Web Hosting
A good web host is absolutely essential if you’re going to run a successful website. These are some of our top picks for web hosting companies that we’ve used ourselves and highly recommend.
WP Engine
WP Engine is an excellent web host that’s optimized for WordPress. If you’re running a WordPress website and looking for a high performance server, WP Engine is an excellent choice. WP Engine is perfect if you’re running a brokerage or company website that gets a lot of traffic and needs higher performance. Click here to get 10% off when you sign up!
Site Ground
Site Ground is another amazing host that’s a bit more of a budget option. It’s officially recommended by WordPress.org, their support is excellent and their performance is really good as well. You’ve got automatic daily backups, the ability to create staging copies of your site to test changes and a ton of other excellent choices. If WP Engine is a bit too expensive for you Site Ground is easily our second choice.
Web Design Templates and Resources
If you want to build your own website there are resources out there that make it easier than ever before. You no longer need advanced knowledge of web programming or anything like that thanks to software like WordPress and premium themes and templates.
The Genesis Framework
The Genesis Framework is easily the best WordPress theme if you’re building your first website. It’s very easy to use, optimized for speed and search engines, very secure and comes with a wide variety of different child themes to customize the design. This website is built with the Mai Lifestyle Pro theme and there are even two beautiful themes designed specifically for real estate agents!
Agent Focused Pro Theme for the Genesis Framework
Agent Focused Pro is a beautiful theme for any real estate agent with beautiful mobile friendly design. You can display your own real estate listings and even integrate your site with an IDX feed to pull listings in automatically. This theme requires the Genesis Framework and you can buy both together at a discount.
AgentPress Pro Theme for the Genesis Framework
AgentPress Pro is another beautiful real estate website theme that uses the Genesis framework. It’s perfect for both agents and brokers with beautiful listings and mobile friendly design. This theme also requires the Genesis Framework and you can buy both together at a discount.
ThemeForest: Website Templates and WordPress Themes
ThemeForest.net is probably our favourite theme and template marketplace. You can find some incredible WordPress themes by professional designers including many designed specifically for the real estate industry. ThemeForest.net also has email templates, marketing templates and other useful tools so you can do most of your marketing yourself.
Graphic Design Resources
With the graphic design resources and templates available from these sites and maybe some basic Photoshop knowledge you can create stunning flyers, advertisements, logos, brochures and much more all by yourself.
GraphicRiver: Design Templates
GraphicRiver.net is the best online marketplace we’ve found for graphic design templates for things like flyers, advertisements, logos, business cards, signage and more. Everything is made by professional graphic designers and very reasonably priced.
Unsplash – Free High Resolution Stock Photos
Unsplash is a massive library of incredible quality high resolution stock photos that you can use for free even for commercial purposes. if you’re looking for beautiful photography to use on your blog or any other project this is a great place to look.
Pexels: The best free stock photos in one place
Pexels is another absolutely fantastic website for incredible photos that are free to use however you want, even commercially. Every day they add 100 new photos in high resolution.
Software
Various software programs that are highly useful and will help in your real estate career.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is a subscription service where you get full access to every Adobe program including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and much more. Photoshop is incredibly useful if you need to touch up or edit photos for your real estate listings.
Evernote
Evernote is the best note taking app out there. You can store and organize any kind of information including things like contact information, to do lists, your own notes and sync everything across multiple devices. It’s easily one of the best ways to keep all your work organized.
Miscellaneous Resources
A few more great little tools that you should definitely check out.
If This, Then That (IFTTT)
IFTTT is an absolutely fantastic free tool where you can link various accounts across things like social media and other apps. If you carry out an action in one app it’ll automatically trigger another action in a different app. It’s very useful for automating things and can save you a lot of time.
Compress JPG and PNG
Before you upload any photos to your website or listings take a few seconds to compress them first so they’ll load faster on your site. This site will compress your JPG and PNG files saving you 70% to 90% of the file space and you won’t be able to tell any visual differences between the original and compressed versions.