How to Create Real estate Community Pages that Convert Like Crazy [Examples]

Community pages are an essential component of a real estate website. The reason is both buyers and sellers find them useful and relevant. Buyers find the information about the community such as schools and local businesses valuable, while sellers get an idea about the current state of the local real estate market. Needless to say, your real estate website must have community pages.

A community page is useless if it doesn’t serve its purpose – that is to provide valuable information to website visitors and in exchange, encourage them to take a specific action (such as sharing their contact details and scheduling a call or an appointment).

In this guide, I am going to explain why they are important, and how to make them super-effective:

Table of Contents

Must-have elements of a community page (with examples)

The purpose of a community page is to provide valuable information to real estate buyers and sellers. You need to take into consideration the following three things:

What information should it offer?
Is the information easy to understand for readers?
What action do you want your readers to take?

Based on these criteria, here are a few must-have elements of a community page:

Detailed information about the community

Median listing price
Number of homes listed for sale
Average home value
Schools
Crime rate
Demographics
Home listings
Area map
Information about local businesses
Relocation guide
Latest real estate market data
The current state of the real estate market: Whether it’s a buyer’s market or seller’s market
Average days on the market
Amenities (parks, playgrounds, golf courses, hiking and biking trails, water bodies, picnic spots, etc.)

It’s going to be time-consuming to collect all these details and update them regularly (quarterly updates will do), but believe me, the pages will get you tons of leads if they start ranking for your target keywords. And if you follow the best on-page and off-page SEO practices, your content will rank higher in the search engines for sure. You just need to be patient.

You will find good examples of community pages everywhere.

For example, visit this Realtor.com page for Big Bear Lake in California.

You will find a map and the latest information about the housing market, schools, amenities, local businesses, and neighborhoods.

Latest & featured listings

Another important component that your community pages must have is nicely displayed widgets of the latest and featured listings.

Buyers will browse the listings to find homes, while sellers will get an idea of what homes are selling for in their community.

These listings will ensure that buyers and sellers stay longer on your website. This will boost SEO as it will reduce the ‘bounce rate’ and increase ‘dwell time’.

Moreover, most IDX providers allow you to use ‘conditions’ to capture leads when visitors browse the website.

For example, you can force visitors to share their contact details after browsing a pre-defined number of listings. A popup will appear after they have reached this limit, asking them to share their details to keep viewing properties. This is a great way to use the listing feature for lead generation.

However, make sure to A/B test this lead generation tactic. Sometimes, such interruptions cause visitors to leave the site.

Here is an example of how to display listings on your community pages:

Links to neighborhood guides

If creating detailed community guides for every neighborhood is too overwhelming for you (particularly if you are serving a large area), here is a way around.

Pick the most popular communities and turn them into detailed guides with as much information as you can provide. You can create generic guides (not exceeding 500 words) for smaller neighborhoods or upcoming projects in the communities.

Simply have a property listing widget and a map displayed on those pages. There is no need for these pages to have information that you will need to update regularly.

For example, let’s say you are a broker or an agent in Houston:

You can create detailed community pages for important areas such as:

Sugar Land
Katy
Humble
Spring

Now you can create smaller guides for neighborhoods in the community. For Sugar Land, you can create quick guides for the following neighborhoods:

New Territory
First Colony
Telfair
Riverstone
Sienna Plantation
And so on….

You can then link the main community page with the pages for smaller neighborhoods or projects.

This strategy is guaranteed to increase page views per website visitor. This will translate into more engagement and leads and higher rankings.

Visual appeal

Since the community pages have so much information and data, you must present the details in a way that your website visitors find easy to consume. There are just paragraphs after paragraphs of text, the visitors will leave without thinking twice.

Here are a few ways to make the information easily digestible:

Infographics
Images
Bulleted lists
Visually appealing icons

Take a look at the following example:

You can see how nicely the real estate market data has been displayed with the use of icons.

Many boutique real estate agencies are leveraging aerial drone videography to make their community pages more impressive and visually appealing.

Consistent CTA (call-to-action)

You are putting so much effort into creating awesome community pages to generate real estate leads, right?

Well, you won’t get any leads if your community pages don’t have CTA buttons.

CTA buttons on a community page will encourage the visitors to take the action you want them to take.

So, you first need to decide what action you want them to take:

Schedule a call
Send you a text message
Subscribe to your email list

Now, how to encourage the visitors to call/text you or subscribe to your email list?

Here are some ideas:

Let’s Chat About (community’s name)
View All Listings in (community’s name) – as I mentioned before you can force the user to share their details after they have visited a predefined number of listings
Schedule a Call for a Free CMA
Text/Call Me for a Free Consultation
Know Your Home’s Value in (community name)

Clicking these buttons will open a popup or appointment scheduler. You can also guide the user to another landing page where they are asked to provide their contain details in exchange for scheduling a call or more information about the community.

Social proof & testimonials

All the data and information you provide on your community pages will definitely make a great impression on the users. This will demonstrate how you have your fingers on the pulse of the local real estate market and how you are a neighborhood expert. The users will trust you and feel comfortable sharing their contact details.

You can take this trust-building exercise a step further. On the community pages:

you can display reviews you have received on Google My Business, Yelp, Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Facebook, and other trusted review websites.
video testimonials of buyers and sellers you have helped. The testimonial will be more effective if it’s community-specific.
Real estate transaction details – how many homes you have sold in the community, the total value of homes sold by you, or how many clients you have served.
Details of your team in brief

Here is an example of how you can use social proof to make your community pages more effective:

Wrapping up

Real estate is a local business and you must demonstrate your local real estate market expertise to win the trust of website visitors. The community pages will go a long way in helping you achieve this goal.