A real estate brokerage website costs anywhere from about $16 a month on a general website builder to $100,000 or more for a fully custom build. Most new brokerages land in one of three brackets: an all-in-one real estate platform at roughly $300 to $1,500 a month, a design studio template at roughly $1,500 to $8,500 up front plus a small monthly charge, or a custom build from a studio.
Then there is the line nobody quotes you. If you want MLS listings on the site, you pay the IDX software provider, and separately your MLS may charge you for its own data. Documented examples of that second charge range from nothing at all to about $400 a month, with one-time setup as high as $1,200, and it is entirely dependent on which MLS you belong to.
Worth knowing before any of it: in its 2024 Member Profile, NAR reported that the median REALTOR spent $90 a year maintaining a website, up from $50 in 2021. Most people in this industry are spending almost nothing. That does not make the platforms overpriced, but it should make you ask hard what you are buying.
One note on sourcing, because it matters here. Five of the biggest platforms in this category publish no pricing at all and require a sales call. Everything below is labeled either published (from the vendor's own current pricing page) or reported (reconstructed from review sites and user accounts).
Real estate brokerage website costs at a glance
General builder (Wix, Squarespace)
Design studio template
All-in-one platform
Custom studio build
MLS data access
| Option | Up front | Ongoing | Listings included? |
|---|---|---|---|
| General builder (Wix, Squarespace) | None | $16 to $159 per month | No, plugin only, and Squarespace effectively not at all |
| Design studio template | $1,499 to $8,500 | About $99 per month | Usually yes, basic |
| All-in-one platform | $0 to $2,000 | $300 to $1,500+ per month | Yes, bundled |
| Custom studio build | $2,500 to $100,000+ | Care plan | Built to your MLS's rules |
| MLS data access | $0 to $1,200 | $0 to $400 per month | This IS the listings |
The last row is the one that breaks budgets, so it gets its own section below.
All-in-one real estate platforms
These bundle a website, a CRM, and lead tools into one subscription. They are the default for new brokerages and the most expensive way to own a website, because you are renting three products and only needed one.
Three publish real pricing:
- Sierra Interactive: $299.95 to $724.95 per month across its tiers, with setup waived on annual billing or $500 on monthly. IDX, hosting, and CRM bundled.
- Real Geeks: $299 to $399 per month at the entry tier, up to $1,599 to $1,799 at the top, on a 6 or 12 month commitment. IDX bundled.
- Placester: $59 per month for a solo agent up to $479 to $599 for broker plans. Notably, it is the only one that line-items listings separately, at $25 per month per MLS.
Five do not publish anything. BoomTown, Lofty (formerly Chime), Ylopo, kvCORE (now BoldTrail), and CINC all require a demo call. Third-party reviewers and user reports put them roughly between $449 and $1,500 per month at the low end, with setup between $500 and $3,000 and some tiers requiring separate ad spend on top. Treat every one of those numbers as an estimate, because none of it is vendor-confirmed.
The honest read on this bracket: at $500 a month you are spending $6,000 a year and $18,000 over three years, and you own nothing at the end. That is fine if you actively use the CRM and the lead routing. If you signed up for a website and quietly ignore the rest, it is the most expensive website you could have bought.
Design studios and custom builds
Agent Image publishes the clearest pricing in this segment: roughly $1,499 to $2,100 setup for its template tier, $2,500 to $8,500 for semi-custom, and $7,500 to well over $100,000 for full custom work, all with a flat $99 per month covering hosting, support, and basic IDX. CRM, SEO, and advertising are separate.
Luxury Presence publishes nothing. Reconstructed reports put entry around $2,500 setup plus a few hundred a month, with higher tiers running $4,500 to $5,500 setup and $1,500 to $2,500 monthly when SEO is included. One user reported an 18-month contract totaling $48,500. Take all of that as directional.
We looked at a third well-known studio and could not report it honestly: the available sources put its pricing at both $39 to $59 per month and $9,000 to $15,000 per project, which almost certainly describes two different products, and we are not going to guess which applies to you.
This bracket is where design quality actually varies most. At the top you get work that looks like nobody else's. At the bottom you get a template with your logo on it, sold at a custom price.
DIY builders
Wix runs $17 to $159 per month and Squarespace $16 to $99, both on annual billing. For a brokerage, the catch is listings. Neither supports IDX natively. Wix needs a third-party plugin, commonly iHomefinder, which starts around $150 per month and can cost more than the site it plugs into. Squarespace has no comparable real estate plugin ecosystem, so treat it as unsupported for listings without custom development.
Where this bracket genuinely works: you are opening in weeks, you have no MLS access sorted yet, and you need a credible page that says who you are and how to reach you. That is a real use case and there is no shame in it.
The charges nobody puts in the quote
This is the section that saves you money, and it is the one thing every "brokerage website cost" article leaves out.
Showing MLS listings involves two separate bills. First the IDX software: IDX Broker runs $60 to $149 per month, Showcase IDX $94.95 to $124.95, iHomefinder $160 to $500 depending on plan, Realtyna $99 per month plus a setup charge between $850 and $10,000 depending on which MLS you are pulling from.
Second, and this is the surprise, your MLS may charge you for its own data. Both IDX Broker and Showcase IDX disclose that some MLSs levy pass-through charges on top of the subscription. Showcase IDX puts that range at $0 to $33 per month. But the MLSs themselves vary far more than that. Five published examples:
CRMLS (California)
Park City (Utah)
Greater Northwoods (WI/MI)
RANW (Wisconsin)
IRMLS (Indiana)
| MLS | Data access | One-time |
|---|---|---|
| CRMLS (California) | Two feeds at no charge, third $85/mo via Trestle | None for the first two |
| Park City (Utah) | $12/mo IDX feed | $500 new vendor setup |
| Greater Northwoods (WI/MI) | No MLS charge for personal sites | $500 for other categories |
| RANW (Wisconsin) | $10 to $30/mo by delivery method | $50 to $250 |
| IRMLS (Indiana) | $250/yr RETS, or $1,000 to $2,000/yr for API | $250 |
That spans roughly nothing to $400 a month, and up to $1,200 up front. No article can tell you your number, including this one. Call your MLS before you budget, and ask specifically about the data feed, not just membership.
The rest of the stack competes for the same money. NAR national dues are $156 a year plus a $45 assessment for 2026, which is one of the very few genuinely national numbers in this whole subject. State and local association dues stack on top and vary widely: one documented 2026 example totaled $906 including NAR. Errors and omissions coverage averages somewhere around $665 to $815 a year per reporting insurers, varying by state, limits, and claims history.
None of that is website spending, but all of it lands in the same month as your website decision, which is exactly why the $900 entry point below exists.
What actually drives the price
Five things move the number more than anything else:
- Whether you are renting or buying. A subscription never ends. A build is a larger number once, then a small maintenance line. Over three years those cross, usually somewhere around month 18.
- Custom design versus a theme. Designing from a blank page costs more than recoloring a layout, and a seller can feel the difference in about two seconds.
- Listings. IDX software plus MLS data access is a recurring cost that has nothing to do with your website's design. Decide whether you need it (see below) before you let it set your budget.
- Speed and build quality. A site that loads in under half a second is engineered, not purchased. That matters most on a phone with one bar, which is where your buyers will open it.
- What happens after launch. Hosting, security, backups, updates, and a human who answers. Bundled on platforms, a care plan on custom builds.
Notably absent from that list: compliance. Building to your state's advertising rules is about knowing them, not about spend. We covered exactly what those require in our brokerage website requirements guide.
What we charge at Flare Built
We publish our ranges. A Launch build, a sharp single-page brokerage presence, starts at $900 and is typically live in about 48 hours. A Signature build, five to eight bespoke pages with a CMS you can edit yourself, starts at $4,500. Custom platforms and web apps start at $15,000. Every price is a range because scope is a conversation.
After launch, Flare Care covers hosting, security, updates, and priority support, starting at $95 a month.
Two things make this different from the brackets above. Speed: the site is live before you open, not eight weeks after. And ownership: it is a build, not a rental, so year two costs you a care plan rather than another $6,000.
Where we are not the right fit: if you want the CRM, the dialer, the lead routing and the ad management in one bundle with one bill, an all-in-one platform is genuinely the better buy, and we will say so on the call.
The question that matters more than the invoice
Before you spend anything on listing search, look at where buyers actually search.
An independent analysis of category traffic found the top 10 home-search sites capture about 98% of it, with Zillow alone at 44%, Realtor.com at 19%, and Redfin at 15%. Brokerage-owned portals came in at 1.5% for RE/MAX and 1.3% for Compass, with Coldwell Banker, Century 21, Keller Williams, and eXp each under 1%. If national brands with enormous marketing budgets cannot pull search traffic away from the portals, your new brokerage's IDX search will not either.
Two honest caveats, because this is the weakest evidence in the whole subject. That analysis is from 2023, so it is aging. And nobody has published an independent comparison of lead conversion between brokerage sites and portals. The surveys that exist disagree with each other in ways that track their sponsors: NAR found 46% of buyers started by looking at properties online versus 20% who contacted an agent first, while Zillow's own research found 52% contacted an agent first. An association and a portal, reaching opposite conclusions. Draw your own inference.
What that leaves is a reasonable position rather than a proven one. Your website is unlikely to win buyer discovery, because that fight is already over. What it does is convert the people who arrive with your name already in their head: the referral, the past client, the seller deciding whether you look like a real brokerage, and the agent deciding whether to join you. Those visitors do not need a listing search. They need to see, in about ten seconds, that you are established and worth calling.
Spend accordingly. A site that does that job well costs far less than the platform subscription you were about to sign, and the difference covers your MLS dues for a year.
If you want a real number instead of a range, build your package in about two minutes, or tell us about your brokerage and we will scope it on a short call.