I Kept Fixing the Part of a Real Estate Site You Can See

Nobody ever caught me at it, so I’ll turn myself in.

I used to judge the real estate sites I built by looking at them. Big monitor, second coffee, a slow scroll from the top of the homepage down to the footer, and if it looked right to me it was right and the invoice went out that afternoon.

Not once did I open the code underneath and ask what a machine would make of the thing.

It took two weeks of opening other people’s listings to knock that out of me.

So say you’ve got one Saturday and no budget worth the name. Where would you spend it?

The trade that changed my mind

4,192 real estate businesses went into my sample across 24 markets, and 2,231 of them had a website I could open and run my whole list against.

Sort them one way and agents come out ahead of everyone at asking a stranger for her name.

Sort them another way and their pages hand a machine almost nothing to hold on to.

Both of those sentences come out of the same 24 markets, the same two weeks of crawling, and in a few cases the same brokerage on the same street corner.

The trade lands on 70 out of 100 overall, which is what one excellent habit and a few sloppy ones add up to.

Check me before you believe me. Down at the foot of my report there’s a tool that will build the whole trade into one card for you, industry menu set, city menu untouched, with the number of sites behind every single rate. I go back through it myself whenever a result turns up too flattering to trust.

The order below is the order I work in on my own real estate builds. Cheapest damage first.

First: the facts nothing can pick out

I’d start with the job that costs a plugin and one quiet afternoon, which happens to be the check where this trade comes to rest 45 of 47.

Picture a listing page. Price, beds, baths, the street address, an open house on Sunday from two until four.

You take all of that in about a second, because you’re a person and the layout is doing half the work for you.

A search engine gets a run of words with numbers loose inside it. Nothing on the page tells it which number is the asking price, which is the lot size, and which is the year someone put a new roof on.

I went hunting for that hidden block of text on forty homepages in this trade one week, and barely anything on them counted as a fact once a machine had a look.

Schema markup closes that gap. It puts a name in front of every fact before the page leaves your server, so the price goes across tagged as a price and Sunday goes across as an opening time.

Take it out and none of those facts can be repeated anywhere else. Not in the search result, not in the panel her phone puts up before she has tapped a thing, not by whatever she asks her questions to this year.

A phone answers a question about houses in your town by building the answer out of pages it can quote, and a page it cannot quote is not in the running at all, however handsome the design looks to you and me on a desk.

60.2% of the real estate sites I audited carry it, so a missing one puts you in ordinary company. Ordinary company is who you’re standing next to on her screen.

Across everything I audit the number is 70.5%, which means an average plumber’s homepage is easier to quote from than your listing page is.

When a buyer asks her phone which houses near her have four bedrooms and a garage, where do you suppose that answer gets assembled from?

Who set your website up, and when did you last ask them about this? On most systems it’s a switch nobody flipped rather than a project.

Second: the photographs, which are the product

You know the pictures sell the house. They’re also the heaviest thing on the page by a distance.

These sites come out of my phone speed test at 54 out of 100 while everything else I run it on averages 58, and a gallery of untouched camera files is most of the reason why.

A buyer on the train, two bars of signal, watching a grey rectangle where the kitchen should be. How long does she give you?

Photographers hand over folders of enormous files because enormous files are what a decent camera makes, and nobody anywhere in that chain has ever been paid to picture a woman standing on a platform with one bar of signal.

Resize the photos before they go up. It’s the dullest speed work there is and it’s most of the win, and it costs you ten minutes and nothing else.

Then, while you’re in there, look at the empty box sitting beside each one.

On the average homepage in this trade, 51.8% of the images carry alt text.

Leave that box blank and your golden hour kitchen shot reaches Google as IMG_4471.jpg, and a buyer who has her phone read pages out loud gets silence where the kitchen was.

Do you know what the photographs on your own listings are called underneath the gallery? Mine were camera numbers for years, and I invoiced people for the privilege.

Fill it in the way you’d describe the room down the phone. Kitchen with an island and doors onto the back garden, shot from the hallway. One line, once, and it never needs doing again.

Third: the gallery on a phone

The check itself is nothing clever, and 74.8% of these sites pass it. It is automatic, unglamorous and entirely indifferent to how expensive your website looked when you signed off on it.

Failing it looks like this in her hand: the price sits off the right edge, the gallery grabs her thumb every time she tries to scroll past it, and the call button is a grey shape she can’t hit twice running.

None of that is taste. It’s how a page behaves under a thumb, which is a different trade from how it looks on a desk with a coffee beside it.

Nobody writes to tell you. She leaves, and the leaving is silent, and next month you blame the market.

Take your own phone out on the sidewalk this afternoon and find the price of your third listing with one thumb. Time yourself.

I tried that on a client’s site last spring, standing outside her office in the rain, and I gave up somewhere around forty seconds.

If that takes longer than a red light, the problem is the gallery, and a gallery is a morning of work rather than a new website.

I say the same thing to interior designers every month. They call me wanting the phone version rebuilt, and the rebuild is almost never the job they need buying.

The line I’d cross off the quote

Whoever quotes you for a rebuild will put a lead capture form on the list, and I’d draw a line straight through that one, because 47.2% of these homepages already carry a form, a check where I have this trade 2 of 47.

You’re better at asking for the job than almost anyone I audit. It’s the habit nobody sold you, and it’s the habit every proposal offers to sell you again.

Agents tell me the box has never once produced a client, and that objection is worth taking apart rather than waving off, because most of it is true and the true part isn’t the part they mean.

So why would you pay a stranger to install the very habit your trade already beats everyone else at?

Pay for what you don’t have. There’s a list of it above and none of it photographs well.

Remember how I used to judge my own sites by looking at them? Not one of these three shows up that way. Send me the address and I’ll tell you what a machine sees when it opens your listings, which is rarely what the owner expects.

If it were mine? I’d give Saturday morning to the tagging and leave the form exactly where it is.