There are four ways to put commercial listings on your website: frame a vendor's listing search inside your page, let a vendor host listing pages on your subdomain, link out to LoopNet or CREXi, or publish a page for each property on your own domain. Only the last one gives every listing an address and a page that are plainly yours. Every vendor that sells one of the other three promises it helps your SEO, so we checked what each one actually does on live brokerage sites.
The short version:
Frame a vendor's search
Vendor-hosted pages on your subdomain
Link out
Your own pages
| Method | What you buy | Where each listing's page lives | Price, as published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frame a vendor's search | Buildout Property Inventory Plugin, CREXi Fuse, RealNex MP Direct | Inside a frame served from the vendor's domain | Buildout Showcase $199 per broker a month plus $275 a month; CREXi and RealNex by quote |
| Vendor-hosted pages on your subdomain | LoopNet LoopLink | On a LoopNet-hosted site under your subdomain | By quote |
| Link out | Nothing extra | On LoopNet or CREXi | Free |
| Your own pages | A site that makes one page per property, by hand or through a plugin like RealNex MP Premier or SharpLaunch | Your domain | SharpLaunch from $399 a month billed annually; RealNex by quote |
We build websites for commercial brokerages, including the fourth option, and this article ends at what we build. Weigh it accordingly. The tests are ours, the vendor quotes are from their own pages, and the method is at the end.
What we saw on nine live listings pages
Our audit of Sacramento-area commercial brokerage websites found ten firms showing current listings. We went back to nine of those listings pages and checked two things: whether the listings are in the page itself, and where a single listing opens when you click it.
Three frame the vendor's search. One uses Buildout's plugin, one CREXi Fuse and one RealNex MP Direct. In all three, the page on the broker's domain contains none of the listing text; it all sits inside frames loaded from buildout.com, crexi.com or realnex.com. Click a listing and the three part ways. Buildout gives it an address on the broker's domain, but in the form /properties?propertyId=887277-sale, and that address serves the same page, under the same generic title, for every property. CREXi opens the listing on crexi.com in a new tab. RealNex keeps everything inside the frame, with no address for a single listing at all.
Two show the listings on their own page but send the click elsewhere. One lists three properties and links each to its LoopNet listing. The other shows its CREXi listings, cap rates and prices included, in its own page, then opens "View Details" on crexi.com.
Four publish a page per property on their own domain. Northgate Commercial Real Estate gives each listing an address like /properties/ca/sacramento/2500-watt-ave/ and a title that describes the space. Turton Commercial Real Estate titles its pages with the address, such as "1409 R Street - Turton Commercial Real Estate", and The Edwards Company does the same, "1330 Florin Rd, Sacramento - The Edwards Company". A fourth firm hand-builds a page per property but gives them all one shared title, which is an easy fix.
What each vendor promises
Every one of the four sells its method with a line about your website or your search traffic:
- Buildout: "When you use Buildout's plugin, your property information lives on your brokerage's website, allowing you to maintain your SEO and track your web analytics." (Buildout)
- RealNex: "Keep buyers on your website, and your SEO, with a branded property search powered by your MarketPlace listings." (RealNex)
- LoopNet: LoopLink "improves your site's user experience and SEO." (LoopNet Help Center)
- CREXi: Fuse lets visitors "view, search and access detailed listing information without leaving your site." (CREXi Learn Center)
Two of the vendors say more in the fine print than on the sales page.
RealNex draws the line itself. Its own product page says "MP Direct embeds a fast, hosted listing search on your existing site; MP Premier hosts native, SEO-optimized listing pages you fully control," and describes MP Premier as hosting listings "natively on your site, not in an embed, so the pages are truly yours." That is the whole argument of this article, from a vendor that sells both. (RealNex)
Buildout publishes a fix for its own plugin. Its WordPress helper on GitHub says the plugin uses query parameters by default, "but sometimes search engines can struggle with indexing routes that include query parameters," and that the helper gives "more consistent indexing" by changing ?propertyId= addresses into normal paths. It only works on WordPress. The Buildout site we tested is not on WordPress and still uses the query-parameter form.
What Google says about frames
Asked in its December 2023 office hours how to get the contents of an iframe credited to the page using it, Google answered: "In general, our systems would try to associate the sub-page's content as a part of the primary page for indexing, but it's not guaranteed, since both pages are normal HTML pages on their own too."
That is the honest version of every vendor promise above. It might work. Google is not promising it.
JavaScript is less of a gamble. Google's JavaScript SEO guide says it runs the scripts and indexes what they produce, and then adds: "Keep in mind that server-side or pre-rendering is still a great idea because it makes your website faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript."
We looked for an independent test of whether listing widgets help or hurt a commercial brokerage in search. Two research passes found none. What exists comes from vendors and from agencies selling an alternative, including SharpLaunch, which says its WordPress plugin is "better for both user experience and search engine optimization" because it avoids "an embedded iFrame". That is a competitor's claim, and it happens to agree with RealNex's.
LoopLink and linking out
LoopLink is the in-between option. LoopNet's own terms define the LoopLink site as "a single dedicated website and software hosted by LoopNet branded for Customer." On a live example, each listing gets a real page under the broker's subdomain, looplink.lillibridge.com/Listing/400-W-Arbrook-Blvd-Arlington-TX/19247022/, titled with the property's address. That is far better than a frame. It is still LoopNet's software on your name, and it ends with the subscription.
Linking straight to your LoopNet listings is allowed. LoopNet's terms, effective February 6, 2025, say a customer "may provide a hyperlink to the home page of the Website or to any Listings provided that Customer must remove any such link upon request from LoopNet." The same terms bar copying LoopNet content into your own database and framing any part of LoopNet without written permission. Photos of properties you represent can go on your own site, unaltered, for as long as the agreement lasts, a point we covered in who owns commercial listing photos.
Linking out is honest and free. It also sends every interested tenant to a page that puts other brokers' listings next to yours, which is the arrangement we described in why there is no commercial MLS.
Which way to put commercial listings on your website
- You already pay for Buildout, CREXi or RealNex and want listings up this week: use their plugin. It is better than nothing, it updates itself, and visitors will not know the difference. Just do not count it as search traffic you own.
- You care whether a search for the address finds you: you need a page per property on your own domain, with the address in the title and the details in the page. RealNex sells that as MP Premier, SharpLaunch sells it for WordPress, or a site can be built to do it.
- You are a tenant rep with no listings: skip all of this and publish the deals you have done. It is what a tenant is checking for.
A five-minute check on your own site
- Open your listings page, view the page source, and search it for one of your property addresses. If it is not there, the listings are in a frame or drawn by scripts.
- Click a listing and read the address bar. Your domain plus a path naming the property is the goal. A
?propertyId=string, a vendor's domain or no change at all tells you where the page really lives. - Text that link to yourself. If the preview shows the property, search engines and clients see a page about it. If it shows only your firm's name, every listing is sharing one page.
What we would build
This is the part we sell, so read it as a specification you can hold anyone to, including us.
A page for every property on your domain, with the address in the title, the details in the page itself, a map, the documents, and a way to ask about it. Listings fed from wherever you already keep them, so your team updates one place, and a leased or sold property kept as proof rather than deleted. For a property worth the effort, something a flyer cannot do: our commercial property explorer is a fictional Sacramento office building you can walk through floor by floor, built to show what a property page can be when it is not a PDF. Individual property sites are covered in commercial property microsites, and the rest of how we approach commercial firms is on our commercial real estate page.
Pricing is in the open: a launch site starting at $900 and live in 48 hours, a full multi-page site starting at $4,500 and live in about a week, and Flare Care for the months after.
How we tested
On September 25, 2026 we loaded nine listings pages from the firms in our Sacramento-area audit in a real Chrome browser identifying itself as a normal desktop browser, and compared each page's raw HTML, what a basic crawler receives, with what appeared after scripts ran and frames loaded. We recorded where every frame came from and where each listing link pointed, then fetched individual listing pages to read their titles. A tenth page produced no listings in our run and was dropped.
Vendor claims are quoted from each vendor's own pages as they read on September 25, 2026. Prices are what those pages publish; where a vendor asks you to contact sales, we say so rather than guess.
What we did not test: how any page ranks. Rankings depend on far more than how listings load, and no one has published a controlled comparison. What we can show is whose page each listing lives on, which is the part you control.
If you want these checks run on your site, or a site that passes them, tell us about your brokerage. If you would rather see the price first, build your package in about two minutes.