Commercial Real Estate Broker Websites: We Checked 38

Commercial real estate broker websites in the Sacramento region are more common than residential ones, and less finished than they look. We checked every corporation licensed by the California Department of Real Estate in Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties with Commercial or CRE in its name, 38 in all, on September 23, 2026. Four turned out not to be brokerages. Of the other 34, thirteen have no working website of their own. Of the 21 that do, nine show a property that is currently available, and three have a listings page that shows nothing at all.

The short version:

We build websites for brokerages, and this article ends at what we build. Weigh it accordingly. Everything above that section is measured, the method is at the end, and the firms that got it right are named. The ones that did not are not, because the pattern is the point.

Thirteen of 34 have no working site

Five have nothing at all: search the firm's name and you get registry mirrors and a directory listing. Two have a domain that no longer works. One times out. The other is parked and for sale, with a "Get This Domain" button where the brokerage used to be.

Six exist online only as a broker profile on LoopNet or CREXi. That is better than nothing, and it is also a page on someone else's platform, laid out their way, sitting next to other brokers' listings. We covered why that arrangement exists in why there is no commercial MLS: exposure in commercial real estate is rented from a platform, not shared through a cooperative. A website is the one channel with no landlord.

For comparison, when we ran the same search on new residential brokerages in Sacramento County three weeks ago, 43 of 74 had no website. Commercial firms do better. Most of them are also older, so the gap is partly just time.

The listings problem

A commercial brokerage site has one job a residential site can hand to IDX: show what is available. There is no commercial MLS feed to lean on, so the inventory is whatever the firm builds itself or pipes in from Buildout, CREXi, RealNex or a LoopNet link. This is where the sample splits.

Nine sites show current inventory. Five built it into their own pages. One uses Buildout's plugin, one runs RealNex's map search with 33 properties on it, one pulls from CREXi, and one lists three properties on its own page with each one linking out to LoopNet. Two of the nine are thin: one carries two live offerings under three completed deals from 2023, and another shows one property for lease and "Sorry No Results Found" for sale.

Three tried, and the page shows nothing.

• One listings page promises current listings, "updated automatically." Below that line, where the listings should be, a visitor sees the browser's own error message: www.crexi.com refused to connect. That is what Chrome shows when the site inside a frame refuses to be framed. The for-lease page does the same.
• One reads "No current listings."
• One is still the website builder's template: two tiles headed "Project Name", each reading "This is your Project description."

Seven have no listings, and should not. They represent tenants, or sell advisory or finance work. One homepage says it outright: "Not Just Tenant First. Tenant Only." For these firms a listings page would be the wrong page. What replaces it is proof, and one of the seven does that better than anyone else in the sample (it is named below).

One is unclear: a gallery of dozens of properties across several states, as far away as Honolulu, with nothing to say which are available and which have closed. A tenant cannot use it and an owner cannot tell whether it is a track record or an inventory.

The last one is a "coming soon" page. It said the same thing when we checked it for a different article on September 2.

If you embed listings from any platform, open the page in a private browser window after every change, and again once a month. A frame that goes blank does not tell you. It tells your visitors.

The licence number

California does not leave this to taste. Business and Professions Code 10140.6 requires the licence identification number on "all solicitation materials intended to be the first point of contact with consumers," and the Department of Real Estate's regulation, 10 CCR 2773, names "Websites owned, controlled, and/or maintained by the soliciting real estate licensee" in that list. It applies to every broker and salesperson. There is no commercial exception.

Seven of the 21 homepages show a licence number. Six show the corporation's own number and one shows its broker's individual one. One more has its broker's number in the page's code, attached to a team profile, and nowhere a visitor can see it. The other thirteen show none that we could find, rendered or not.

It is not a small-firm problem. We ran the same check on the Sacramento pages of ten large and regional firms. Four of the ten showed a number. The fix, for everyone, is one line in the footer. Our California page has the rest of what the state asks for.

The details that tell a client whether anyone is home

Across the 21 local sites:

• A phone number you can tap: 9 of 21. Several print a number that a phone treats as plain text, including two that put it in large type at the very top of the page.
• A contact form: 8 of 21.
• A description search engines can show: 11 of 21.
• A preview image for shared links: 10 of 21.
• Structured data: 8 of 21.
• Exactly one headline: 8 of 21. Eight have none, five have more than one, and one homepage has twelve.
• An old copyright year: 7 show 2024 or earlier, the oldest 2017. One footer says 2035.
• A broken security certificate: one, which only loads over plain http.
• A desktop page shrunk onto a phone: one.
• Speed: a median of 0.66 seconds to deliver the homepage HTML, and 19 of 21 under a second. The slowest took 2.43 seconds, and the heaviest page was 1,059 kilobytes of HTML before a single image, on Wix.

The platforms are what you would expect: WordPress on 6, GoDaddy's builder on 4, Squarespace on 3, Wix on 2, HubSpot and Weebly on one each, and four with no signal. As with the residential sample, the tool did not decide the outcome. Two of the best sites below run on WordPress and Squarespace, and so do some of the worst.

How the big firms compare

The ten comparison pages were the Sacramento office pages of CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers, JLL, Newmark, Avison Young, Marcus & Millichap and Kidder Mathews, plus the homepages of Turton and TRI. They are tidier: nine of ten have exactly one headline, every one we could read has a search description, and none of those shows a stale year.

They are not faster. Their median was 0.59 seconds against the independents' 0.66, and their pages are heavier. And on the one thing the state actually requires, they do barely better: four of ten, against seven of 21.

A small commercial firm is not competing with a national one on budget. It is competing on whether its own site is finished, and that costs the same at every size.

Four that get it right

Named, because praise needs no caveat.

Northgate Commercial Real Estate, Sacramento. The most complete site in the sample. Licence number, current listings with sale or lease, city, type and agent filters, a "My Report" tool that lets a client collect properties, a phone number you can tap, a form, structured data and a preview image, all in 0.6 seconds.

Alive Commercial Real Estate, Granite Bay. Proof that a listings plugin works when it is wired properly. Its properties come from Buildout and appear on its own domain under its own navigation, with a "Subscribe to our listings" option and the licence number in the footer, alongside its Nevada number.

North Coast Commercial, Sacramento. Listings that lead with what an investor filters on: "MULTIFAMILY | 5.84% CAP | 9 UNITS | $1,699,000". It also keeps separate pages for space available for lease and for properties sold, and the licence number is on the homepage.

Cordano Commercial, Sacramento. The tenant rep version done right. No listings, because it represents restaurants, and in their place a leasing projects page that names twenty-two leases by tenant and location, most of them restaurants, next to a quote from an owner it placed. Add the licence number to the footer and it is complete.

What the four share is that somebody treated the site as part of the job, not as a brochure made once.

What we would build for a commercial brokerage

This is the part we sell, so read it as a specification you can hold anyone to, including us.

Listings on your own domain, as real pages. Every property gets its own address, so it can be shared, found by search engines and opened on a phone, pulled from the platform you already maintain rather than framed in from it. A frame can go blank without telling you. A page cannot.

For tenant reps, a deal ledger instead. The deals you have done, where, for whom if they allow it, and what a client said about it. That is what a tenant or an owner is actually checking.

The state's rules in the build checklist, so the licence number is in the footer of every page from day one, and the rest of the checks above pass by construction.

Something a flyer cannot do. We built a walkable office building to show what a property page can be when it is not a PDF: the commercial property explorer, a fictional Sacramento office building you can move through floor by floor. More on how we approach commercial sites is on the commercial real estate page.

And the price is out 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. Which one fits is worked through in what a brokerage website costs.

How we did this, so you can check it

The sample is every licensed corporation in the Department of Real Estate's licensee file of September 23, 2026 with a mailing address in Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado or Yolo county and Commercial, CRE, Industrial or Net Lease as a word in its name. That found 38, every one on Commercial or CRE. It is a sample of firms that call themselves commercial, so it misses commercial brokerages with other names, and it is the list anyone can reproduce from the state's own file.

For each firm we searched its name and city, then its officer's name, and confirmed a site was theirs by the firm name, the officer, the address or the licence number on the page. We then read every site ourselves, which is how three of the first-pass classifications were corrected: one "website" was a parked domain, and two were a property management company and a lending practice.

Each homepage was fetched as a desktop and a phone browser, then loaded in a real Chrome browser with JavaScript running to recheck the licence number and the listings. Every listings page was opened and read. Timings are the time to receive the HTML, not the time to a finished page, and they vary by hour. The ten comparison pages went through the same checks.

What we did not measure: accessibility, how the pages feel on a real phone on a real network, or whether the listings shown are accurate. Those are what a full audit covers.

If you run a commercial brokerage in the Sacramento region and want these checks run on your site, or built into the one you do not have yet, tell us about your brokerage. If you would rather see the price first, build your package in about two minutes.