Two thirds of sellers find their agent through a referral or an agent they’ve used before. When they look you up, they check your reviews, your sales and whether you know their neighborhood. Build your website for that visit.
How sellers find their agent
The National Association of Realtors asks recent sellers how they found their agent every year. In the 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 37% were referred by a friend, neighbor or relative, and 29% went back to an agent they had worked with before. Together that’s 66%. Only 4% found their agent through a website.
Most sellers also don’t shop around much. In the same report, 80% contacted only one agent before deciding.
So the usual path is simple. Someone hears your name, looks you up, and decides whether to call. Your website is where that decision gets made.
What a seller wants to know
A homeowner thinking about selling has different questions than a buyer browsing homes. They want to know:
- Do you know my neighborhood, and what homes like mine sell for there?
- Have you sold homes like mine: the same price range, the same kind of property?
- What will you actually do to sell it? Pricing, photography, marketing, open houses.
- What do your past clients say about working with you?
NAR’s research points the same way. Sellers say they want help pricing the home, marketing it to buyers and selling within their timeframe, and they rank an agent’s reputation and honesty high when they choose.
Why it doesn’t pay to compete with Zillow
Buyers already have Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com on their phones, with every listing in the market, saved searches and alerts. An agent’s website won’t out-search them.
Trying anyway has costs. Market-wide search adds a monthly fee and a setup tied to your MLS. Many IDX tools show listings inside a frame from the provider, so those pages do little to help your own site come up in Google. And a homepage built around a search bar puts other agents’ listings in front of the sellers you’re trying to win.
The money and attention are better spent on the pages a seller actually reads.
What to put on your site instead
- Reviews. Real reviews from past clients, on your own site and on your Google Business Profile.
- Past and present sales. Your listings and the homes you’ve sold, with photos, price and status.
- Neighborhood pages. One page for each area you work, with what homes sell for and what it’s like to live there.
- Specialty pages. Waterfront, luxury, historic homes, relocation: whatever you’re known for, with its own page.
- Your listing services. How you price, prepare and market a home, in plain language.
- An easy way to reach you. A phone number, a short form and a way to ask what their home is worth.
These pages answer a seller’s questions, and they help you show up when people search for an agent in your area.
When IDX does make sense
Market-wide search can be worth it if most of your business is buyers, if you run a team with buyer’s agents, or if your clients ask to search on your site. In that case, add it on top of the pages above, not in place of them.
We offer IDX as an optional add-on, quoted based on your MLS fees. Our guide Do realtors need IDX on their websites? goes through the decision in more detail, and our packages show what comes with every site.
Sources: National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, as summarized by Virginia Realtors and BAM; NAR, 2024 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends.