A property page has one job, and it is not to describe the property. It is to bring a serious buyer to the point of asking for a viewing, and to let everybody else leave quickly. Those are the same job: the page honest enough to lose the wrong buyer in ten seconds is the page the right one trusts.
The photographs are the product
Everything else on the page is a caption. This is uncomfortable for anyone who has spent money on a website and not on a photographer, and it is still true: a buyer scrolls the pictures, forms a view, and only then reads. Where the photography is weak, no amount of layout rescues it, and the honest advice is to spend the next budget on a shoot rather than on a redesign.
What design can do is stop standing in the way of good photography. That means pictures at the full width the screen allows, in their real proportions, with nothing floating on top of them: no watermark across the middle, no caption bar eating the bottom third, no carousel arrows sitting exactly where the eye wants to go. Most listing pages are built on a template that treats a photograph as a thumbnail in a grid, and a property that sells on light and volume does not survive being shown 380 pixels wide.
What a buyer is actually checking
Roughly in this order, and usually before reading a sentence of the description:
- Price and location, without scrolling and without a click.
- Whether the pictures are of this unit or of the show flat.
- The floor plan — the one thing photography cannot tell them.
- Whether a real person answers, and how quickly.
The fourth is the one most sites get wrong, and it is the one that costs money. A form that says "we will get back to you" and then does not is worse than no form at all: it has taken the enquiry out of the buyer's head and put it into a queue they cannot see. If nobody is answering within the hour, publish a phone number and a name instead, and let the page be honest about how the agency actually works.
Speed is a signal about the seller
A listing page that takes four seconds to show its first photograph does not read as slow. It reads as amateur — in the same way a viewing where the agent cannot find the keys reads as amateur — and the buyer extends that conclusion to everything they cannot see. This matters more at the top of the market rather than less: somebody weighing a property at eight figures is buying an impression of competence along with the building.
The number this studio holds itself to is that the main photograph is on screen in under two seconds, on a mid-range phone on an ordinary connection. That is a hard target with heavy imagery, and it is met by deciding at build time which single picture matters most on each page and giving it priority over everything else — the analytics, the chat widget and the map included.
The part nobody budgets for
A property site is not finished when it launches, because its content changes every week and the person changing it is not a designer. However the page looks on launch day, six months later it looks like whatever the least careful upload made it look like. So the useful question to ask a studio, before the visual work is discussed at all, is what happens when somebody drops a portrait photograph into a landscape slot at four in the afternoon. If the answer is that the page breaks, the design has not been finished. It has only been drawn.
Gal Etrog · SILICA