What a REALTOR® website actually costs in Canada.

01The four ways REALTORS® end up with a website

• Build it yourself on a website builder — roughly $30 to $60 a month. Genuinely fine for a brochure site. The wall you hit is listings: most builders cannot connect to CREA's DDF®, so you either paste properties in by hand or you do without them.
• A template from a real estate platform — commonly $50 to $150 a month, often with a setup fee. Listings work. The trade is that your site looks like every other site on that platform, and you are usually renting the design rather than owning anything.
• A custom build from a web designer — $3,000 to $10,000 up front, sometimes more. You get something distinctive. Then you own a WordPress site that needs hosting, updates, security and a DDF® connection nobody has agreed to look after, which is where these often go quiet after a year.
• A managed real estate platform — a build fee plus a monthly. Listings, hosting, updates, security and support are one arrangement. That is what PropertyConnector is: $1,497 once, then $199/mo on annual billing.

None of these is wrong. They fail in different places, and the failure is almost always the running costs rather than the build.

02The costs that do not appear in the quote

• Hosting — $10 to $50 a month for anything decent, more if you want it in Canada.
• The DDF® connection — free from CREA, but somebody has to build and maintain the sync. When the feed changes, something has to change with it.
• Updates and security — WordPress and its plugins need patching. Unpatched real estate sites get compromised, and a site serving malware is worse than no site.
• Backups that have been tested — an untested backup is a hope, not a backup.
• Content — the single biggest hidden cost. A beautiful empty site does nothing. Someone has to write the pages.
• Your own time — the one nobody prices. An hour a week keeping a site alive is fifty hours a year you did not spend with clients.

03What actually moves the number

• Whether you are starting fresh or moving a site across. Carrying content and search rankings over properly is real work, and skipping it is how a rebuild loses the traffic the old site had.
• How much of your content is ready. A bio, headshots and a clear idea of your pages move a build along quickly.
• Branding. Using what you have, or starting from nothing.
• How many agents are on the site. A solo REALTOR® and a small team are different jobs.
• Anything that has to connect to something else — a CRM, a booking tool, a mailing list you already use.

04A fair way to compare

• Add three years of running costs to the build price, then divide by thirty-six. That is the number to compare, because a $6,000 build with no maintenance arrangement is not cheaper than a managed monthly — it is the same money with the maintenance quietly moved onto you.
• Then ask the question that actually decides it: when something breaks on a Saturday, who fixes it? If the answer is you, price your Saturday.

Our own numbers are on the pricing page, in full, including what is extra.