How to spy on other real estate websites

Our unique place in the market allows us to examine tens of thousands of real estate websites, those powered by Showcase IDX, those with older IDX options, and even all-in-one solutions. As a marketing coach, I’m constantly looking at what other top marketers are doing to see how to apply the most effective practices.

Here are 3 ways I analyzed real estate websites (2 of them you can do)

1) BuiltWith:

This year alone, my team has analyzed over 100,000 real estate websites. Tools like BuiltWith let you see the public-facing technologies and marketing solutions used on a website. Want to know if a site has the Facebook marketing pixel installed, how about if it’s built on WordPress (almost all top sites are), or if uses Hubspot to track visits for email automation? All of that is easily available by simply entering the URL of a website.

If you have deeper technology expertise, there are other services with APIs that can provide you similar data at scale, but what I love about BuiltWith is that it allows non-technical people to easily get an idea about what is being used on an individual website.

2) View Source:

With a little more technical knowledge, you can inspect the source code for a website to learn even more things, such as what WordPress theme is being used, some of the plugins on the website (most plugins though are private and cannot be identified without admin access to the site), 3rd party software used, etc.

How to view source code for an individual website?

Using Chrome on a Mac, simply visit the website you would like to inspect, click View > Developer > View Source. Alternatively, right-click the page and look at the menu that appears. From that menu, click View page source.

3) Our Internal Data:

We partner with marketing agencies and web developers that build a single site per year to those that support tens of thousands of websites. For this guide, I looked at what IDX and home search settings our most successful clients are using.

We take our clients’ data and privacy extremely seriously and would NEVER expose the specific settings for individual clients, or even small groups of them. So, if you’re looking for what a specific site uses for their settings, I won’t be sharing that with you. If you’d like some insights into what I see from the most successful real estate websites, keep reading.

The results of examining our top 24 most successful customers confirmed many of my strategies, and a few of the results surprised me. This guide will give you some insights into things to try for your own website.

But first, let’s agree on what “successful” means.