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01

Built for Real Estate

Buyers find the house on Zillow. They pick the agent somewhere else.

We build the real-estate web: condo and listing search people actually finish, agent and brokerage sites that turn a name search into a call, and sites for builders selling their own homes without an agent brand behind them. We also build portfolio dashboards for investors who have outgrown the spreadsheet. Cincinnati Condo Connection is ours, so is Nikki Hayden's seller site, and so is Gunning Homes. If you manage rental property, that's a different page and it's linked below.

cincinnaticondoconnection.com

Our work · Cincinnati Condo Connection, built by Upforge

Plates of forged steel fitted together along glowing seams, like the listings, search and inquiry pages real estate web design joins up
02Sound familiar?

Why the search ends somewhere that isn't your site

43%

of buyers start the entire process by looking at properties online

NAR's 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found every recent buyer used the internet in their search, 43% took looking at properties online as the very first step, and 51% found the home they bought that way. The first impression is a search result, not a handshake. (National Association of REALTORS®, 2024)

69%

of home buyers searched on a phone or a tablet

More than two thirds of buyers relied on a mobile or tablet device, per the same NAR profile. So a slow, heavy listing search on a phone is the main experience, not the edge case. Photography-heavy real-estate sites are the ones most likely to be slow. (National Association of REALTORS®, 2024)

Borrowed

Your whole presence is borrowed from the portal you list on

Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin are where the search starts, and there's no sense pretending otherwise. The problem is the step after: someone looks you up by name and lands on a profile page the portal owns and designs, sitting next to whichever agents are paying for that area. It's a brochure you don't control, on a site built to keep the visitor.

03The shift

The same real estate business. A different machine.

Shift 01

Today

Your listings live on a portal, and so does your brand

With Upforge

A site of your own that the name search lands on

Shift 02

Today

A condo search that quits after the third filter

With Upforge

Search people finish, filtered by building, neighborhood, and price

Shift 03

Today

Holdings tracked across a folder of spreadsheets

With Upforge

One dashboard for performance, occupancy, and operations

04What we build

Built for how real estate actually works.

01

Condo & Listing Search People Finish

If your listing search is an embedded widget, it probably looks nothing like the rest of the page and gives up the moment someone wants something specific. We build search as a real part of the site: filter by building, by neighborhood, by price and beds, save a search, come back to it. Cincinnati Condo Connection is the version we run for the Cincinnati condo market. It covers every building and every neighborhood, so a buyer who knows the tower they want gets there in one step instead of scrolling a grid. Where an MLS or IDX feed is available, we pull from it so the inventory stays current without anyone retyping it.

Learn more about Condo & Listing Search People Finish
02

Agent, Team, and Brokerage Sites

A buyer or seller who has your name is the warmest traffic in this business, and a portal profile page is a bad place to land them. We build agent and team sites that answer what they're actually asking: who is this person, what have they sold, and what happens if I call? For a seller-focused agent that means a valuation path, a listing process laid out plainly, and proof from the neighborhoods they work; sell.nikkihaydenrealtor.com is built exactly that way. For a brokerage it means agent profiles that rank, market and neighborhood pages, and recruiting content that doesn't read like a job board.

Learn more about Agent, Team, and Brokerage Sites
03

Builder and New-Construction Sites

A builder selling its own homes is competing for the same searches as every agent in the market, without any of the infrastructure they rely on: no MLS feed, no portal profile, no brokerage name. What you have instead is the one thing they don't: the actual inventory, the floor plans, the lots, and the finish options. We build that into a browsable, filterable inventory with a page per plan and per community, so a buyer searching for a house in your area can find yours and understand it without calling anyone first.

Learn more about Builder and New-Construction Sites
04

Investor & Portfolio Dashboards

Once someone holds more than a handful of properties, the reporting lives in spreadsheets, a bank login, and somebody's memory. We build the dashboard that replaces it: holdings, performance, and operations in one place, with the roll-ups an owner actually asks for. The Executive Portfolio Command Center is exactly that: portfolio software built for a real-estate executive and private to their organization. The answer to "how is the portfolio doing" takes a glance instead of an afternoon of exports.

Learn more about Investor & Portfolio Dashboards
Free real estate audit

Want to know what your current setup is costing you?

The free audit checks your website the way your real estate customers experience it (speed, mobile, accessibility, and search visibility) and puts what's worth fixing in writing. It's automated and free, and the report is specific about what it finds.

06What changes

How the machine removes each problem.

01

A presence the portals don't own

The name search that follows a listing lands on a site you control, with your design, your proof, and your inquiry form, instead of a profile page sitting beside whichever agents are paying for that area.

02

Listing search people actually get through

People filter by building, neighborhood, price, and beds without getting handed off to a widget that looks like a different website. Fewer searches get abandoned, and more of them reach a detail page.

03

Fast on the device most of the searching happens on

Photography, maps, and embeds are what make real-estate sites slow, and mobile is where most of the audience is. So performance is a build requirement here from the start, not something cleaned up after launch.

04

Holdings and performance without the spreadsheet drawer

For investors and executives, the portfolio view replaces exports and bank logins. Acquisitions, occupancy, cash flow, and per-property detail live in one system you own.

Real Estate FAQs

Common Questions From Real Estate

Probably not. We have two pages that fit better, and we keep them apart on purpose. If you need leasing websites and marketing for your communities (a site per property, vanity domains, tour and application flows), that's property management websites. If you need the software (a resident portal, rent collection, maintenance workflows, replacing a per-unit platform), that's property management platforms. This page is for brokerages, agent teams, individual realtors, and real-estate investors.

This one, if your problem is getting found by buyers. A builder selling direct is fighting for the same searches as every agent in the market without an MLS feed, a portal profile, or a brokerage name behind it, and that's a real-estate marketing problem rather than a construction one. Gunning Homes is exactly that build. If you need a site about the building work itself (the crews, the process, past projects, and getting shortlisted for a job), start on our architecture, engineering, and construction page instead. Plenty of builders end up wanting a bit of both, and we'll tell you which one is doing the heavy lifting for you.

Yes, and we build it as part of the site rather than dropping in a widget that looks like it came from somewhere else. Where your MLS or IDX vendor exposes a feed, we pull from it so inventory and status stay current on their own. Where a feed isn't available or the rules where you operate restrict it, we build search over the inventory you can publish and link out for the rest. Either way the filtering, the map, and the detail pages are yours to design. See our application development approach.

Scope and who it has to serve. An agent or team site has one job: convert the person who already has your name into a call, so it leans on proof, process, and a fast path to reach you. A brokerage site carries the whole roster: agent profiles that rank on their own names, market and neighborhood pages, listing search across the office, and usually recruiting. They share a foundation, and a brokerage site is roughly an agent site multiplied by the number of people it has to represent well.

Both. sell.nikkihaydenrealtor.com is a single agent's site, built around sellers: what a listing appointment covers, what the process looks like, and a straightforward way to start one. Individual agents get the same build quality as a brokerage, at a scope that matches. See our portfolio for more.

Not on inventory, and we don't pretend otherwise. That fight is over. What your site wins is the second search. Someone sees a listing, decides they like the agent, and looks you up by name. That's the highest-intent search in real estate, and right now it usually lands on a profile page the portal designed and controls. Owning that moment is the realistic goal, and it's a very good one.

Yes. The Executive Portfolio Command Center is exactly that: portfolio management software built for a real-estate executive, pulling holdings, performance, and operations into one dashboard instead of a drawer of spreadsheets. VSF Consulting built the AI prototype; we brought it to production. The application is private, but the VSF case study shows the work. See our application development page.

A real estate website costs $4,000 to $15,000, depending on how much content, market coverage, and listing search is in scope. An individual agent or small team site costs less than a brokerage site with agent profiles, neighborhood pages, and search across the roster. Investor dashboards and portfolio software are scoped as custom applications rather than sites. We lay out the line items before you commit. See our web development services.

A real estate website takes 2 to 8 weeks. An agent or team site is quicker than a brokerage site with listing search, agent profiles, and neighborhood coverage. Portfolio software is longer and phased, so you can use early modules while the rest is still in development. Learn more about our build process.

That's most of the point. The majority of home search happens on a phone, and listing search is the easiest thing in this industry to make slow. Big photography, maps, and heavy third-party embeds all pull the same direction. We build with Next.js, serve images in modern formats, and treat mobile performance as a build requirement rather than a cleanup pass. See our performance optimization work.

We offer ongoing maintenance and support shaped around how this business actually moves: new neighborhood and market pages as you expand, agent profiles added and removed as the roster changes, sold and testimonial content kept current, and search and inquiry reporting so you can see which pages are producing calls. You own your frontend and can bring maintenance in-house whenever you choose.

Real Estate: key facts (with sources)

  • 43% of buyers start the entire process by looking at properties online (source: National Association of REALTORS®, 2024)
  • 69% of home buyers searched on a phone or a tablet (source: National Association of REALTORS®, 2024)

Sources

Each source opened and verified · last checked
  1. · All recent home buyers used the internet in their home search: 43% took looking at properties online as their very first step, and 51% found the home they ultimately purchased through an online search (NAR 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers).
  2. · 69% of home buyers relied on a mobile or tablet device in their home search, per NAR's 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers.

Your real estate business, running on your terms.

Tell us where the hours are going, and we’ll show you what a system built for your operation looks like, with a fixed price before any work starts.