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With hundreds of other IDX websites online, why would a buyer choose yours? And no, “Because they clicked on my ad!” is not an acceptable answer. Not in 2024. Not when the average time buyers spend on real estate websites is less than two minutes. Not when you have to compete with Zillow, Realtor.com and other agents who — maybe like you — are wondering where their next mortgage payment is coming from.
To capture leads with your IDX website in today’s biblically competitive, post-lawsuit market, you need to think like a luxury agent. Everyone has listings. Ryan Serhant’s website offers an experience. Like Serhant, your personal brand, expertise and empathy need to shine through on every page of your website.
Yes, buyers will still click on your ads and still want to search for homes on your website. Keeping them there is the hard part. To help, we reviewed dozens of IDX websites that offer buyers a home search experience they can’t get from Zillow.
SummaryThe 7 best IDX websites for 2024 (+ one to watch)
These seven IDX websites offer an alluring combination of value for money, solid UX design, an engaging search experience and proven lead capture features. All key ingredients for keeping buyers searching for homes on your site instead of on Zillow.
Since almost all of our picks offer roughly the same features, we scored them based on our opinion of their property search experience, design quality, and overall user experience (UX) . We also include an IDX website startup we think is going to do big things in the space.
PRO TIP
IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange, a system that allows real estate agents and brokers to display Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listings on their websites.
Showcase IDX
Pricing: Starting at $84.95 per month
Search experience: 4.8
UX design quality: 4.6
Standout features: Friends and family search, users can hide listings, satellite view on maps; open house, new listing, and price change notifications on listings in property search results; basic CRM
See it live: Luxury Living Fort Lauderdale
Showcase IDX is an industry-leading IDX plugin for WordPress that sets a standard that all others follow. Property search results pages are well-designed, easy to navigate and customizable. We love the search with friends feature that allows buyers to invite friends and family to share and discuss listings they’ve saved on the site.
Widgets allow you to curate and display listings by type or neighborhood — crucial for providing a bespoke home shopping experience that Zillow can’t. You can drill down into your niche and display waterfront properties, starter homes, or anything else you’d like front and center on your website.
This might be a little nit-picky, but the fonts Showcase IDX uses on their map view are a little dated and a bit hard to read. We also thought the UX elements on the friends and family search were fine, but could use improvement. We’d also love to see Showcase develop a branded IDX website package for agents who don’t already have a WordPress site.
AgentFire
Pricing: Starting at $149 per month + design fees
Search experience score: 4.8
UX design quality score: 4.6
Standout features: VIP tours CTA, Calendy tour booking, neighborhood guides, custom designs available
See it live: The Meza Team
AgentFire offers branding-focused IDX websites at a surprisingly affordable price. While rivals like Luxury Presence charge an eye-watering $500+ per month, AgentFire charges a far more reasonable $149. While branding remains the star of the show, AgentFire’s IDX home search and listing pages are some of the best in the industry.
The layouts, font choices, and overall search experience are sleek, easy to navigate, and look like they were designed in 2024 — because they were! Other IDX sites allow you to customize fonts and colors, but AgentFire looks great right out of the box.
We’d nix the Airbnb-style zoom-to-search feature. It’s a bit frustrating to use; you have to constantly zoom in and out to see more listings. This is a minor flaw in an otherwise stellar product.
Agent Image
Pricing: Starting at $99 per month + design fees
Search experience score: 4.7
UX design quality score: 4.9
Standout features: Real Trends Award-winning design, personal branding is prioritized, iHomefinder Max or IDX Broker, lead scoring CRM
See it live: The Carrol Group
Agent Image combines award-winning, brand-first design and custom IDX search. With over 25 years of experience designing and building IDX sites for luxury agents, they are a perfect match for agents who want to stand out.
While Agent Image is not a true all-in-one CRM and IDX website, it offers basic lead scoring, routing, and other CRM features through iHomefinder Max. This makes Agent Image ideal for teams and boutique brokerages that want a fully customized website with built-in CRM features.
While Agent Image’s designs are beautiful, they tend to be a bit busy. Some agents might prefer a more minimalist design. Something they can work out with Agent Image’s design team. Agent Image’s design fees are also on the expensive side, starting at around $1,500. IDX is also not included in the monthly price. Adding iHomefinder Max bumps up your monthly cost by $150.
iHomefinder Max
Pricing: Starting at $150 per month
Search experience score: 4.6
UX design quality score: 4.6
Standout features: CRM with lead scoring, routing and marketing automation that can track lead’s behavior on your website, plus market reports
See it live: Gottesman Residential
iHomefinder Max is a popular IDX plugin for WordPress that includes a powerful CRM. Like Showcase IDX, it doesn’t come with a website, but for most agents, this is a feature, not a bug. It gives them total control to create or buy a WordPress website that they can customize to their heart’s content. Instead of being forced to choose a template, agents can unleash their creativity and build anything they want while iHomefinder handles the IDX.
The pricing. At $150 per month, iHomefinder Max’s pricing is inching closer to what all-in-one platforms charge. They’re straddling the fence between platforms like Real Geeks, which offers a much more powerful CRM, and AgentFire’s done-for-you branding-focused websites. A tall order for some agents considering you have to build or buy your own WordPress site to use it.
CINC
Pricing: Starting at $899 per month (includes leads)
Search experience score: 4.7
UX design quality score: 4.8
Standout features: Done-for-you lead generation, advanced CRM with AI features, Etta home search app, neighborhood guides, featured listing and neighborhood/property type listing pages
See it live: Denver House Hunters
CINC combines purpose-built IDX websites and done-for-you PPC advertising with an advanced AI-powered CRM. Like most lead generation sites, CINC prioritizes home search over branding. But that’s where the similarities end.
CINC’s home search experience and UX design are miles ahead of the competition. The usual IDX suspects like Zurple and Boomtown look and feel homemade next to CINC’s sleek, professional property search and listing pages. Lightning-fast loading times (crucial for SEO) and a custom-branded home search app called Etta round out the package.
CINC’s websites are hardcore lead generation machines, so branding is an afterthought. We’d love to see CINC home pages focus more on personal branding and client service.
The neighborhood guides are a step in the right direction, but we were left craving more. A blog and a few buyer and seller education pages would make CINC a perfect IDX site. Bleeding-edge tech + sleek, modern design + an emphasis on client service = IDX perfection.
Pricing is also an issue. Leads are included in the $899 starting price, but most agents we know would love to get their hands on CINC’s IDX site and software to drive their own leads.
Real Geeks
Pricing: Starting at $299 per month
Search experience score: 4.5
UX design quality score: 4.5
Standout features: Move to property search app, market report pages, featured listing & neighborhood listing pages
Real Geeks combines a good (but not great) IDX home search experience with a highly capable CRM, home search app, and automated marketing tools.
Like CINC, Real Geeks is first and foremost a lead generation website — ideal for agents who want to drive leads through PPC ads. You can customize pages to include client service-focused content, testimonials, or pretty much anything you’d like. You can also create listing pages for neighborhood and property types for a more curated home shopping experience.
We’d love to see dedicated pages or blocks for testimonials and client service content. Most pages are pretty easy to customize, but you have to design them yourself. This is something a talented UX designer could knock out in a few days, so we’re a bit disappointed Real Geeks hasn’t made that investment.
Placester
Pricing: Starting at $54 per month ($29 + $25 IDX support fee)
Search experience score: 4.6
UX design quality score: 4.6
Standout features: Basic CRM, neighborhood listing pages, DIY or done-for-you setup, customizable lead capture popups, testimonials widget
See it live: Aaron Rangel, Sotheby’s
With over 12,000 active users, Placester is the most popular IDX website behind Keller Williams’ proprietary IDX. Once you look under the hood, it’s easy to see why. Placester offers attractive websites at a very affordable starting price. It’s perfect for new agents or any agent who wants to save a bit of money.
Placester’s search experience is on par with rivals like AgentFire. Property search is intuitive and easy to use, and listing pages are attractive and come with bonus features, including a mortgage calculator. A basic CRM rounds out the package.
Placester’s pricing is a bit deceptive. All plans require a $25 monthly IDX support fee which is not listed in their advertised pricing. That “$29 per month” starting price (paid yearly!) is actually $54 per month once you include the IDX support fee.
Worse, their entry-level package is very limited. They don’t even offer lead capture CTAs. For that, you’ll need to upgrade to their $79 Agent Plus package. Throw in the $25 IDX support fee, and you’re looking at $104 per month. That’s still a relative bargain, but a far cry from their advertised prices.
One to watch: Panda IDX
Pricing: Starting at $69 per month + design fees (starting at $499)
Search experience score: 4.7
UX design quality score: 4.8
Standout features: AI property search, basic CRM, neighborhood and new development listing pages, school ratings, price drops integrated into property search results
See it live: Lion and Orb Homes
Panda IDX creates stunning, branding-first websites that give competitors 100x their size a run for their money. Their UX design is near perfect. Even tiny design elements like buttons, icons, and font choices look shockingly professional and well-thought-through compared to other IDX sites. Even better, all this fancy design serves a purpose — to make the search experience better. One small example: Useful data such as recent price drops are featured prominently on listings in property search results.
Panda is also the first IDX website (that we know of) to feature natural language AI property search that works just like ChatGPT. It’s still labeled experimental for now, but our quick test searching for “2-bedroom condos in South Beach” brought up exactly what we were looking for.
There is a catch though: as of today, Panda IDX is only available in Florida. On a recent Whatsapp chat the founder assured us they were in the process of expanding to other states, but for now at least, only
Sunshine State Realtors can use their platform.
FAQs
IDX websites are real estate websites that use the Internet Data Exchange (IDX) to display up-to-date property listings from a Multiple Listing Service (MLS) on Realtor’s personal websites. IDX is added to agent websites via IDX plugins added to WordPress sites or through proprietary IDX software provided by a third party.
For our money, Showcase IDX is the best platform to add IDX listings to a WordPress website. We think their search experience and UX design are head and shoulders above their competitors. It just looks and feels better.
For Florida Realtors, Panda IDX is our clear favorite. Hands down. Their UX design and search experience matches or beats custom designs from rivals that charge 10x as much.
For an all-in-one IDX website, it’s a toss-up between AgentFire’s branding-focused websites and Placester’s more affordable options for new agents.
Sort of. Many large franchise brokerages offer free IDX websites as a perk for their agents. Keller Williams famously offers free IDX websites as part of its proprietary KW Command CRM.
Brokerages like Douglas Elliman offer their agents subsites with IDX listings. Offering free IDX sites allows brokerages to maintain branding standards and gives agents a free site to generate leads. The catch? When agents change brokerages, they lose their free websites.
This is a highly subjective list! Our team spent many hours researching the features and benefits of IDX websites, so our opinions may, or let’s face it, WILL differ from yours. We think our team’s collective 50+ years of experience in real estate sales, marketing, and lead generation should factor into your decision.
Then there’s the market. The real estate software market has always been competitive. Over the last few years, innovations in AI and massive infusions of cash have turned a competitive market into a cutthroat market. Real estate software companies are slashing prices to stay above water. Some might not make it. Companies that try to compete with dated branding and design definitely won’t.
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