Web design

August 2026 · 8 min read

What a commercial real estate website actually costs.

Almost nobody in this business publishes a price, which leaves owners and brokers guessing at a number somewhere between a template they configure themselves and a full agency retainer. Here is how the pricing actually works: what moves the number, what belongs in the quote, what the thing costs to run once it is live, and how to compare two bids that are four times apart without picking the wrong one.

Why the range is so wide

The word "website" is doing too much work. It covers a one-page site for a single 2,600 square foot suite, and it covers a forty-page brokerage site with a searchable listings database, twenty broker bios, and a case study library. Those are different objects that happen to share a noun. A quote is not high or low in the abstract; it is high or low relative to what is being built and who is producing the content that fills it.

In our experience the single biggest driver is not design at all. It is content production. A site is a container. If the owner already has professional photography, a clean site plan, a current rent roll, and copy that someone has written, the build is the whole project. If none of that exists, which is the normal starting position for a small retail listing, then someone has to fly the property, retouch the stills, redraw the floor plan, and pull the trade area numbers before a single pixel of design matters. That work is real, it takes days, and it is where the money goes.

The four line items behind every quote

Whatever format a proposal arrives in, it is priced off these four things. If a quote does not make them visible, ask.

• Scope, counted in the units that matter. Not pages. Suites, listings, brokers, properties. A center site with fourteen tenants and three vacancies carries more structure than a single-suite site, and a property management portfolio site scales with the number of properties in it. Ask a designer to quote by page count and you will get a number that stops describing the work by week two.
• Content production. Photography, drone, film, floor plan redraws, retouching, demographics, traffic counts, copywriting. Each of these is a separately priceable thing, and each can be supplied by the client instead of the studio. Our photography guide covers what a proper shot list involves and roughly what production runs; the useful move is deciding, line by line, what you already have.
• Build method. A theme configured over a weekend, a page builder, or a site coded from scratch. This is the biggest quality fork in the road and the one buyers understand least. We wrote about the downstream costs of the template route in what templates actually cost you, and the short version is that the sticker price and the total price point in opposite directions.
• What happens after launch. Hosting, updates, availability changes, and who does them. A center site is not a finished object. Suites lease, rates change, tenants open. Whoever quoted the build should tell you what a change costs and how fast it lands, in writing, before you sign.

How we scope it, with two real examples

Our own model is a flat quote per project, given after we have seen the property and the scope, with hosting and updates included rather than metered. That is a choice, not an industry standard, and it exists because CRE marketing budgets get approved once, not monthly. What it means in practice is easiest to see across two projects at opposite ends of the range.

Marbella Plaza is a 66,124 square foot grocery-anchored center in San Juan Capistrano. That site carries the whole asset: an interactive site plan, every suite with its own facts and status, the tenant roster, trade area data, photography, and lead capture that tells the broker which suite the inquiry came from. Multiple vacancies, a plan to draw, a roster to keep current. The scope is the center.

5801 Lincoln is a 2,660 square foot corner suite in Buena Park, taken from brief to live in three days along with a co-branded seven-page flyer, using drone footage the owner already had rather than a shoot day. One suite, one story, two listing firms to co-brand. The scope is a single space, and the price follows the scope. We described that build day by day in the three-day case notes.

For what it is worth, and consistent with what we have said elsewhere on this site: a custom single-property website is a four-figure project, not a five-figure one. Center sites and brokerage sites run higher because there is more of everything in them. We quote both the same way, as one number agreed before work starts.

Two quotes for "a property website" can differ by four times and both be honest. They are not describing the same object.

The running costs, which are smaller than most owners assume

This is where a lot of CRE marketing money quietly leaks, because the infrastructure under a property site is close to free and the invoices often are not.

A .com domain costs a little over ten dollars a year at registry cost. Cloudflare Registrar sells domains at what the registry charges plus the ICANN fee, with no markup and no renewal increase, which puts a .com in the ten to eleven dollar range annually. Static hosting for a property site is genuinely free at the entry tier: Cloudflare's Pages documentation states that requests to static assets are free and unlimited, on the free plan and the paid plans alike. Netlify and similar services publish comparable free tiers. The trade area data underneath a good listing page has no license cost either, because the American Community Survey is published free by the U.S. Census Bureau, and most cities publish their traffic counts through a public GIS portal.

So when a monthly figure appears on a proposal, the honest question is what service it buys. Paying a studio monthly to keep availability current, publish new suites, refresh photography, and answer the phone is a reasonable thing to buy. Paying a monthly fee that is described as hosting for a static site is paying for something that costs almost nothing to provide. Both arrangements exist. Only one of them survives the question.

How to compare two quotes that are four times apart

Line the bids up against the same six questions. In our experience the gap usually explains itself by the third one.

• Who is producing the content? If one quote includes a shoot day, drone film, retouching, and a redrawn site plan and the other assumes you will email a folder of photos, the two numbers are not comparable and never were.
• Is it custom or a theme? A configured theme is a legitimate product at a legitimate price. It is just not the same product.
• What does a change cost? A suite leases on the fifteenth. How long until the site says so, and what does that update bill at?
• Who owns the domain, the code, and the photography license? The answer should be you, in writing, on all three. Ownership of the domain in particular decides whether you can ever leave.
• Is performance specified? Google's web.dev documents 2.5 seconds as the threshold for a good Largest Contentful Paint, measured at the 75th percentile of real users. Ask for a target, because a slow property site fails at the exact moment it matters, which is a tenant rep opening the link in a parking lot.
• Who will actually do the work? Every hour a project spends being handed between a marketing coordinator, a photographer's edit queue, and an offshore build team is an hour you are paying for in coordination rather than output.

When the right answer is to spend less

Not every listing needs a dedicated site, and we will say so on a call. A single inline vacancy in a strong corridor with a market rate and real tenant demand can lease off good photography, an accurate portal listing, and a sign. The spend is better justified when the asset carries the story: a center where co-tenancy and layout do the selling, a disposition that will run for months, multiple vacancies that would otherwise fragment across separate portal listings, or an owner who is watching how their property is being marketed. We laid out that test in more detail in when a listing needs its own site.

The comparison that decides it is not the price of the website against the price of another website. It is the price of the website against the carrying cost of the vacancy it exists to fill. Take the Lincoln suite, 2,660 square feet. At a hypothetical $2.50 per square foot per month, that space represents about $6,650 in monthly rent, roughly $80,000 a year. Run the same arithmetic with your own rate and your own square footage. If the marketing shortens lease-up by one month on one suite, the question of what the site cost stops being interesting.

If you want a real number for a real property, tell us the address, the vacancy, and what content already exists. That is enough for us to quote it. Our services page covers the project types we build and how each one is scoped.