Honest answer: a real estate website in India costs anywhere from ₹20,000 (template) to ₹8,00,000+ (custom build with lead management). The price you should pay depends on one question: does the website need to generate business, or just exist? Here's the full breakdown.
We build real estate websites for a living, so this guide names real prices — including ours. By the end you'll know which bracket you're in, what actually moves a quote, and the one feature worth paying extra for.
No "request a quote to find out" games. Numbers first.
§1The three price brackets (and who each is for)
Every quote you'll receive falls into one of three brackets. They're not quality tiers — they're answers to different problems. Match the bracket to the job the site has to do, not to your budget's ego.
Notice the overlap: ₹1.5L buys either the top of semi-custom or the bottom of custom. That overlap is where most bad decisions happen — same money, very different machines. The next section is how to tell them apart.
§2What actually drives the cost up
Four things separate a ₹40k site from a ₹4L one. Design isn't one of them — a template can look gorgeous. These are.
Lead management: inside vs bolted on
A template site emails you each enquiry. A custom build captures it, tags the source campaign, scores it, and queues the follow-up. That difference is invisible in a demo and enormous in a quarter — when you're paying ₹900 per site visit on ads, every enquiry that dies in an inbox is money you already spent.
Listing search (the IDX myth)
US guides treat "IDX integration" like a checkbox. Ignore them: India has no MLS, so there's no central listing database your site can plug into. Listing search here — your inventory, your filters, your map — is custom engineering, built from scratch. It's the single biggest line item on a portal-style build, and it's honest cost, not padding.
Content & SEO readiness
A site built to rank ships ranking-ready: clean URLs, location pages, schema markup, and a CMS your team can publish from without calling a developer. Retro-fitting that onto a template usually costs more than building it in. We've quoted both directions — the rescue is always pricier.
Speed (Core Web Vitals)
Buyers bounce at 3 seconds. Plugin-heavy sites routinely take 5–8 seconds on Indian mobile networks, which means the ad click you paid for leaves before the page paints. Speed is engineered in at build time — it's rarely optimised in later.
Building or rebuilding?
We quote website projects with a fixed price and a written scope — in 48 hours.
§3The math demo: when ₹4L beats ₹40k
Sticker price is the wrong comparison. Cost per enquiry is the right one. Run the numbers on the same 2,000 monthly visits:
Those conversion rates come from our own builds — a slow template converting 0.4% and a fast custom site converting 1.2% are typical, not best-case. Your numbers will vary with traffic quality.
One honest caveat: if your site gets under 500 visits a month and you don't run ads, this math doesn't apply yet. Buy the template, spend the difference on getting visitors, and rebuild when traffic justifies it.
§4Ongoing costs nobody mentions
The quote is never the whole bill. Budget for three more lines:
- Hosting: ₹500–₹5,000 a month depending on stack and traffic. Custom builds often sit at the lower end — cleaner code needs less server.
- Maintenance: ₹5,000–₹20,000 a month for updates, backups and fixes. Template sites need it most — that's where plugin breakage lives.
- Content: if you want the site to rank, someone has to write. Plan ₹15,000+ a month, or accept that SEO stays parked.
And a word on the "free website" offers from portals and platforms — the part of this market almost nobody writes down:
If the website is free, the enquiries are the product — and they're not only yours.
You usually don't own the domain, you can't export your data cleanly, and when you leave, the SEO history stays with them. You start again from zero. Free is the most expensive bracket on this page.
§5The verdict
Short answer: agents getting started → take the template at ₹20–80k and spend the savings on ads. Brokerages → semi-custom at ₹1–2.5L. Builders and brokerages that live on enquiries → custom at ₹1.5L+, and make lead management non-negotiable.
Whichever bracket you pick, get the quote in writing with a feature list attached. A price without a scope isn't a price — it's an opening offer.