Stock In Action

Less than two years ago the real estate market was booming. With all the money Realtors were bringing in, dropping a couple thousand dollars on a custom website made sense. With the change in the market, all that is over. Whether you’re a Realtor yourself or designing for a Realtor, your budget is probably tight.

Rich or broke, Realtors need a logo, business card, fliers, and a website. Using stock files is a fantastic way to get professional -looking design done inexpensively. Even with stock, a designer may still be necessary, but it will always be cheaper than custom work. Many real estate offices employ an in-house designer, who may be the perfect person to turn a couple pieces of stock into a quality design for little to no cost.

Having an MLS (Multiple Listing Service) search on a Realtor’s website is essential. If buyers can’t find homes on the site, it might as well just be a one page business card website.  There are some great real estate web templates out there for under $50, but they won’t have the MLS automatically integrated into them. Unfortunately there isn’t one comprehensive MLS system – they’re all regional and work independently of each other. Usually an MLS search page can be added into the site using an iframe (basically a page within a page). This is something that might need to be done by a designer.

Here are a bunch of great real estate-related stock photos, websites, and vectors:

Web Templates:

Images:

Flash: