About the Author
Nick Lindeman is the Head of Web Development at VOLTAGE, where he leads the team that designs, builds and maintains client websites. He's usually part of a project from the first discovery meeting, so he hears directly from a client's team what the site needs to do before anyone writes code. He has led projects ranging from full redesigns to migrations of thousands of pages, along with the custom tools and integrations that connect a website to the rest of a business. Whatever the project, he builds with the client's team in mind, so they can keep the site current without calling a developer. Nick has more than a decade of front-end and WordPress development experience, including several years leading development teams, and a graphic design background that shows in how his team's sites look and work.
Commercial real estate websites have to do several jobs at once. They confirm a firm’s credibility, introduce its brokers, carry live listings, help with recruiting and stay current in a market that changes every week. After building sites for brokerages, developers and property groups, I’ve found that the projects that hold up best are planned around the firm’s people, its listing feeds and how often its content changes.
In commercial real estate, the website confirms what a relationship started.
In discovery meetings, commercial real estate clients tell us the same thing in different ways. Their leads come from relationships and referrals. By the time a prospect visits the site, they’ve usually already talked with a broker or heard the firm’s name from someone they trust.
That changes what the site needs to do. It has to answer a visitor’s quick questions with confidence. Who are these people? What have they done? What’s available right now? How do I reach the right broker? We plan the homepage and main navigation around those questions before anything else.
Brokers are the product, so we build around people.
Brokers bring in the business, and firms compete for top producers as hard as they compete for clients. On nearly every commercial real estate project, the people section ends up being one of the most important parts of the build.
That usually means:
- A people page that makes it easy to scan leadership and the broader team.
- A full page for each broker, with their bio, specialties, credentials and contact details.
- Careers and culture pages the firm’s team can update on its own, because recruiting never really stops.
A team page that only shows headshots and phone numbers doesn’t give anyone much to go on. A broker’s page is often the last thing a prospect or recruit checks before deciding to reach out.
One site has to serve owners, tenants, investors and recruits.
A single brokerage site might need to speak to property owners, tenants looking for space, investors, first-time business owners and people considering a job. Each group arrives with a different question.
We map those audiences in discovery and give each one a clear path from the homepage. An owner should find leasing and management services quickly, a tenant should get to available space in a click or two, and a recruit should find the careers page without digging. When everyone shares one generic path, every group has to work harder.
Listings usually come from a platform the firm already uses.
Commercial real estate firms rarely manage listings inside their own website. Listings usually come from a third-party listing platform, which makes sense. It also means part of the site depends on a system outside the firm’s control, so how the website connects to it matters.
The listing complaints we hear about most often are slow property search, listings that fall out of sync and agents missing from properties they represent. Depending on the firm, the right answer might be embedding the listing platform’s own search or bringing listings into the website itself.
When listings live on the site, we pull them in so search stays fast, and we tie each property to the agents who represent it. That way a visitor can get from a property to the right broker. Property pages also need room for the details that lease space, like photos, video and virtual tours.
No two listing feeds are set up the same way, even when they come from the same platform. Two firms on the same system can have completely different field structures, naming conventions and data quirks. So instead of forcing every feed into one template, we test with each client and work out together how their listings should look on the site. As long as the data coming in is structured well, there’s almost no limit to how far we can customize the display.
Content goes stale when every update needs a developer.
Many of the older sites we’ve replaced relied on PDF project sheets and pages no one had time to update. Busy brokers and small marketing teams won’t wait on a developer to post a new listing announcement or swap a headshot.
We build with flexible content blocks and clear templates so the firm’s team can publish news, market reports, project updates and new hires on its own. PDFs still have a place, since brokers like sending a link instead of an attachment, so we make it easy for the team to upload reports and brochures and share them as links.
Developments need a site that shows momentum.
For a development, every new tenant helps sell the space next to it, so the site has to make the project feel real long before it’s finished. It also has to be easy to update as the project moves along and new tenants sign.
A page for each district or phase, a clear picture of what’s planned in each one, the numbers that show the project’s scale and an easy path to leasing contacts give prospective tenants a reason to believe in the project. They also give the leasing team something current to point people to.
Pages people can find are pages search engines and AI tools can find.
I’m not the search strategist on our team, but our developers work closely with our search team, and that shows up in how we build. Search engines and AI tools read the text on a page, so the more of a firm’s expertise lives on real pages, the more those tools have to work with.
A dedicated page for each broker and each service, with real text about what that person or team does, gives those tools something to read and cite. The same choices that help a visitor find the right broker also help the firm show up when someone searches for one.
Start gathering your content before the project begins.
We build a new website with the content a firm gives us. If your current site is missing listings, team bios, project details or anything else you want to feature, the time to find it is before the project kicks off.
A simple content inventory that lists what you have, what’s missing and who owns it can save weeks once development begins. In our experience, content is both the most important part of a new site and the piece that most often slows a project down.
The same lessons apply to any firm whose people are the product.
Commercial real estate makes these lessons easy to see, but they apply well beyond it. Architecture and engineering firms, law firms and consultancies also sell their people’s expertise, recruit constantly and publish content that ages fast. If your website has to introduce experts, show their work and stay current, the same approach fits.
We recommend starting a website project with questions about people, feeds and freshness, along with a content inventory, before talking about design. You can see how we work with commercial real estate firms or learn more about our website design and development. Which part of your website goes out of date fastest?