How much does areal estate website cost?
By Saad Ali · 1 November 2026 · 7 min read
Template, custom or somewhere in between: what actually drives the price of a real estate website, what you should expect to get for it, and how to tell if a quote is too cheap to be safe.
It is the first question almost every agent asks, and the honest answer is that the price depends less on the number of pages and more on what the site has to do for your business. A site that only needs to look credible is a very different project from one that has to rank in search, run a live MLS search, capture valuation requests and feed them into your CRM.
The three kinds of real estate website
Most real estate websites fall into one of three groups, and knowing which one you are buying makes every quote easier to compare.
- Template sites: a theme from your brokerage or an IDX provider with your logo and colours. Fast and cheap, but your site looks like hundreds of others and you have little control over structure or search.
- Customised templates: a premium theme adapted to your brand by a designer. Better looking, but still limited by the theme when you want to change how search, pages or lead capture work.
- Custom sites: designed from a blank page around your market, your listings and your clients, with the search, content and lead flow built in from the start. This is where premium agents, teams, brokerages and developers usually end up.
What actually drives the price
When two quotes look wildly different, it is almost always because they include different work. These are the things that move the number:
- Design: art-directed, custom design takes far more time than adjusting a theme.
- MLS and IDX integration: connecting your feed and designing the search so it feels like part of the site, not a bolted-on widget.
- Content and structure: neighbourhood pages, market pages and service pages that give Google a reason to rank you.
- Lead capture and CRM: valuation forms, showing requests and routing every enquiry into your CRM automatically.
- Languages and markets: a site that serves two markets or two languages is closer to two sites than one.
- Speed and technical SEO: fast load times on a phone, clean structure, schema and redirects from your old site.
What a custom site costs with us
Our website projects start from $1,000, and every proposal is fixed-scope: a written list of what is included, a fixed price and a timeline, agreed before we begin. Larger brokerage, development and multi-market sites are scoped individually because the work is genuinely different. You can see how we price and run projects on our engagements page.
The real cost of a website is not what you pay for it. It is the listings you lose because a seller looked at it and chose someone else.
When a cheap quote is a warning sign
A low price is not automatically bad, but be careful when a quote does not mention who owns the site and domain, how your listings will reach it, what happens to your old pages and their search rankings, or who you call when something breaks. Those are the costs that arrive after launch.
Questions to ask before you hire anyone
- Will the design be built for my market, or adapted from a theme?
- How will my MLS listings appear, and will the search match the rest of the site?
- Where will every enquiry go, and how fast will I see it?
- What will you do to protect the search rankings of my current site?
- What exactly is included, in writing, and what would cost extra?
If you want to see what a custom site looks like in practice, browse our website work or read about our real estate website design service. If you are not sure what your current site is costing you, start with a free audit.
Request a private audit