For builders
What Should Your Website Do to Help You Sell Homes?
What the research on listings, photos and virtual tours suggests about builder websites, and the small things that decide whether you sell or your competitor does.
Santiago CarrilloOctober 9, 2026 · 8 min read
One of the things you are probably asking for from your marketing team is to improve your website. Specifically, you probably want more: more photos, more virtual tours, more AI features or more options in general. In leasing, where competition is tight and decisions happen fast, the companies with "more", like more photos or virtual tours and AI chatbots, seem to convert better than the ones without. And since what happens in leasing usually shows up in homebuilding a few years later, you may think you need more.
I thought this was the case too. So my hypothesis going in was simple: builders whose websites have interactive maps, virtual tours and more advanced tech features convert at a higher rate than builders whose websites don't.
Before writing about it, I went to the research. My team and I reviewed more than 40 studies and reports on listing photos, virtual tours, video and how buyers search for homes online. Although most studies look at resale listings, not new construction, and no one has measured builder websites directly, I think it's worth our while to see what these studies show.
What I found was not what I expected, but I think it will be more useful for you.
1. Easy and fast beats impressive
One thing to keep in mind is that buyers don't start with the look of your website or your photos. They start researching first: where, how much, and how big, in that order. Research using home-search data from Trulia found that people segment their search by location first, then by price, then by size (Piazzesi, Schneider & Stroebel, American Economic Review, 2020). By the time someone lands on your community page, they have usually already decided the area. Your website's job is to help them answer their next couple of questions as fast as possible.
There is no study that measures this on builder websites. But every industry that has measured it points the same way:
per 0.1 s faster
Speed. A Deloitte study commissioned by Google, covering 37 brands and 30 million mobile sessions, found that a 0.1-second improvement in load time lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. On lead-generation sites, the closest model to a builder's website, bounce rate on information pages improved by 8.3%.
with mediocre lists
Filters. Baymard Institute has spent years testing how people search product catalogs online. In their usability testing, sites with mediocre product lists saw users abandon their search 67–90% of the time. Sites with a slightly optimized set of filters saw that drop to 17–33%.
That second finding is the one I want builders to read twice.
Many builders look at e-commerce websites as the gold standard for online sales and assume that level of search is out of reach for builders. It isn't. Even the big e-commerce sites get this wrong: Baymard's benchmark of 344 top US and European retailers rates the average site "mediocre at best." The gap between bad and good is not a massive platform or budget. It is a handful of small decisions done right. These decisions need to be based on how people buy your products. That's it.
And you, as a builder, have an advantage Amazon or other retailers don't. You are not filtering hundreds of thousands of products or maintaining that level of inventory. You are filtering dozens of homes.
And what does a buyer need from your website?
- A fast-loading, mobile-friendly, readable site.
- A way to narrow by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet, move-in date and maybe builder.
- Real homes with real prices (and hopefully real, nice pictures; more about that below).
That's it. Do that well, and you are already ahead of most of your competition.
2. The first photo is your first showing
If filters and speed decide whether a buyer finds your home, photos decide whether they keep looking.
exterior photo first
Eye-tracking research on online listings found that 95% of people looked at the exterior photo first, and spent about 20 seconds on it, compared with about 8 seconds per interior room. Most of them never read the description. It was a small study, but it matches everything else we found: the elevation is the handshake.
And here is the finding that changed my mind about virtual tours (which I used to push for on websites for larger communities).
after photo quality
A Harvard Business School study of more than 75,000 home sales in Los Angeles found that listings with 3D tours sold for about 1.1% more, until the researchers controlled for the quality of the photos. Then the premium disappeared. The tours weren't doing the work. The sellers who paid for tours also paid for better photography, and the photos were doing the work. The only time tours clearly sped up sales was during the first months of the pandemic, when buyers couldn't visit homes in person.
Other research points the same way:
professional photos
When Airbnb gave hosts professional, verified photos, occupancy went up by roughly 9%. Same property, better pictures.
nothing
More photos help, but each additional photo adds less than the one before. The first handful of great images do most of the work. Photo number forty does almost nothing.
Benefield, Cain & Johnson, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics
higher chance of sale
Drone video was associated with more interested buyers and a higher probability of sale in a study of the Singapore market. That makes sense to me. A drone shot shows what a floor plan can't: the trees, the lake, the school down the road. It puts the home in a life, the way clothes sell better on a person than on a hanger.
Ong et al., International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis
None of this should surprise anyone who has sold a house. A freshly painted home sells better than a dirty one. Light, color and composition tell the buyer what kind of product this is before they read a single word.
If you sell a $650,000 home, your photos should look like a $750,000 home, NOT like a lower-priced one.
3. Your website's job is to book the visit, not to close the sale
A new home is a considered purchase. Nobody buys one from a website.
One pattern showed up again and again in the research: more information tends to come with higher prices but a longer time to decide. It happened with interior photos, with virtual tours and with drone video. My reading is that more information: 1) attracts more careful buyers, who compare more before they act, and 2) confuses people who tend to go with the options that require less thinking (there is a lot of research on this; see Tversky & Shafir, Psychological Science, 1992). Additionally, when people buy their house, the buying process takes time and the website is just one of the many parts of the process, but not where the sale happens.
In the MERCA model I use with clients, the website lives between Route (the route a buyer takes to find you) and Conversion (turning interest into a conversation). Its job is to move the buyer one step forward: from "this looks right" to "I want to see it."
That changes what you put on it:
What buyers use to decide whether you make their shortlist: price, size, availability, location and great photos. Hiding these doesn't create curiosity. It gets you skipped.
What belongs to deliberation: finishes, options, selection processes, the full walk-through. That is what your sales team and your model home are for.
Short answers to the common questions, and an easy way to ask for more or schedule a visit.
Virtual tours still have a place: buyers relocating from another state, who can't drive by on a Saturday, are exactly the case where the research saw tours matter. If you are building a large community in a city people are moving to (like retirees moving to Florida), giving them more information than your competition could help. But for a local buyer, a few great photos and an easy way to book a visit will often do more than a 3D model they'll explore once on their phone.
4. The next conversion matters as much as the first
When someone fills out your form, they have already done the work (and your marketing team, theirs). Your prospective buyers searched by area, landed on your site, then looked and filtered by price and size, liked what they saw in your photos and decided you made their shortlist. So they clicked on the contact form. That lead is warm, and they are almost certainly looking at your competitors too.
And not only that: once they looked for "homes for sale in X location", the giant media companies like Meta or Google KNOW someone is looking. And, without anything else being done by the prospective buyer, they will be shown multiple ads on social media, emails and searches. So timing is of the essence here.
What happens in the next few minutes after they fill out your form or chat with your AI chatbot decides the sale. That's why we studied it: in The Lead Response Gap, we measured how fast builders respond when a buyer reaches out. Being present when the buyer is searching gets you on the list. Responding when they raise their hand is what gets you the visit.
The simple version
If you want to market your homes better, you need a website that is easy and fast to use, that answers what the buyer needs when they look for it, and whose photos communicate the quality of the product you sell. And you need to stop expecting the website to close the sale. It is one step on the route a buyer follows in a considered purchase. The step after it, how fast and how well you respond, matters just as much as being there when they search.
None of these are big things. They are small things done right. And in most markets, that is the difference between you making the sale and the builder down the road who did.
A note on the evidence: the research we reviewed is mostly about resale listings and other industries, not new-construction websites. Where I draw conclusions for builders, those are my deductions from that evidence and from experience. I'd rather tell you that than overstate it.
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