Create a real estate website on Drupal with all the needed features

Real estate & property management businesses can reap huge profits from having a well-built website — and many of them actually do!

However, sites in this area are not built in one click. They require reliable and smooth third-party integration, excellent property categorization, advanced search, and more. This makes the choice of the CMS a responsible task. In this post, we take a tour of the features and opportunities that prove it’s a great idea to build a real estate website on Drupal.

Benefits of creating a real estate website

Having your own real estate website, built in accordance with the best practices and the right tools, can give you:

• a wider client base
• a more powerful business brand
• availability with no geographical boundaries
• endless opportunities for digital marketing
• increased transactions

and more!

Drupal for the real-estate websites

As a Drupal development & support team, we know how well Drupal performs in the real estate and property management industry. This is also proved by numerous Drupal real estate website examples.

All this inspired us to dedicate a blog post to the key Drupal benefits for real estate websites, among which are:

• advanced integration opportunities with third-party systems thanks to Drupal 8’s API-first approach
• the possibility to share the site’s data to a mobile app in order to provide better experiences for your users and expand your audience
• multi-level categories for real-estate objects thanks to Drupal’s taxonomy system
• convenient real estate filtering and sorting options by various criteria
• smart search opportunities (including faceted search, location-based search, autocomplete, and much more)
• image optimization options that allow you to keep the quality of real estate images while scaling and cropping them for different listings
• enhanced multilingual capabilities that will allow you include overseas customers
• flexible roles and permissions, as well as content moderation opportunities, that provide good control to your property management
• a mobile-first approach in Drupal 8 that makes it easy to provide smooth viewing experiences for your mobile audience
• plenty of helpful modules that enrich real estate & property management website functionality

What functionality you’ll need for your real estate website

Among the key features to make a real estate website, there are:

• property listings
• appealing visuals
• registration
• CTAs
• contact forms
• search
• filtering
• testimonials

and many more.

In the wealth of opportunities for real estate & property management websites in Drupal, we have gathered a few of the most requested real estate website features that many of our customers have been asking for recently:

Real estate APIs and third-party integration

APIs are vital for today’s data exchange, especially on the rapidly growing real estate market. Real estate websites rely on APIs to get relevant property data for their real estate listings. Real estate APIs provide functionalities like MLS (multi-listing service) feeds, mortgage data, rental estimates, and many more.

A real estate website can also share its data with third-party websites and applications. The API-first principle of Drupal 8 makes it especially smooth and easy thanks to a built-in REST API and data serialization and preparation to be shared in the JSON or XML formats.

When talking about third-party integration, any other third-party software can be brought to work with your real estate website. This can be software for accounting, real estate transaction management, lease management, real estate CRM, and much more.

• Example: integration with Quickbooks

An example is this kind of integration with the Quickbooks accounting software. It can help you track income and expenses per property, calculate the management fee collected from the customer, and much more. To speed up the integration, there are some useful Drupal modules such as the Quickbooks Online API, the Drupal QuickBooks Integration, and more.

Payment processing

Some customers need payment processing functionality on a real estate website. It is vital to provide customers with convenient payment methods and a good choice of preferred payment gateways. Drupal Commerce 2 provides secure and smooth payment functionality integration by supporting 70+ payment gateways, for which there are contributed modules. Whatever other gateways you wish to integrate your real estate website with, can be added via customizations. Flexible payment options for on-site, off-site, “manual” gateway payments, and many more are possible.

User management features

It’s vital for a real estate website's security and efficient workflows that only the right people have access to the right tasks. Real estate owners, buyers, renters, developers, renovators, brokers, and many other participants of the process need different permissions. Those who decide to create a real estate website with Drupal, appreciate its system of roles and permissions that can be very granular. In addition, there are contributed Drupal 8 modules for user access and many more to provide smooth user management.

• Special case: real estate data aggregator

Among the real estate & property management websites created by our team, there is a special project that is an example of how complex, advanced, and interesting it can be. Gridics is a platform that aggregates real estate data from various sources in the right format. Among the cool features are a zoning code management tool, an interactive 3D Map that helps customers better evaluate the real property objects, a Gridics API to filter data by various criteria, and much more.

Build a real estate Drupal website with us!

The choice of features for your real estate website is unlimited. Drupal is an enterprise-class CMS that allows developers to implement ideas of any complexity. If you are inspired to create a real estate website with Drupal, contact our Drupal experts and let’s discuss what your future site could do for you.