Major aspects of property listings website design that improves the conversion rate

Design a one-click search

Most customers always start with very simple search requests, like “One bedroom” or “Three rooms”. Some of them will be interested in starting their search with the selection of a property type, for example, “Apartment” or “Cottage”. Put these options in the most visible spot of the search page and home page. Don't make your prospective buyers navigating across labyrinths of numerous pages and different filters. Learn your customers’ needs and make the most popular search options accessible literally in one click.

Another popular starting point for a search is the location. Very often along with property type, your visitors would want to set up a location of the desired property. Give them the map of the city in which you provide your services and allow selecting an area to filter the listings. If you have offices in multiple cities then try to determine the location of the visitor and automatically show him offers from the city where he is located in, or from the closest one you provide your services in.

Ensure precise filtering in the advanced search

Unlike a quick search that must be very simple and intuitive, advanced search will be used by those who understand why they need it. So don't afraid adding as many search options as your picky and curious customers might need. Every single detail of a property listing that may be important to your prospective buyers must be presented in an advanced search filter. Your visitors must be able to narrow down a big database of your listings to just a few offers that catch their eyes.

Pay attention to UI components you use for presenting of the filter options on your website. They must be convenient to use and allow for quick interactions. For example, it is a good idea to use a slider for setting up a price range option value. It also makes the price range option more distinguishable and easier to find among other options, thus improves the speed at which users interact with the search filter.

Media content must be quickly accessible

In one of our previous blog posts, we have discussed the importance of photos and videos for your listings. After you produced good media content make sure it is easily accessible on your website. Whenever possible allow website visitors to enlarge photos to see all the details of a property. Always give a shortcut link to the photo gallery page of a property. And finally, optimize media content browsing experience for mobile! A lot of your potential customers will be using mobile devices while browsing your website.

Always show more

Show your visitors as many other relevant properties as you can and whenever you can. The most widespread and obvious technique is to add related offers section to the property details page. So after a prospective buyer gets interested in a single property you keep him on your website for longer by suggesting more of the similar offers that may also attract his attention.

You can filter related offers by the same location and same amount of bedrooms, or by similar price and the same amount of rooms. Or, you can go further and suggest properties with similar photos as related offers. The latter approach works very well but requires significant efforts on the technical side, including AI and machine learning.

Always show the list of recently viewed listings to your visitors. This will constantly remind them about offers that got them interested before. If they navigate back and forward trying to choose between multiple listings that attracted their attention this feature will be quite handy. This feature will also be helpful when a prospective buyer comes back to your website to check again that offer that attracted his attention before.

Convenience stuff — bookmarking and sharing

Finally, add small stuff here and there that will make the work with your endless database of listings easy and seamless. One such thing is bookmarking or favorites. These things are not difficult to implement technically, but along with providing extra convenience to your website visitors, they will give you a clear insight into which your listings are popular among your visitors. Put the bookmarks or favorites button on top of your website, so that your users will never miss it. And don't forget to show them related offers based on their bookmarks and favorites.

Provide your potential customers the ability to share the offers they like on the internet. Or even to share the entire sets of their bookmarks and favorites. A lot of prospective buyers on your website will look for a new home for their families, not just for themselves. So, either through email or on social networks let them share what they found with their relatives.

While implementing the sharing functionality make sure that every page of your website has a unique link. So that if one copies the link directly from the browser, shares it (on Skype for instance) and then someone else opens the link, he sees exactly the same page in his browser.

Never stop improving!

Now that you are aware of major aspects of good design you can try them on your current website or implement them within your brand new website that's only about to be released. But don't stop just there, these are only basic tips. You should learn from your users. Setup the best analytics tools you can find, and see what the visitors of your website like, what they don't like and how they use your website. Then improve the design and functionality of your website based on the behavior data you have collected. Design of user interface a never-ending process of constant learning and improving!