Websites for property management companies
Two audiences who want opposite things, and a body of advertising law that governs how you describe a home. Built so the listing pages do not create liability.
Best for residential property managers and letting agencies serving owners and tenants from one site, with listings syndicated from a management system.
A property management website serves two people who want nothing in common. An owner wants to know what you charge, what you do about arrears and whether you will protect their asset. A tenant wants to find a home and report a leak. Most sites in this sector are built for the tenant, because listings are the obvious content, and then wonder why owner enquiries are thin.
Listing descriptions are advertisements, and the law treats them that way
The federal Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to publish any advertisement for housing that states a preference, limitation or discrimination based on a protected class. The federal protected classes are race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, disability and familial status, and many states and cities add more, including source of income, age and marital status.
The rule that keeps copy safe is simple to state and easy to break: describe the property, not the type of person who should live there. Walk-in closets, two blocks from the park and off-street parking describe a property. Perfect for a young professional, ideal family home and quiet building, no children describe a tenant, and the last one is the kind of phrase that generates complaints.
Two traps are worth naming because they look innocent. Religious landmarks used as location references, such as two minutes from St Mary's, signal religion. And describing the existing residents of a building rather than the building itself does the same for several protected classes at once. Where listing copy is written by many hands, or imported from owners, this needs a review step rather than good intentions.
The feed decides whether the site survives
Listings come out of a management system, change daily, and are the content most likely to break. The integration is therefore the real build decision: how listings arrive, what happens when one is let, whether a removed listing leaves a dead page or redirects somewhere useful, and whether the photographs survive the trip. A beautiful listing template fed by a brittle import is a site that looks broken within a month.
Give the owner their own path
The owner side is where the margin is, and it needs its own entrance: what the management fee covers, how tenants are screened, what the vacancy process looks like, how statements and payments reach them, and what happens when rent is late. Most competitors answer none of this publicly, which makes it the cheapest advantage on the page.
What a build here actually includes
Every build is scoped to the practice, but on this kind of site these are the parts that are not optional.
- Separate owner and tenant journeys from the first screen, not a shared homepage
- A listings integration with a defined behaviour for let and removed properties, including what their URLs do afterwards
- A listing copy review step, since descriptions are advertisements under fair housing law
- An owner section covering fees, screening, arrears and reporting in plain terms
- A maintenance request route that does not require a login nobody remembers
- Area pages that describe places rather than the people who live in them
What we keep seeing go wrong
None of these are hypothetical. They are the things that turn up again and again on sites in this vertical, and most of them are cheap to avoid and expensive to undo.
- Listing copy describing the ideal tenant rather than the property
- Religious or demographic landmarks used as location references
- Let properties left as dead pages, which accumulate until the site is mostly out of date
- An owner proposition buried under a tenant-first homepage
- A portal login used as the only maintenance route
- Importing owner-written descriptions straight to the page with no review
Questions we get asked first
- What can we not say in a listing description?
- Anything stating a preference, limitation or discrimination based on a protected class. In practice that means describing the property rather than the person: no perfect for families, no ideal for young professionals, no references to religious landmarks, and nothing describing the current residents.
- Are listing descriptions really advertising?
- Yes. The Fair Housing Act applies to the publication of advertisements for housing, and an online listing is one. The same applies to the social posts that promote it.
- How should let properties be handled?
- Decide before launch. Either keep the page with a clear let status and a route to similar properties, or redirect it. What fails is leaving dead pages behind, which is what most systems do by default.
- Why is our owner enquiry volume low?
- Usually because the site is built for tenants. Owners need their own entrance, their own content about fees, screening and arrears, and their own enquiry route. Most competitors publish none of it.
- Can one site serve several branches?
- Yes, with a real page per branch and a listings feed filtered to it. Separate sites per branch split the search authority and multiply the maintenance.
