These are the terms that come up most often when planning a website, platform, or app with a real estate software development team. New to the topic? Start with our complete real estate software development guide.
Real estate software terms, A to Z
- Admin dashboard
- A private screen where staff manage listings, leads, users, and reports in one place. See admin dashboard development.
- Agent roster
- The list of agents and their profiles on a real estate website, often with each agent’s listings and contact details.
- AI-powered search
- Property search that understands natural language, such as “3-bedroom homes near good schools,” instead of only fixed filters. See AI-powered real estate solutions.
- API
- Application programming interface: a defined way for two systems to exchange data, such as a website sending leads to a CRM.
- Brokerage
- A licensed real estate business that employs or sponsors agents.
- CMA
- Comparative market analysis: an estimate of a property’s value based on recent comparable sales, often offered as a home valuation tool on real estate websites.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google’s measurements of real-world page speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, used as signals in search rankings.
- CRM
- Customer relationship management: software that stores contacts, leads, and deals and tracks every interaction with them. See real estate CRM development.
- Custom software
- Software designed and built for one business’s needs, rather than a ready-made product used by many businesses.
- Digital marketing
- Promoting a business online through search ads, social media, email, content, and SEO. See real estate digital marketing.
- Drip campaign
- A series of automated emails or texts sent to a lead over time.
- Headless CMS
- A content system that stores content separately from the website design, so the same content can appear on a website, an app, or elsewhere.
- Lead capture
- Forms and tools on a website that collect a visitor’s contact details, such as valuation or showing requests.
- Lead routing
- Rules that assign each new lead to the right agent or team automatically, by area, listing, language, or availability. See real estate workflow automation.
- Lead scoring
- Ranking leads by how likely they are to act, based on their activity and details.
- Listing feed
- A regular transfer of listing data from an MLS or another source into a website or platform.
- Listing platform
- Software for publishing, searching, and managing property listings, such as a portal or marketplace. See listing platform development.
- Map search
- Property search that shows listings as pins on an interactive map, often with draw-to-search areas.
- Marketplace
- A platform where many parties, such as buyers, sellers, and brokers, list, search, and connect.
- MLS
- Multiple listing service: a shared database of property listings created and used by real estate professionals in a market.
- MVP
- Minimum viable product: the first, focused version of a product with only the core features needed to launch and learn.
- Off-the-shelf software
- Ready-made software sold to many businesses, usually by subscription.
- PPC
- Pay-per-click advertising: ads, such as Google search ads, where you pay each time someone clicks.
- Property management software
- Tools for managing rental properties, including tenants, leases, maintenance requests, and owner reporting.
- PropTech
- Short for property technology: software and digital products built for the real estate industry.
- RESO Web API
- The real estate industry’s modern standard for sharing listing data between MLSs and software.
- Responsive design
- A website layout that adapts to phones, tablets, and desktops.
- Retargeting
- Showing ads to people who have already visited your website, to bring them back. Platforms limit how this works for housing ads.
- Saved search alerts
- Emails or notifications that tell a buyer when new listings match their saved search.
- Schema markup
- Code that describes a page’s content to search engines, such as a business, a service, or FAQs.
- SEO
- Search engine optimization: improving a website so it ranks higher for relevant searches. See real estate SEO services.
- Social media marketing
- Building an audience and generating leads through posts, video, and ads on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. See real estate social media marketing.
- Special Ad Category
- Meta’s required setting for housing, credit, and employment ads, which limits targeting by age, gender, and ZIP code.
- Speed to lead
- How quickly a business responds to a new inquiry. Faster first responses generally lead to more conversations.
- Tenant portal
- A secure area where tenants pay rent, submit requests, and see updates.
- Transaction management
- Tracking the documents, tasks, and deadlines of a deal from offer to closing.
- Webhook
- An automatic message one system sends to another when something happens, such as a new lead arriving.
- White-label
- Software rebranded and sold under another company’s name.
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