifeblood of your business.  Thinking of it in this way will allow you to focus on designing your website in a way that will facilitate this interaction and convert more business.

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So the first part with lead capture would be creating the elements used as a vessel to capture said leads. We’ve got that covered. With your TRIBUS website, we’ve carefully crafted lead capture forms that are informative and easy to use:

forms - 80/20 rule

As in the 80/20 rule, these may be a small portion of what’s on your site, but may well be the single most important part of it. Each form has been designed to give potential leads the incentive to obtain relevant information that is important to them. And in doing so, they give you, the brokerage, the information you need to build your online archive of potential leads you want to engage and nurture.

The real design decisions that involve you, the brokerage, are now how to design the website in a way that will allow users to come across this central functionality that we really want them to use. There are many strategies to accomplish this, including these, some of the most prevalent routes.

Keeping your contact information within your navigation

contact - 80/20 rule

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Not only do you keep this information readily available in your navigation, which is a memorable spot that users can key into if they ever feel “lost” within your site, but you also have the option of keeping the navigation fixed to the top as users scroll through the site. No matter where they travel through your site, asking any type of question is only a a matter of traveling to the top corner of a page, and clicking a button to prompt a contact form.

Attaching our ratings feature to listing previews

rate - 80/20 rule

Giving users the ability to interact with listings is an invaluable tool. Giving users contextual clues — like the above stars on the listing previews featured on our award-winning custom website for RE/MAX Results — gives the users a personable, approachable interaction, incentivizing them to create an account when clicked.And the create-an-account form that follows gives users a simple overview of other features that will enhance their home-search history on top of the rating system.

another one of our custom clients, Zephyr Real Estate, and central to the redesign is a fixed right-hand sidebar, which almost exclusively features Calls to Actions that prompt lead capture forms.

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zephyr - 80/20 rule

While users peruse all the information about a listing, at any point — if the home peaks their interest on a more concrete level or they need to know more — the sidebar will always be there to for the user to connect with a Zephyr agent. Brilliant.

Making agent pages a social hub to foster engagement

results - 80/20 rule

When users actually get to an agent page, they’ve most likely already made very conscious decisions to search through potentially three or more pages (in the case of the above website, again from RE/MAX Results, Home>Office Results>Office Agent Results). By the time they get there, it’s much more imperative to have elements allowing the user to quickly connect, as they have a higher likelihood of wanting to by the time they’ve reached this page. Angela’s page above exemplifies this. There are numerous clear Calls to Action, where clicking the email prompts a contact form. The “Visit My Website” link transitions users over to a more personalized site that has many more opportunities for the lead to get captured, as well as featuring select listings that allow for increased potential interactivity.

This should give you an idea of the how central your website can be to becoming a force in lead capture — and in keeping with the 80/20 rule, how capturing leads often comes down to just a tiny part of that website. Not only are the design features used effectively, but they can also be used in tandem of each other, like Zephyr having a fixed navigation, as well as a fixed sidebar on their listing details pages. These are just a few of the great tools TRIBUS offers to help maximize the potential of your real estate brokerage website, now and in the future.

Jason is the heart and soul of the creative team at TRIBUS. He invests himself heavily in every single web page design in order to craft experiences that are meaningful for all users. In addition to being an excellent graphic and interaction designer, he’s obsessed with typography and dabbles in video editing. Jason has also worked on a few major branding projects, the TRIBUS brand overhaul being one of his latest accomplishments.
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