Client portal

A client portal is the signed-in half of a real estate website: the place where a buyer’s saved homes, saved searches, messages and sold-data access live under one login. Portals made this the expected way to shop for a home; a BrokerFold site gives every client the same workspace on your domain, attached to you. There is no separate product to configure — the portal is what your website becomes for a visitor with an account.

What a client sees inside

Every registered visitor gets an account hub with four working rooms:

• Saved homes — every listing they’ve hearted, anywhere on your site, synced across devices and sessions. The full behaviour is covered on the saved homes page.
• Saved searches — their named filter sets, each re-runnable in a tap and each carrying a daily email alert toggle.
• Messages — their conversation threads with you, tied to the specific properties they asked about.
• Profile — their details and sign-in management, including VOW password renewal when the board’s expiry schedule comes due.

None of it is decorative. Each room exists because a buyer mid-search returns to it weekly, and each return visit happens on your domain instead of a marketplace’s.

The membership card: sold data

The strongest reason a client signs in is the data they cannot see signed out. On boards where your site carries VOW licensing, the sold layer — closed prices, off-market history, sold-derived stats — unlocks for registered visitors who accept the board’s terms, with the VOW gate enforcing the rules request by request. This is the same mechanic the big search portals use to grow their registered base; inside your portal, the registrations and the relationship are yours. It also gives the portal a quality most agent sites lack: a reason to exist beyond bookmarking.

A direct line, not a contact form

Signed-in clients can open a conversation from any listing page — the message thread is anchored to the property, so “what’s the parking situation here?” arrives with the here attached. Threads live in the portal’s messages area on their side and in your CRM’s Conversations tab on yours, and your replies reach their inbox with a link back to the thread. The same signed-in layer powers viewing requests: a client can request a tour at an exact time, and bundle several of their saved homes into a single request instead of firing five separate forms. Details on the chat side are on visitor chat.

What the portal hands you

Every portal account is a CRM contact, linked at registration with consent recorded properly under Canadian rules. From then on the portal is an intelligence feed: hearts, searches, listing views and sold-data sessions land on the contact’s timeline, and the behaviour profiler turns the stream into scores and plain-language summaries. You open a client’s record before calling and see what they actually did this week — which is the difference between “just checking in” and a call about the two new matches in their price band. The underlying account machinery is documented on visitor accounts.

Included, on every template

The portal ships with every BrokerFold plan and works identically on every template — design choice never changes what a signed-in client can do. Branded listing alerts are the outbound half of the same system: the portal is where clients come back to, and alerts are what keep bringing them.