1. Live inventory, not a PDF price list
The single biggest upgrade: every unit as a page of its own, with current status (available / reserved / sold), price, floor plan, orientation, and completion phase. When a buyer sees a unit they can actually still buy — and sees others turning to "reserved" — the website stops being a brochure and starts being a market.
A PDF price list emailed on request does the opposite: it adds friction, goes stale the day you export it, and hands your pricing to competitors with zero signal about who's reading it.
2. Self-service exploration
Buyers want to explore the way they think. That means clickable building and floor browsing (building → floor → unit), filters that match real criteria (bedrooms, floor, orientation, budget, completion date), and increasingly, search in plain language — typing "sunny two-bed under €450k ready by summer" and getting ranked matches.
Every step of self-service exploration is also demand data you can't get from a contact form.
3. More than one way to raise a hand
"Contact us" is the highest-commitment ask on the site, so it converts a sliver of visitors. Layer in lower-commitment actions: save a unit, subscribe to a price alert, take a match quiz, book a viewing slot. Each one captures a real lead with context — and each has its own audience at a different stage of readiness.
4. Trust signals
A new-build purchase is the largest transaction of a buyer's life with a company they may never have heard of. The trust section is not decoration: developer story and track record, delivered projects with photos, construction progress updates, clear legal identity in the footer, and a proper privacy policy. For international buyers, add the site in their language — a multilingual site is often the difference between an inquiry and a bounce.
5. Findability: Google and AI assistants
The technical basics are table stakes: fast on mobile, per-unit pages with clean titles and descriptions, structured data (schema.org), a sitemap, and one canonical domain. What's new is that buyers increasingly ask AI assistants — "new developments in [city] with 2-bedroom apartments under €300k" — and assistants read the same structured pages Google does. A site whose units are individual, well-described pages gets cited; a site that's one long image page doesn't exist to them.
6. Someone has to run it
The quiet killer of development websites is operational drag: every price change routed through an agency, every sold unit updated a week late, every content edit a ticket. Whatever you build, ensure the sales team can update inventory and content themselves, instantly. If the website reads from the same system your team uses to manage units — the way Habivo's builder works — staleness stops being possible.
Frequently asked questions
What should a new-development website include?
Live unit-level inventory with availability and prices, interactive floor-plan browsing, multiple lead-capture actions (saved units, price alerts, quizzes, viewings), trust content about the developer, and clean per-unit SEO.
Should developers publish prices on their website?
Transparent unit-level pricing consistently converts better: it qualifies buyers automatically, builds trust, and the behavioural data on priced units is far more useful than inquiries asking 'how much?'.
Does a development website need to be multilingual?
If any meaningful share of your buyers are international or investors, yes — browsing in their own language measurably lifts inquiries, and it's cheap to do with a platform that translates with a click.
See how Habivo does this
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