Choosing an IDX Website Vendor: Broker One vs WordPress vs Others

Who Is It For?

If you’re a professional real estate agent or broker, sooner or later you will have to think about getting a real estate IDX website. Broker One specializes in building beautiful IDX websites for a variety of clients in —and we’ve found that one of the most commonly asked questions we get when vetting new business inquiries is what makes us different from other solutions. So, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide detailing the differences between us and our competition, and we hope our guide helps you make a wise decision when going forward and building your own real estate IDX website for your business.

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Let’s Start with Something Basic—WordPress

More often than not, when we hear from new clients, they’ve already Googled IDX website builders for themselves and discovered the endless options for IDX plugins that supposedly are very easy-to-use and work straight out of the box with Wordpress. We’re not here to say these plugins and the promises they make aren’t true. Just that they only tell half of the story.

  1. Even if you go with a template, you will still need to purchase it and, unless you have significant web design and development skills, hire a developer to make the pages and other necessary changes. And you will still need to hire a designer to implement images, customize layouts and more.
  2. After all of the above work is completed, you will still need to purchase an IDX subscription, and depending on the platform this will cost you around $29–$49 a month minimum.
  3. Then, you will need to hire a developer again to actually plug the IDX listings into your site, make sure that the search works the way you want it to work, make sure that the property listings are populating correctly and more. Yes, this will require decent amount of time, and developers aren’t cheap talent to hire.
  4. You will also need to find hosting. The cheapest shared hosting starts at $6.99/mo. And at that rate, you’ll only be getting a slow site.
  5. Maintenance comes after. Since all of the pieces of your website have now been purchased from a variety of vendors and developed by different developers, when WordPress inevitably undergoes an update, you will find a few plugins are now broken as a result. The speed at which you can figure out how to solve this problem could be VERY time consuming, so you’ll likely find yourself hiring a developer to help. Again.

As you can already see, the “cheapest” way to go is actually not so cheap. Total comes out to $36-$60/mo and that doesn't include development, maintenance or updates

Other Providers - Placester, IDX Broker, etc

  1. You’ll be promised a bunch of premade templates that will work out of the box, but that will look like various other business’ online storefronts. It’s your choice if this is fine with you. But if you’re investing in building a brand name for yourself, this is obviously not the way to go.
  2. They’ll eliminate the hassle of hiring multiple developers and maintaining the platform and storefront.
  3. On most options, hosting is included.
  4. Prices vary depending on the options you choose. But you can expect them to be around $59 and up per month.
  5. You’ll be subject to various fees—including setup fee, change fees and more.

Broker One

  1. Broker One has beautifully designed premade themes that are optimized to work specifically with the platform of your choice. As an added benefit, Broker One employs a stable of designers and branding professionals that will customize your theme for you, ensuring that your personal brand is able to sing.
  2. All Broker One plans come with maintenance and hosting included as part of the package.
  3. Broker One utilizes the most modern SEO technology and best practices available that allows your online real estate storefront to achieve the best possible rankings with Google, enabling your business to rank top-of-list in Google Search.
  4. Broker One charges no contract, cancellation or setup fees, and plans are not built on longterm contracts. As your team size changes over time, you can upgrade the number of users at-will. You can also change your plan whenever you want without penalty.
  5. Broker One offers a free 7-day trial, unlike most any of our competitors. If you like us, we’re glad for you to stay after the initial 7 days. If you want to keep exploring other options, we’re glad to offer guidance and point you in the direction you’d like to go. (We just hope that in time, you’ll realize we’re the best-in-class solution and that we’ll see you again soon.).
  6. Broker One pricing starts at only $29 per month.

Best of all, unlike prefabbed solutions, Broker One is here to truly partner with your business. Our team of developers, designers, copywriters, strategists and other marketing professionals have more than fifty years of combined experience within the real estate category, so you can trust that you’re choosing a solid group of professionals who understand real estate inside and out. We also offer a 24/7, 365 help desk, so you can be sure someone is available to assist you when you need it.
We’d love to partner with you to grow your real estate business. Contact us today to get a conversation started. We’ll look forward to your inquiry.