The real estate website brief: what to put in it, and how to score the quotes you get back

I ran the query “questions to ask a web agency before signing a website quote” with the word real estate inside the query. Not one real estate result came back. Six pages, all generic: the 10 questions, the 12 key questions, the 7 questions. The engine had nothing vertical to offer, because nobody wrote it.

One page in the whole search came close. Resilogis, writing about websites for real estate agencies, points out that you have to tell your provider which software you use. That's it. That's the entire public state of the art on the single line that decides whether your site works: the need is identified in the search results, and nobody supplies the document.

Meanwhile, brief templates circulate everywhere — several web agencies give one away as a lead magnet (I tried to read one of them while researching this piece and got a 403, so I won't pretend to know what's in it). The ones I could read all have the same spine: context, audience, sitemap, features, design, budget, timeline. That spine is fine for a brochure site for an accountant. On an agency site it leaves out every line that actually moves the price and the result — and everything you leave out of a brief comes back as a change order.

You already know roughly what a real estate agency website costs. This article is the next step: how to not pay for the same thing twice.

What a generic template says, and what it has to say on an agency site

The eight lines to copy into your brief

Write these as sentences, not intentions. A provider quotes what is written. Everything else is either not built, or billed later.

1. The software gateway, named, with a frequency.

   “The site must display our listings from our [Hektor / Netty / Apimo / Modelo] account through an automatic feed. The quote must state the direction of the feed (import or export), the synchronization frequency, who owns the field mapping, and what happens to the feed if we change software.”

   Naming the software is the difference between a quote you can compare and a quote you can't. “Listings integration” as a single line item means nothing; it can hide two days of work or two weeks.

2. What happens to a sold listing's URL.

   “Specify in writing what happens to the URL of a property once it is sold or withdrawn: kept online in a ‘sold’ state, redirected to a defined target, or removed. Give the rule per case, and include implementing that rule in the price.”

   This is the line nobody writes and everybody discovers six months later, when the site quietly serves a few hundred dead pages.

3. Portal syndication — in scope or out, but stated.

   “State whether this site is the source of our listings or a consumer of the same feed we send to portals, and name the portals concerned. If syndication is out of scope, write that it is out of scope.”

   Out of scope is an acceptable answer. Silence is not — silence is a change order with a delay attached.

4. The valuation page treated as a product, not a form.

   “The valuation page is our primary commercial product. Specify the number of steps, which fields are required at each step, where the lead is delivered, which acknowledgement the visitor receives, and what response time is promised on screen.”

   If you only enforce one line in this list, enforce this one — I broke down what separates a valuation funnel from a contact form in a previous piece.

5. The seller/buyer fork, on the home page, above the fold.

   “The home page must offer two explicit paths — sell/get a valuation, and buy/rent — each as a button of its own, not a navigation link, both visible without scrolling.”

   Every agency serves two people with opposite intents. Most home pages serve one and hope the other finds the menu. I showed three hero sections that handle the fork properly, at three different budgets.

6. Energy rating and regulatory fields as template slots.

   “The listing template must include dedicated display slots for the energy performance rating (DPE) and every mention our listings are legally required to carry in our country, populated from the software's fields — not typed by hand by an agent.”

   Hand-typed regulatory data is how a listing template becomes a liability. Make it a slot fed by the feed.

7. Languages, stated per language (the Belgian case).

   “The site ships in the following languages: [FR / NL / EN]. State, per language, whether listing descriptions are translated by us or automatically, and whether each language has its own indexable URL.”

   “Multilingual” on a quote is not a specification. Three languages with human-written listing descriptions and three separate URL trees is a different project from a language switcher on the static pages only.

8. The fate of your existing URLs.

   “The quote must include a URL-by-URL redirect map from the current site to the new one, delivered before go-live, applying the sold-listing rule defined above. Tell us which line of the quote covers this work.”

   Ask which line covers it. If the answer is a shrug, you've learned something for free.

The scoring grid: how to compare five quotes without price deciding for you

The best thing I found on comparing web quotes is an Epixelic article that proposes a real scoring logic — contents, deadline, autonomy, maintenance, conversion, each rated out of 5. Sound method. But there's no table, no downloadable template, no spreadsheet, and no sector specificity at all: their worked example is a consulting firm. Everything that makes your project a real estate project is missing.

So here is the weighted version, with the criteria that actually apply to you. Rate each quote from 1 to 5 per line, multiply by the weight, add it up.

Price is deliberately absent from the grid.Score first, then look at the price, then divide. A quote that scores low on the first two lines isn't cheaper — it's incomplete, and the gap will be invoiced later at a rate you didn't negotiate. And if a quote scores 1 or 2 on the feed line, don't compare it to anything yet: send the question back and re-score it. Half the spread between five quotes usually disappears once everyone is answering the same document.

Where this document actually comes from

Straight up: there is no real client brief in my archive.This document isn't exhumed from a past project, and I'm not going to dress it up as one. It's built backwards from real audit criteria — the things I've actually found wrong on live agency sites, turned into the sentence that would have prevented them.

Etimo (Charleroi). Real audit, run on the live site. The findings, and the brief line each one produces:

That last one still bothers me. Etimo has independently certified reviews — a stronger trust asset than most of its competitors have — sitting below the new-listings block where almost nobody scrolls.

An honesty caveat on that audit, because it matters here: several of those findings are marked “to verify on the live site” in the audit itself. The truncated phone numbers may well be a scraping artifact. The “0 CTA” count comes from what the parser read in the DOM — buttons rendered as images wouldn't be indexed by it. I'm reporting the audit as it was written, flags included, not as a cleaner story than it is.

Club Immobilier. Also a real audit, and the source of a full teardown I published earlier. A “40 years” badge — the single strongest thing the agency has to say — sitting in the footer. A copyright reading 2018. Three JavaScript errors in the console on the home page. “Estimer mon bien” not in a dominant position above the fold. No buyer/seller split at all on arrival.

Four more brief lines, straight out of that: the strongest trust number goes above the fold; the console is clean of JavaScript errors on the home page as an acceptance criterion, not a nice-to-have; the copyright year is generated, never typed; the valuation CTA is above the fold. If you want to check your current site against the full grid first, the 15-point audit checklist is the short version of the same criteria.

Why I'm telling you what to ask for

I write these quotes. I'm on the other side of this table.

Here's the uncomfortable part: a vague brief is goodfor the provider. Not because providers are crooks — because a quote can only price what's written down. When the feed isn't specified, the honest provider under-quotes it and eats the difference or renegotiates; the less scrupulous one prices a cheap version, wins on price, and invoices the real one as an amendment. Either way you pay, and only one of you saw it coming.

The eight lines above are the ones a provider quietly hopes you'll forget, because they're the expensive ones. I can say that out loud without a conflict of interest, because this blog sells a document, not a redesign engagement.I'm not bidding on your project. Honesty here costs me nothing — which is precisely why you should trust this list more than the same list published by whoever wants to be the fifth quote in your inbox.

Hamza Benjaaba

Web designer and no-code developer, working on websites for real estate agencies and local service businesses in France and Belgium. I write the quotes on the other side of this negotiation, which is the only reason I know which lines get left out of them. The criteria in this brief come from audits I ran myself, console open, on live agency sites — not from a template I downloaded.