Real estate agent website design: seller leads

An agent's site is often built around listings. The front page is a search box with filters for price and area, and each result leads to a buyer's form. A seller is not searching for a house, and the valuation link, if there is one, sits in a footer beside the team page. When the link is found, a form like this one can ask for the full address, the bedrooms, the square footage and an expected price, all marked required. The homeowner does not know the exact square footage or want to name a price, so they leave for a site that asks for an address alone.

• Is there a What is my home worth link in the header, or only on a sub-page?
• Does the valuation form require an expected sale price, or does it accept an address alone?
• Does the form say what the agent does next, and roughly when a person will reply?
• Do the listing results lead to a buyer's form only, with no sell option beside them?

A visitor who wants to buy and a visitor who wants to sell use the same homepage, and the homepage is built for the first. Search, filters, a grid of photos with prices. The seller sees a house they are not buying and an interface that assumes they are. Test it the way a seller would: open the homepage on a phone, then try to reach a valuation without typing a search. Count the taps. If the answer needs more than two, a seller in a hurry will not find it, and may ask a neighbor for a name instead.

The valuation form is where the seller's question is either answered or dropped. Its fields ask for facts a homeowner may not have in hand, such as exact square footage, the year of the last roof and an expected sale price. The price is the field that stops people. Someone asking what their home is worth wants that answer from you, so a required field that demands their own guess first turns the question around. Make the price optional, and say that the agent will suggest a figure once the address is checked.

Look at the wording around the form, too. A line that says an agent will be in touch, with no time given, leaves a seller unsure whether anyone will call. A line that says when someone replies, and what they will ask on the call, tells the seller the form is worth finishing. The run shows whether the seller reached the price field, read the reply line and submitted, so you can see which of those blocks them.

Give a simulated visitor a plain task: find out what a three-bedroom house is worth, and ask for an agent to contact them about selling it. Use an invented address, an invented owner and a test inbox. Read the report for three things: the screen where the seller stopped, whether the form accepted an address with no price, and whether a confirmation reached the inbox. A run cannot judge the valuation itself. It can show whether a seller who only has an address is able to ask.

Landing page testing

An agent site changes with each new listing template, team page or market report banner. Each change can move the valuation link out of the header or add a required field to the form. After each change, run the seller visitor again and check the header and the price field. Then run a buyer visitor, because a fix for sellers should not bury the search that buyers came for.