Web design

August 2026 · 7 min read

How to choose a commercial real estate web design firm.

Most shops bidding on your website have never read a rent roll. That is not a criticism of their design work, it is a description of where the risk sits: in the gap between a site that looks good in a proposal deck and a site that markets property. Here is how to tell the two apart before you sign anything.

Decide what you are actually buying

Three very different projects get filed under "we need a website," and the right firm for one is often the wrong firm for another.

A brokerage site is a credibility and recruiting asset. Its job is to make an owner comfortable handing you a listing and to make a producer comfortable leaving their current firm. It lives or dies on positioning, bios, and how the work is presented.

A property site is a leasing tool for one asset. Its job is to convert a tenant rep who clicked a link in an email into an inquiry with a suite attached. We wrote about the format in detail in single-property websites.

A center site serves two audiences that never meet: prospective tenants and the shoppers you are promising those tenants. That is a harder brief than either of the others, and it is covered in shopping center marketing.

Name the purchase before you take the first call. A firm that gives you the same answer for all three has one product and is looking for a place to put it.

Judge the portfolio on a phone, in a parking lot

Proposal decks are not evidence. Live sites are. Ask for three URLs of work the firm actually shipped, then open them on your phone on cellular data, standing outside, in daylight. That is the real usage condition for this industry: a broker on a site tour, an owner between meetings, a tenant rep checking a link from the passenger seat.

What you are watching for is unglamorous. Does the hero image appear before you lose patience. Are the phone numbers tappable. Is the availability table readable without pinching. Click into a listing and see whether the suite status looks maintained or abandoned. A site with a leased suite still marked available tells you something about the firm's relationship with its clients after launch.

You can also check the technical floor yourself, for free, on any public URL. Google's Core Web Vitals guidance, published on web.dev, sets the "good" threshold for Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads. Run a few of the firm's client sites through Google's PageSpeed Insights and you will learn more in ten minutes than any capabilities presentation will tell you. Speed is not the whole of search performance, and we go through the rest in SEO for commercial real estate, but a firm that ships slow sites will ship you one too.

Ask who produces the content, and get it in writing

This is where projects die. Not in design review. In month three, when the site is built and waiting on photography that nobody was assigned to take.

Most website quotes quietly assume the client supplies everything that goes inside the site: photographs, floor plans, site plan graphics, demographics, suite-by-suite copy, the aerial with the roads labeled. Those assumptions are rarely stated out loud, because stating them makes the number look less complete. So ask directly, item by item, and write the answers down.

• Photography and drone. Who shoots, who edits, and is the flight included. Our take on scope and cost is in commercial real estate photography.
• Trade area data. Who computes population, income, and traffic counts, and from what source. Reprinting a competitor's flyer numbers is not research, and the method matters more than the figures. See trade area analysis.
• Site plan and floor plans. Who converts the architect's sheets into something a tenant can read on a phone.
• Copy. Who writes the suite descriptions and the property story, and who approves them.
• Ongoing changes. Who updates availability when a suite leases, how fast, and at what cost.

The site is the easy part. Projects stall because nobody ever agreed who was going to take the photographs.

A firm that can answer all five without hedging is quoting a marketing program. A firm that answers "you provide that" to all five is quoting a template build, which can be the right purchase at the right price, as long as you know that is what you are getting. We laid out what moves the number in what a commercial real estate website actually costs.

Settle ownership before design starts

The uncomfortable questions are the ones worth asking early, while you still have leverage in the conversation.

The domain should be registered in an account the owner or the firm principal controls, not in the vendor's account "for convenience." Analytics should be a property you own, with the vendor added as a user, so the history survives the relationship. You should be able to get an export of the site, and you should ask what that export actually contains: a static build you can host anywhere is a different asset than a subscription page that stops existing when you stop paying. The tradeoffs of proprietary platforms are covered in CRE website templates.

Ask the redirect question too, because it comes up more than people expect. Firms rebrand, merge, and change domains. Google Search Central's own documentation on site moves is explicit that permanent redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent are how you carry search signals across a domain change. A firm that has done this before will say "we map every URL one to one" without being prompted. A firm that has not will say the new site will "rank fine."

Industry knowledge shows up in small places

You cannot really test whether a designer understands commercial real estate by asking them if they do. You can test it by watching for the details that only come from having worked in it.

California is a useful example. Business and Professions Code section 10140.6 requires a licensee to include their license identification number on solicitation materials intended to be the first point of contact with consumers, and the Department of Real Estate publishes guidance on which materials that covers. A brokerage site is exactly that kind of material. A general design shop will not know the rule exists, and you will be the one who finds out.

The same is true of the smaller conventions. Co-listed properties need both firms on equal billing, in every place either name appears, including the flyer and the inquiry routing. Retouched photography and tenant visualizations need to be disclosed as such, which is the whole argument in virtual staging, done honestly. Rate on request is sometimes the right call and sometimes a wasted filter, and the person building your site should have an opinion about which. None of these are design decisions. They are brokerage decisions that happen to land inside a design project.

How we answer these questions

It would be strange to publish this list without answering it ourselves, so here is where Endcap actually sits.

We are a studio run by a licensed California broker, and we build for a narrow slice of the market: brokerages, owners, property managers, and retail centers. The largest project on the site is Marbella Plaza, a 66,124 square foot grocery-anchored center in San Juan Capistrano, where the work covered the property site, the suite-level availability, the trade area presentation, and the media. The Marbella case study walks through it.

The smallest is 5801 Lincoln Ave in Buena Park, a 2,660 square foot corner suite that went from brief to live in three days, including a co-branded seven-page flyer for two listing firms. We wrote up the timeline honestly, day by day, in how we built a listing site in three days, and the before and after media is in the Lincoln case study. That project is the clearest answer we can give to the content question above: there was no photographer, no data vendor, and no print designer in the chain, because the same shop did the research, the retouching, the build, and the flyer.

On the commercial terms: every project is quoted as one flat number before work starts, the scope is written down, and the deliverables are yours. Our services page lists what is included by project type.

If you only make one call

Ask for one live site built for an asset like yours. Ask who produced the content on it, specifically the photographs and the demographics. Ask what happens to the site, the domain, and the analytics if you stop working together. Then open that site on your phone and see whether it still says what the property is today.

Three questions and one page load will separate a design vendor from a marketing partner faster than any RFP. Whichever firm you choose, choose knowing which one you are buying.