Real estate website design is evolving — fast. Today’s sites are sleeker, faster and capture leads based on data from tens of millions of user interactions. To keep up, your site needs to offer more than just a pretty picture of a lakefront mansion. In 2025, effective websites leverage beautiful imagery, videography, graphics, copywriting, captivating typography and user experience design (UX) to educate buyers and sellers — and sell you as a hyper-local market expert and trusted advisor. Your real estate website needs to make your phone ring — if your website design doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.
To help, we analyzed data from RealTrends, HousingWire’s sister company, to find websites that use clever design to sell houses. We break it down, explaining why each site is so effective, and offer actionable advice you can learn from top producers’ websites to build your own.
Before we dive in, let’s go over why real estate website design deserves far more attention than you’re probably giving it.
Why your real estate website’s design matters (more than you think it does)
Since almost any real estate website will offer similar technology, design will set yours apart from the crowd. When every other agent’s site is “good enough,” yours must be exceptional to stand out. A crucial lesson for newer agents who can’t rely on referrals. Here are five reasons why design matters more than you probably think:
Data show users abandon sites they don’t like — fast
Think your leads will be patient looking for what they want on your website? Think again. Studies show that 88% of consumers will abandon your website if it has poor UX. Worse, 79% of customers admitted to searching for another site if the one they landed on didn’t meet their expectations. Since NAR data show that 73% of agents have a website, they’ll forget yours before you can blink. Great design ensures that they won’t.
Avoid poor font choices, slow loading times, ugly colors, intrusive pop-ups or confusing navigation — to name just a few key factors.
A well-designed real estate website generates leads while you sleep
If you build your website right, it will sing your praises and even have some of the difficult but necessary conversations with leads for you. A buyer might not know how mortgage points work until they read about them on your site. Even better — your site might help convince them that their expectations for a home don’t match reality — all while you sleep.
Diamonds are forever, but your team or brokerage? Not so much
If you design it right, your website will help you for your entire career. Think of it as owning instead of renting. An Instagram account with thousands of engaged followers can make your phone ring. So can your profile page on a luxury brokerage website. But you don’t actually own either of them. An algorithm change can sink your follower count. The odds of you staying with your team or brokerage for more than a year or two? Slim, at best. If you’re new, you might leave for a better deal next year — or even next month. Your website will generate leads and show off your brand for as long as you want it to.
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The 9 best real estate website design trends for 2025 (+ why they work)
Okay. Now that you’re (hopefully) sold on how crucial great website design is for your business, here are our picks for the nine best real estate website designs for 2025. For each site, we walk you through why they work and highlight simple design strategies you can use on your own real estate website.
Village Properties: Use local real estate as design inspiration
Design by: Luxury Presence
To sell yourself as a trusted advisor who can help people find their dream home, you must also sell them on your city. Data from Redfin show that 26% of homebuyers want to move to a different part of the country. Using a design inspired by local architecture is an excellent way to help get them excited about moving to your city.
Santa Barbara brokerage, Village Properties, offers a real estate website design that uses subtle color cues that reflect the unique Spanish revival architecture of their hometown. This achieves two crucial goals: it highlights one of the most coveted home styles their customers want, and helps set them apart from the cookie-cutter real estate websites their competitors use. This real estate website design says: we have deep local roots and experience, and, more importantly, we know exactly what you really want. They’re selling the dream with design.
Here’s an example from their staff page. The arched images are a dead ringer for the arched Spanish revival-style windows in the house in the middle picture:
The Spanish design motif even extends to the site navigation:
Dwelling in Maine: Flex your hyperlocal roots
Design by: Union Street Media
Using your website to show off your roots in your farm area will help you connect with buyers and gain their trust. Know what they want, and use your website to show them you’ve lived and worked there long enough to help them get it.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to sell Spanish revival mansions to show you know what buyers want. Dwelling in Maine’s website design is as cozy as cracking opening an LL Bean catalog in front of a roaring fire. The deep forest green brand color has a folksy charm that perfectly reflects the laid-back lifestyle buyers in Maine want.
They take it a step further by highlighting that they are “locally connected” and, more importantly, “Maine Owned.” A clear jab at the giant luxury franchises that are gate-crashing the formerly sleepy neighborhoods they sell in. It’s the real estate equivalent of a “buy local” campaign that we know resonates with buyers and sellers alike.
Before you sit down with a website designer to build your site, brainstorm what makes people want to move to your city. Nature, nightlife, and historic charm are popular choices.
The Malibu Life: Make your website easy to use — for everyone
Design by: Luxury Presence
To keep your potential leads from leaving, your site needs to be easy to use — for everyone. Large, easy-to-read fonts will help people find what they want faster. They’ll also make your site accessible to those with vision impairments. This is crucial for driving seller leads. Since the average age of a home seller is 63, you should pay close attention to font sizes and styles.
The Malibu Life’s website is a masterclass in accessible design. Fonts are large and easy to read, and the blue icon in the lower right corner lets visitors make the fonts even bigger or provide a real-aloud recording of the pages’ contents.
The gorgeous mid-century-chic branding doesn’t hurt either, but vision-impaired or just plain ornery visitors might leave before they can admire it. Some won’t care how pretty the site is. And who would blame them if they can’t read it!
eXp Realty: Stay true to your brand
Design by: Custom
Want your website to stand out? Stay true to the personal brand you worked so hard to build. eXp Realty has always had bold (if a little cheesy) branding. It didn’t impress many graphic designers in Brooklyn, but it sure helped them sell a lot of houses. Their newly revamped website is a refreshing change from the carbon copy websites of the other big franchises. Instead of putting the property search bar front and center, they opted for aspirational slogans that stir emotion.
Even the property listings are presented in an unconventional way. The scroll across the screen reminds us of movies on Netflix (you need to interact with the moving X to see how cool it looks):
Taking design risks with your website is an excellent way to set your personal brand apart from everyone using the same old site templates. The key to success is to take the time to build a brand you love, and stick with it.
Bond Street Partners: Take (calculated) design risks
Design by: Agent Image
Real estate agents are natural-born risk takers. Taking design risks with your branding and real estate website design can help you stand out and create a brand that might outlive you. Bond Street Partners website looks very different from other brokerage’s sites and it has helped propel them onto the Real Trends list.
Instead of a property search bar, the site’s homepage presents visitors with pictures of luscious Beverly Hills homes — selling the dream of one of the most storied neighborhoods on Earth.
The key to using this strategy on your own real estate website is to take design risks, but make sure you have an expert on board before you do. Weird design will turn people off and you risk looking unprofessional. Being unique with the help of a talented web designer will add value to your brand.
Sandpiper Realty: Sell the community
Design by: Union Street Media
Selling people your community is another way to show off your local roots and passion for helping people find their dream home. Sandpiper Realty uses stunning photography and deep-dive neighborhood guides to convince people they’re making the right move.
Their site shows just as many pictures of sailboats as it does the stately old-money homes Martha’s Vineyard is famous for. Here’s why: Zillow already shows them houses. So do their competitors. They’re selling people on something far more magical: the charmed life they can live if they move to the island they’ve been selling homes on since 1969!
Like Dwelling in Maine, Sandpiper gets design inspiration from their local community. The red white and blue design on the right evokes maritime flags — a subtle nod to the island’s seafaring traditions.
Using imagery and useful information about your community can help sell people the dream. It could be historic homes, hiking trails, island life or nightlife, or even more prosaic attractions like being close to major employers. People want to move to your area for a reason. Help them get excited about it, and your phone will ring.
Joyce Rey: Focus on generating seller leads
Design by: Agent Image
Driving and converting seller leads is another crucial website design strategy. Those who list, last. Sticking with buyers is a massive risk in 2025. Home valuation landing pages are the traditional way to drum up seller leads on your website.
Beverly Hills broker Joyce Rey takes it a step further. See that green icon in the bottom-right corner? Click on it and it opens a window that offers a free home valuation. Joyce has it on every page of her website.
She doesn’t need it. She probably gets the vast majority of her clients from referrals. But seller-lead-focused web design helps her grow her business and income even more. There is a lesson there.
Tracy Tutor: lead with video
Design by: Luxury Presence
Today’s buyers and sellers are so used to watching videos they will expect them on your site, too. Videos may also help your website rank on search engines to drive free traffic to your webpages. According to one study from 2019, sites with videos on them were 53x more likely to rank on Google. Now that’s old data, but most publishers report better rankings with video than without it.
Showing your audience videos front and center on your site will also help them get to know you faster than text or your headshot ever could. Tracy Tutor has a video of her speaking to a packed house at a real estate conference mixed in with rolling surf and cinema-quality drone videos of eight-figure mansions.
A simple way to get the same effect without the deep pockets is to embed a YouTube or Instagram video on your homepage. That play button will be like catnip for people who want to get to know you.
Redfin: Sell! Sell! Sell!
Design by: Custom
The goal of your website design is to sell houses. If it doesn’t sell, it’s not great design. If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. Period. Redfin’s site might be more Wal-Mart clearance aisle than Gucci, but that’s kind of the point. Redfin’s website is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. The copy makes it crystal clear what they want people to do: “find the right home at the right price” and “Buy. Sell. Rent.” It cuts through the noise and the fluff and gives people exactly what they’re looking for.
Here’s their home valuation page. Again, it’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer:
7 proven website design tips for agents & brokerages
Even with inspiration from the stellar websites above, your real estate website design can go wrong in so many ways. To help you stay on the right path, here are seven proven website design tips:
1. Build your brand first
Take the time to create your personal brand before you start designing your website. Your mission, vision and values, brand colors and logo are the North Star for every design decision you make.
2. Focus on ease of use first
The Malibu Life website has an important design lesson. The prettiest design in the world won’t help if your website isn’t easy to use.
3. Buy once, cry once
If you hire a web designer or buy a template site from a website builder, the price you pay often dictates the quality you get back. Spend as much as you can afford on your website to avoid spending even more hiring someone to fix it five more times over your career. Buy once, cry once.
4. Make sure your logo stands out
After your headshot, your logo is the most important brand asset you have. Make sure it stands out. Avoid placing your logo on busy background photos or a background color that washes it out.
5. Include testimonials
Always include testimonials from happy former clients and customers. You can pull them from Zillow or, better yet, ask for video testimonials and embed them on your website.
6. Create visual hierarchy on every page
This is a tricky one, but it’s important. When you (or your web designer) are designing your site, decide which elements you want your visitors to see first. In most cases, it’s your logo or your headline or your tagline, but it can vary.
7. Make it easy to contact you
Anyone who visits your website should be able to contact you without hunting for your contact information. Include prominent calls-to-action (CTA) and your phone number with a click-to-call feature on every page of your site.
Real estate website design: The full picture
With hundreds of real estate websites competing for an ever-shrinking pool of leads, clear and persuasive real estate web design is more important than ever. To stay ahead of the pack, agents, teams and brokerages need to highlight their local roots, lead with video, stay true to their brands, and take design risks based on experience and data. Happy designing!
