Website for estate agents: what it needs and what it costs
An estate agency website costs EUR 3.500 to 7.500 once listings come into the site from a feed or an API, and EUR 1.500 to 3.500 if it stays a brochure with listings living on the portals. Both exclude VAT. The dividing line is not how the site looks. It is whether property data gets moved by software or by staff.
Listings are data, not pages
A property is a record. Price, status, address, floor area, rooms, energy label, photo set, the agent handling it, viewing times. Nearly every one of those fields changes while the listing is live. The price gets adjusted, the status moves to under offer, photos are reshot, a viewing is added. A page is something a person writes once. A record changes without anyone opening the website.
Build listings as pages and you have signed the office up for data entry that never ends, in a second system, with no guarantee it matches the first. The portal says under offer, your own site still says available, and the caller who reaches you found the stale one. That is what makes an agency site feel broken while every page in it looks fine.
Build listings as data and the site reads from wherever your agency software already publishes. One entry, one truth, and the website updates itself.
Why that puts an agency at step 04
Step 04 covers EUR 3.500 to 7.500 over 6 to 12 weeks, and it is the step that includes an API, a login, a dashboard and CRM work. An estate agency site uses most of that list.
- The import. Reading the feed, mapping its fields onto yours, handling the photos, and deciding what happens when a listing vanishes from it. Keeping a sold property at its own address instead of returning an error is a decision, not a default.
- Search and filter. Price, area, property type, rooms, status. Filtering has to run against the data on the server to stay fast and to produce addresses that can be shared and indexed.
- Detail pages generated from the record. Gallery, floor plans, map, energy label, and an enquiry form that already knows which property it came from.
- Lead routing. A viewing request or valuation enquiry landing in the system the office actually works in, tagged with the property, rather than in a shared inbox nobody owns.
- Saved searches and alerts. Optional, and they require accounts, the other reason this work sits at step 04.
The steps in order
| Step | Price | What it covers | Fits an agency that |
|---|---|---|---|
| 03 Business website | EUR 1.500-3.500 | 4-7 pages, CMS, service pages, booking or contact | Sends buyers to the portals and sells the agency on its own site |
| 04 Advanced site or web app | EUR 3.500-7.500 | Login, dashboard, API, CRM, payments, chatbot | Shows its own listings from a feed, with search and routed leads |
| 05 Custom SaaS platform | from EUR 7.500 | Scope, auth, billing, admin, deployment, after discovery | Is building a product: multi-office portals, vendor or landlord logins, anything sold on to other agencies |
When step 03 is the honest answer
You may not need listings on your own site at all. If buyers find the property on a portal and find you by name, the site has a different job: who you are, which streets you know, what a vendor gets for the fee, and a valuation request that reaches a person.
That is step 03. Four to seven pages, a CMS, service pages for selling, letting and valuation, and a booking or contact flow, at EUR 1.500 to 3.500 over 3 to 6 weeks. It is a real site, it can rank for your area, and it sits a full step below the feed route in price. If the portals already carry your listings, putting the budget into the vendor argument is the better spend.
What moves the quote
- What the feed gives you. A documented API is one job. A scheduled file export is another. Software with no export at all is the expensive case, and it is worth establishing which one you have before anyone quotes.
- Photos and video. Image handling is where a listings site gets slow. Resizing, cropping and serving the right file to the right screen is real work whether or not it appears on the brief.
- Languages. An Amsterdam agency selling to internationals runs Dutch and English, which means every static page in both languages, plus a decision about listing text you did not write.
- Rentals alongside sales. Rentals carry their own fields and their own lead flow. It is not the same template with a new label on it.
- What happens after launch. Care runs EUR 100 to 300 per month for updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. On a site with a live feed the monitoring is the part that earns it, because you want to hear that the import stopped from us and not from a vendor.
Search is quoted separately from the build. SEO foundation is a one-off of EUR 450 to 750: Search Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links and a plan for the next 3 to 6 months. That plan matters here, because listing pages appear and disappear while an agency needs pages that stay put: area pages, selling and letting guides, valuation, fees. Having it carried out month after month is SEO growth at EUR 500 to 800 per month.
How the project runs
- Discovery on the data. Before any design: what your software exports, in what format, how often, and which fields can be trusted. The fixed quote follows this, not the other way round.
- Structure and design. Search, results, detail page, and the pages that sell the agency. Designed against real listing data, including the listing with one bad photo and no description.
- Build and import. The feed goes first, because it is the part that can surprise everyone, then the pages on top.
- Launch and watch. Redirects for any old listing addresses, then a stretch of watching the import run.
Step 04 runs 6 to 12 weeks, and the feed decides where in that range you land.
When to spend less
If the office is small and the vendor argument is doing the selling, step 03 with a strong set of area pages will earn more than a search interface nobody uses. A listings site is worth building when buyers arrive on your site directly, and worth skipping when they do not.
Do not pay for accounts and saved searches on launch day. Accounts only pay off if something useful is sent to them afterwards, which means someone writing the alert emails. Ship the listings, find out whether buyers come back, then add accounts when there is a reason.
The full ladder with what each step includes is on the packages page, and the stack behind a feed driven site is described on our Next.js development page.
Questions agencies ask
My software has no API, what then?
The site is only ever as current as the feed behind it, so this is the first question we ask. The options are a file export, a data entry route where the office publishes to the site through a CMS, or changing software. All of them are quotable. The data entry route is the cheapest to build and the most expensive to live with, so make that trade deliberately.
Will my listing pages rank in Google?
An individual listing ranks for its address and not much else, and it stops being useful the moment the property sells. The pages that hold rankings for an agency are the ones that do not expire: area pages, selling and letting guides, valuation, fees. Plan for listings to serve buyers and evergreen pages to serve search.
Who owns the site and the data?
You do. The code, the repository and the database are yours, the import included. If you move to another developer, nothing has to be bought back.
Can you host it?
We can, and it is agreed per customer rather than assumed. A site running a scheduled import has more moving parts than a brochure site, so hosting and monitoring get discussed together during scoping and priced in the open.
Tell us which software your listings live in and what it exports at /#contact, and you get a fixed quote against one of these steps.
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