Questions to ask real estate website providers

When a brokerage signs a website platform for the whole roster, the demo answers none of the questions that will decide whether the deal ages well. The questions that matter are about paperwork, ownership, and what happens at the edges — a new recruit’s first day, an agent’s last day, a board rule change, the contract’s renewal. Here is the due-diligence list we would put to any provider, including us, with what a good answer sounds like. (The solo-agent version of this exercise is the seven-question framework; this page is the office-wide edition.)

Data agreements: who signs, and for what

Which boards do you hold live data access with — IDX and VOW listed separately? A good answer names boards and licence types in writing. Vagueness here means discovering coverage gaps after signing.

Who signs what, per agent site? Board data agreements run to the brokerage, so every agent site needs sign-off from the broker of record — the approval mechanics are laid out in broker of record IDX and VOW approvals. Ask how the platform tracks which sites are papered, pending, and missing. A good answer is a dashboard; a bad answer is “we email you.”

What happens when a board changes its display rules? The right answer: the platform updates centrally and every site inherits the change. The wrong answer makes forty site edits your problem.

Provisioning: the recruiting question in disguise

How fast is a new agent’s site live? Same-day provisioning turns websites into a recruiting asset — a site the recruit can see during the interview. If the answer involves weeks and a designer, the program will always lag headcount.

What does provisioning cost per agent, and what does seat pricing do at our size? Get the per-seat math in writing at your real headcount, including what an added seat costs mid-term.

Ownership: read the exits before the entrance

Who registers and controls custom domains? Domains should sit in the name of whoever is meant to keep them — brokerage domains with the brokerage, agent personal domains with the agent. The full ownership anatomy is in do I own my real estate website.

What exports on exit — and in what shape? Contacts, deal history, consent records, content. A good answer names formats and includes consent status, because a contact list without consent records is a CASL liability, not an asset.

What happens to an agent’s site when they leave us? You want a policy you configure, not a surprise: retire it, transfer it, or strand it should be the brokerage’s call, made in advance.

Compliance: who keeps forty sites current

How do registered names, brokerage identification, and board attribution render — per template or per platform? Platform-level means every site is correct by default and your supervision reduces to exceptions. Template-level means an audit backlog that grows with every hire.

Show me your last compliance-driven change and how it rolled out. The specific example tells you whether the operating layer is real.

Commercial terms: the four-year view

Contract length, renewal pricing, and what triggers increases? Ask for the renewal price in the initial paperwork.

What is the notice period and data-return process at termination? The clean answer is measured in days, with exports available before the lights go out.

How to run this

Send the list in writing to a shortlist of three, and score the answers against each other rather than against hope. Test one live customer site per vendor on a phone. Then weigh the two questions that are hardest to fix later — board coverage and exit terms — above everything cosmetic. Platforms built for org-wide deals, ours included, should expect this scrutiny; what a brokerage-grade platform looks like is the companion piece on the capability side. A vendor comfortable with hard questions in writing is telling you how they will behave for the length of the contract.