Medium and Large Companies Have Unique Needs —
A Custom Real Estate Brokerage Website Helps Tell Your Story
In addition to everything we might consider “standard” for a real estate website, TRIBUS is also able to design and develop fully custom real estate brokerage websites. We understand that no two real estate brokerages are alike, so we work closely side-by-side with you to design and implement a totally unique website fitted to suit your unique needs. From beginning to end — from landing pages to listings — our team of designers and developers will be working with you to create the website you’ve always wanted, down to the last line of code.
A custom real estate brokerage website isn’t a single thing — it’s a process. A process between your brokerage, and our dedicated teams of project managers, designers, developers, client care representatives, marketing specialists, SEO experts and others. Once your new site is live, the process doesn’t end there, either: Our Concierge Support team is your team from here on out, available by chat, email and phone 11 hours a day. We help with training, bug fixes, updating content, adding SEO value and all sorts of other details, for as long as you’re a client. And if, one day, you decide to move on from TRIBUS, we would be sad to see you go — but your site will remain yours to continue using in perpetuity. It’s your website; you’re not just renting it from us.
Custom Real Estate Brokerage Websites,
Tailor-Made for Your Brand
Take a look at a couple of our custom clients below, RE/MAX Results and Zephyr Real Estate. Both are large, highly respected brokerages in the industry.
One’s in Minneapolis; one’s in San Francisco. One’s bright and highlighted with pastels, featuring photos suggesting warmth, family and nostalgia, with the home search bar placed right in your eye line. The other is dark, with minimal coloring, splashed front and center with striking images of sophisticated real estate professionals. Take a look around each of their sites. You may not love every single inch of them, and that’s fine. The point is that these wildly different looks — and the corresponding feelings you get from them — are exactly what each of them wanted, and define each brokerage’s brand. This is the sort of dedication we bring to our custom real estate brokerage websites, whether you’re a Zephyr or RE/MAX Results or somewhere in between.
Our team can work out the details needed for the design of these custom features during the design phase of your website’s development. For design enthusiasts and leading-edge brokerages alike, this option is a must-have.
The Road to Custom Real Estate Brokerage Websites
It all starts with a conversation. We know what we do well — but what do you want? What is your brand’s perfect design aesthetic? How do you want one of your customers to feel when visiting your website? Do you want your site to scream professionalism and elegance, or maybe you’re looking for something warmer, friendlier, something that introduces yourself as a neighbor and friend? And how do you want your agents to feel as they access their systems every day? These sorts of conversations are where we’ll start, and will inform quite a bit of our initial design phase moving forward.
Scoping Your Project
Since we start on a fully custom project with a blank piece of paper, before we begin in earnest on building your platform, we need to know more about what it is you’re looking for in your dream site. So we’ll get you on the phone with our sales and product people to scope the project: the specifics of what you want in the site’s interface, CRM capabilities, various third-party integrations and more. Our team will huddle up to look at prospective costs associated with what you want, and come up with a basic scope of everything the project will entail. We will come back to you with a proposal. If you’re happy with that proposal, we’ll present you with a contract, and we can hit the ground running.
It’s worth noting that, even though we have a foundation for your entire project done by this point, it doesn’t mean anything is final — far from it. It’s still early, and you’re bound to have new ideas or change your mind about some things. In fact, it’s a normal part of our process to accept these changes both before and after your site is live. At any time you can enhance your website via change orders. Because all of our sites are separate, you can make any change you like without it effecting other TRIBUS clients.
Contract Signed
Once all the dotted lines are signed, and you’re handed off from our sales professionals to our project managers, now the fun can begin. Start digging deep and dreaming up exactly how you want this thing to look and feel — TRIBUS’ custom real estate brokerage websites aren’t just a landing page and some pictures of homes, it’s an entire platform. So think about how you want your entire web experience to play out, from the front end to the back end: your custom brokerage CRM, brokerage Intranet, IDX/VOW search functions, agent and team websites, roster pages, community pages, company blog and so much more. From this point forward, it’s your platform, not ours; don’t be afraid to make it your own!
Kickoff Call and Brainstorming
By now, we have a pretty good idea of where we think we want to go with your project, and we’ll pitch you those ideas during this call — and, hey, sometimes we have pretty good ideas, given our time in this industry — but, most importantly, we want to hear yours. We like to say around here: If you had a magic wand, what would you most like to change about your current brokerage platform vendor? Hopefully, we can make that a reality, and this call is where it all starts.
Design Phase
This phase is perhaps the most fun for us and our clients, but it’s also a lot hard work. It’s important that your team and ours maintain an open dialogue throughout this process.
It starts with a few post-it notes, with some rough design ideas tacked to a cork board. We get notes on those ideas, we go back to the drawing board, and rinse and repeat until we have a basic structure for both desktop and mobile viewing built out — the “wireframe.”
Then we start coloring within those lines: placing photos, adding in some copy and fine-tuning the styles. By the time we’re done, and you’ve signed off on all the designs, you’re going to have a full picture of how your site’s going to look and function. Now all we have to do is turn all those designs into an actual website.
Incidentally, while TRIBUS’s designers are top-notch, if you are already working with your own branding or design agency, we would be happy to work alongside them to make your perfect site. In the past, we’ve collaborated with organizations like 1000watt and HDSF to get the look of clients’ websites just right.
Scoping Your Project, Part Two
Once the final designs are approved, we will be able to take a closer look at that scope from earlier and paint a fuller picture of the complete platform. Your team and ours will put our heads together again to see what needs revising before and throughout development and it. Essentially, if you want something changed or modified at this point, we can handle that with minimal issues — again, we want this thing to be perfectly suited for your needs. And some needs may change. We are happy to make adjustments to our earlier plans where needed.
Development Begins
This is the real meat of the work for us — but you can largely sit back and relax while we make your tailor-made website a reality. All we are going to need from you, for instance, is whatever content from your current website you want to transfer over to the new one. So agent contact info and headshots, blog posts, offices, community information, support staff details, “about us” content, info about your brokerage’s favorite charities — whatever you got, send it our way and we’ll take it from there.
Another big part of this phase is restructuring your entire site to ensure great SEO. This is something we particularly pride ourselves on. So, where needed, we will overhaul elements like your internal link structure, photo alt tags, page load times, page titles and more to help our custom real estate brokerage websites rank well on search engines. (It’s worth noting that, after launch, we maintain this dedication to your SEO, going through your SEO data twice a month or more to check up on your performance and make improvements if needed.)
When it comes to making these custom real estate brokerage websites, we want your vision, but we’ll handle all the heavy lifting. When this phase is over, there will still be some kinks to work out, but that’s what Quality Assurance is for.
Quality Assurance
Behind the scenes, we will be hard at work testing and tweaking the website until it meets our lofty standards. Essentially, we want to get our custom real estate brokerage websites near-perfect before our clients even start playing around in them. You’re not going to test drive a new car before it’s finished, and we want you to have the smoothest ride possible once you get on the road.
Beta Testing
We are about 95 percent of the way there, but for that last 5 percent of the trip, we will need your input. Start poking around our Beta version of the website: Does everything work the way you envisioned it back in our first phone call with you? If not, let’s figure out how to get it there. Notice any bugs? Great! That’s what this phase is for. We’re close to the finish line now — once we’re out of Beta, start getting the champagne ready.
Finishing Touches
Your team will now have access to the backend of your website while we put the last bits of icing on the cake. While we are loading content into the site and adjusting what needs it, our Concierge Support team will start training your agents and staff on how to use all the new tools they’ll soon find in their belts.
Launch Day
It’s here, and we’re ready to launch. TRIBUS is all hands on deck for this whole week to make sure everything functioning right as new visitors pour into your website and agents start filling out the backend en masse. Our developers are at the ready to fix any odd bugs that may or may not crop up as more people interact with the site. Our Concierge Support team is on hand to answer any and all questions you, your agents or staff members may have. Our project managers are making sure you’re happy. Our SEO experts are observing your early performance (we have been known to boost organic search traffic by 25 percent in the first 30 days after launch, according to WAV Group). This week is like our World’s Fair, and we’ll all be there to make all our attractions are fully operational and visitors are enjoying themselves. Learn more about what goes into launching custom real estate brokerage websites by downloading this free case study.
After launch, if your needs change with your platform, we can continue making modifications — all you have to do is ask. From here on out, deviations from the scope we decided on after the design phase are processed as change orders. We’ll figure out the cost, level of complexity and time it will take to get it done, and will typically start in on any and all change orders within the month.
Concierge Support
Post-launch, we don’t leave you high and dry. As we mentioned up top, for as long as you remain a TRIBUS customer, our Concierge Support team is yours to lean on; available 11 hours a day, five days a week, by phone, chat or email, we are available to help your entire business remain happy and productive. Whether you have a new idea you want implemented, or one of your agents is simply having trouble uploading their new headshot, that’s what we’re here for. Our custom real estate brokerage websites aren’t just a bunch of lines of code — they’re relationships we are passionate about.
Want to Learn More About TRIBUS’ Fully Custom Real Estate Brokerage Websites?
Still have questions about our custom real estate brokerage websites? Well, we have answers! Here are some great resources for you to check out to dive deeper into this product and process.
- See the fruits of all this labor — check out a few of our projects here.
- Don’t take our word for it on the quality of our work: read some of our customers’ testimonials here, including executives, agents, staff and teams.
- For a more specific example of what we do when building these custom real estate brokerage websites, download the case study about launching RE/MAX Results’ site.
- If you want to learn more about what exactly goes into the launch process for these sites, check out this blog post by TRIBUS’ VP of Product, Katie Ragusa.
- If you’re thinking of making the move to a new website vendor but aren’t quite sure what to look for in a company, be sure to consult our free “Checklist for Working With a Broker Platform Vendor.”
- And finally, for a more personal conversation about our custom real estate brokerage websites, go ahead and schedule an introductory call with TRIBUS.
