3 Major Benefits Of Custom Software Development In The Real Estate Industry

The real estate industry is pushed towards adopting a custom software development approach for service delivery, then continuing with its old school methods. This change is based on two main reasons: the evolution of technology and the fierceness of the competition. Building a website with one of the website building tools might look like a good idea to get your business online fast. We recommend you to examine your options before making any decision. Think on a long run, weigh the pros and cons of choosing already built CMSes (custom management systems) and off the shelf CRMs (customer relationship management) versus custom-built CMS and CRM software.

In this article, we are going to talk about the benefits of custom development in the real estate industry. Business owners have to make decisions that best fit their business needs. We will offer you some tips and tricks to stay ahead of your competition, so follow along as we dive deeper into this interesting subject. 

Real Estate Website Builders vs Custom Real Estate Development

As we’ve mentioned above, there are two ways to build your real estate website: you can choose the available online website builders, or you can opt for a custom software development company to create your project from scratch.

The most common platforms for real estate websites are Wix and Squarespace. They serve the most simple websites, such as landing pages and portfolio types of websites. Now, let’s explore the pros and cons of a website builder for a real estate business:

Advantages

• Easy to use, you don’t need technical or coding skills;
• The templates come with built-in functionalities that can be easily customized;
• You don’t have to worry about UX and UI design;
• These websites are usually responsive and mobile-friendly. 

Disadvantages

• Limited available features that might not fit entirely with your business needs;
• Low chances of being able to add other features than the pre-built ones. In case you can request such features, they are pretty expensive and it might take a lot of time to be developed;
• You might have issues with advertising your website, especially on Google. You need to have your own domain, unique name, and clear code to promote your services;
• It is hard to customize or improve the existing design, as the templates are static. But most importantly, your competition might have already used the design you would like or the designs are outdated;
• Do not hope for an outstanding user experience as you cannot achieve a specific idea or business goal because of a lack of customization. All your potential buyers will get the same monotone and flat customer experience.  

When it comes to building a custom CMS and CRM system from scratch, we talk about 3 major benefits that will help your business overcome the main challenges in real estate: meeting your target audience’s experience, satisfy specific needs of your business, and ensuring proper, more efficient communication between real estate agents and potential buyers, and between your teams. Of course, custom development also has some disadvantages. Let’s talk about them and then dig deeper into the advantages: 

Disadvantages

• It will take longer to develop as it is going to require real estate market analysis, idea validation, finding a unique design concept, and testing;
• You will invest more money into the development stage;
• It will require some research from your side in finding the right software development company that has the essential experience and expertise. 

As you may see, the disadvantages are not that many, and when thinking long term, they are almost nonexistent. We highly recommend you to opt for a custom real estate development if you want to be on top of the market and having a competitive advantage. Your potential buyers will not only have an amazing user experience, but your website will have a great design, will be responsive, optimized for mobile, your SEO will be rock-solid. More than that, your agents can see the customer life cycle, will have all the data in one place, and the teams can communicate faster and easily between them and with clients.  

With this being said, let’s dive deeper into the main benefits of a custom CMS and CRM development for the real estate industry:

The 3 Major Benefits for Custom Software Development in The Real Estate Industry

The real estate industry is more and more competitive, therefore, being online is mandatory. Custom software for real estate is a very important tool whose utility and value increases with optimizations and versatility.  We are going to split the benefits of a custom software development for real estate businesses into SEO and competitive advantage, user experience advantages, and better customer management for real estate agents.  

1. SEO and Competitive Advantage

The competition in the real estate industry is strong and aggressive. To overcome this and ensure your success on the market, we stand by custom software development. The most important benefit of this type of development is that you will have a competitive advantage because you will get your offerings to the market faster than other companies in your industry. Through the years, your competition will offer the same digital experiences, because already-built software is identical and offers the same benefits. But a custom solution is unique, perfectly tailored on your business needs, and you will automatically have an SEO advantage. As your business grows, the software grows with you, adapting to your new requirements and needs. An off-the-shelf solution cannot be changed to fit your new demands. With a custom solution, you do not depend on other software platforms, plug-in updates, and programs. With a custom platform you can anticipate and adapt when changes are needed, so you don’t compromise your efficiency and customer experience. As we’ve mentioned before, you will have an SEO advantage from the start when opting for custom software. This translates into increased performance because you can optimize and customize a lot of processes; user retention because an authentic software is designed and has functionalities that provide your clients unique features, adapt to their demands and you can upgrade or downgrade your resources at any time; responsive to ensure the same experience across all devices; secure because you will use HTTPS. Check out what we can do for you in terms of SEO.