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Best Luxury Real Estate Branding Websites
Overall Rating
4.3
Luxury Presence develops luxury branded real estate websites with options for PPC campaigns, social media marketing, and SEO packages. They have over 7500 clients, including many high-profile agents like Joyce Rey, Jade Mills, and Heather Goldin.
In this Luxury Presence review, we cover everything you need to know before making a decision. This includes pros, cons, pricing, website examples, video review, and case studies.
We include them among our Top 10 Real Estate Website Design Companies. That said, it’s important to read who should and shouldn’t hire Luxury Presence to build a luxury branded site.
Quick Review
Luxury Presence builds some of the most beautiful and well-branded luxury real estate websites.
If that’s your primary need and you can afford their pricing, absolutely consider hiring them. That’s especially true for ultra luxury real estate agents.
Like Agent Image, they may not be the best match if you value PPC lead generation. In that case, you must sacrifice aesthetics by choosing Sierra Interactive or BoomTown.
Luxury Presence is generally poor at SEO and won’t generate significant traffic unless you already have an extremely well established brand. They lack true SEO or lead generation experts.
If you value organic SEO lead generation, consider InboundREM. We provide the only option for expertly combining luxury branding with SEO potential.
Now let’s take a deep dive into our Luxury Presence review.
Luxury Presence Pros
1. Beautiful and Well-Branded Design
Luxury Presence websites combine gorgeous aesthetics with a strong degree of user functionality. They typically include stunning homepage video that’s sure to impress high-profile clients.
2. Excellent Reputation
Over 20 of the Top 100 WSJ Agents trust Luxury Presence with their website. That includes some of the biggest names in luxury and ultra-luxury real estate.
What’s also impressive is their ability to exceed the expectations of high-profile agents. Typically, ultra-luxury real estate clients won’t be convinced to contact agents based on a website alone. However, Luxury Presence has managed to create sites that do just that.
“Luxury Presence was the #1 reason for my record-breaking year. My clients are always telling me that they found me from my website. It’s very important that you’re out there and can be seen. They know real estate, and they know what our audience wants. I couldn’t ask for more.”
3. Customer Service
For the most part, clients that review Luxury Presence have very positive things to say about the onboarding process, customer service communication, and sales team.
For more information, check out our Client Testimonials section.
Luxury Presence Cons
1. Expensive Pricing
As you might expect, Luxury Presence pricing is not cheap. They also tend to be secretive about their current pricing plans.
After InboundREM rolled our BrandMaster website platform with SEO capabilities, I reached out to see how much it would cost to build a similar site with a comparable SEO package.
For an 18-month contract, they quoted $48,500. That averages out to over $4000 per month.
I’m certain Luxury Presence pricing has increased in the meantime. Additionally, custom luxury branded websites often require additional work to perfect, which would result in an even higher cost.
Of course, that pricing won’t be an issue if you deal with ultra-luxury real estate. For more information, check our Luxury Presence Pricing section.
2. PPC Lead Generation
As mentioned, it’s unlikely that luxury real estate agents rely heavily on Google Ads or Facebook marketing. In most cases, referrals will be far and away the most important lead generation source.
However, inexperienced luxury agents sometimes need to boost their client pool through PPC strategies. In this case, Luxury Presence may not be the best option.
Of the few case studies about Facebook Marketing campaigns, one highlights how they generated 132 leads within a 42 day campaign. It seems that none of these leads were ultimately converted.
Another case study highlighted 144 seller leads over 98 days which resulted in 2 converted leads overall. That’s not bad considering that luxury clients don’t typically use Facebook to find properties.
That said, Luxury Presence currently has over 7500 clients. If these are their most successful campaigns, it’s likely that the overwhelming majority of their PPC ads are ultimately ineffective.
Currently, 2 agents have left comments on this article echoing our conclusions.
3. SEO Potential
While Luxury Presence claims to have SEO capabilities, there is little proof of expertise or results. In fact, some clients have experienced huge drops in traffic.
Joyce Rey formerly had about 1500 monthly visitors, which has since dropped to around 500. Two of the highest performing keywords are agent names. In other words, much of the remaining traffic comes from Joyce’s excellent reputation rather than Luxury Presence’s SEO power.
Luxury Presence SEO Case Study
The main Luxury Presence SEO success story is Noble Black, a Manhattan real estate brokerage. Let’s take a closer look at this Luxury Presence website.
The website generates about 150 visitors per month. It’s been that way for the last year, actually losing some traffic and keywords over time.
If we take a closer look, we can see that the vast majority of that traffic is based on keywords that direct to the Noble Black homepage.
On Luxury Presence’s website, they mention that Noble Black ranks on the first page of Google for over 30 keywords related to Manhattan real estate. That remains true.
However, only 3 of those keywords generate more than 10 visitors per month. One of those three is “Noble Black”, which generates traffic because the brokerage has built a name for itself, not because Luxury Presence did anything special.
Still, it is impressive to rank #1 for the powerful keyword “manhattan real estate agent”. It also happened within a year, which is doubly impressive. So let’s take a closer look at how that happened.
Of the 60+ blog articles and landing pages, only one page drives more than 10 visitors per month besides the homepage.
The reason is that the homepage has a strong backlink profile. They’ve snatched backlinks from lots of authoritative websites, which is impressive.
It’s important to understand that the value of a backlink used to be primarily domain authority. In other words, that’s how big and popular the backlinking website is.
Currently, backlinks are valuable if they have lots of user interaction, meaning traffic and on-page clicks. If we sort the homepage backlinks according to traffic, we see that 3 of the 5 best backlinks are authoritative, well-trafficked articles about the best real estate slogans.
In other words, an SEO writer for a popular real estate blog included Noble Black on their list of great slogans. Then two other writers on popular blogs reused that content for their own blogs.
I originally stated that, “This SEO success story is the ancillary result of Luxury Presence catering to high profile clients that naturally generate backlinks through their excellent branding.”
Malte Kramer, the CEO, has since reached out and stated that they achieved this success through an SEO strategy that included backlinking.
It’s not clear which of the above backlinks were attained organically or through backlinking efforts.
In any case, I would not say that Luxury Presence is an SEO-focused company. I’m open to revising that statement based on further evidence. But a huge focus on SEO wouldn’t cater to the mainstream values of luxury agents. Branding websites are more important.
That said, it is possible to blend luxury branding sites with results-driven SEO capabilities, which you can read more about here.
SEO-Focused Luxury Branding Sites
It’s difficult to build luxury real estate websites that generate significant organic traffic. SEO website design and luxury branding design are at odds with each other.
Luxury real estate websites should be clean and sleek, but SEO websites require lots of options for user interaction. Luxury sites use elegant fonts, but SEO sites use more plain, readable fonts.
There are two other real estate website builders that create branding sites and have SEO expertise. These are Real Estate Webmasters and InboundREM.
Real Estate Webmasters tends to create either branding or SEO sites, and the results look totally different. Here at InboundREM, we spent years developing a model that achieves both goals.
Check out the examples of neighborhood pages below. The first prioritizes branding, the second prioritizes SEO, and the third combines both.
Pricing Plans
| Launch* | $2500 Setup and $250/month Licensing Fees |
| Brand | $3500 Setup and $450/month Licensing Fees |
| Growth | $4500 Setup and $1500/month for very basic SEO plan |
| Premium | $5500 Setup and $2500/month for semi-decent SEO plan |
| Additional Costs | $500 for 1500-word Blog Posts, $3500 for Branding Videos, and $3000 for SEO Migration |
*The Launch Plan doesn’t include any website revisions, making it a difficult commitment.
Like many real estate website providers, LP does not provide public pricing plans. The table above represents outdated data, but the best approximation we can deliver presently. Contact Luxury Presence for current pricing plans.
In the last year alone, Luxury Presence grew from 5000 to over 7500 clients. It can be that their pricing plans have increased.
PRO TIP: You may receive a significant discount on the setup cost if you get referred by an existing customer.
Also on this point, the CEO Malta reached out and assured us that, “Our plans come with multiple revision rounds. We do not limit the number of revisions per revision round, so in effect, our clients have unlimited revision rounds included with each plan.”
Take that into account when asking for revisions and considering whether LP is within your budget.
That said, Luxury Presence offers a wide variety of extra services, which are relatively expensive for real estate website design but keeping generally in line with luxury real estate website development.
As per the CEO Malte Kramer, “We offer a Digital CMA Tool, Single Property Websites, Agent Subdomain Sites for teams, Listing Syndication, Lead Intelligence, Enterprise level features for large teams and brokerages, etc. Also, our SEO Plan includes citations, GBP posts, backlinks, extensive copywriting, and more. “
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Who Should Use Luxury Presence
1. Luxury Agents with Strong Marketing Budgets
If you’re established and can afford around $4000+/month for the first year and about half of that after, then you’re in a prime position to boost your branding. Luxury Presence absolutely deserves your attention.
You probably want to choose between Agent Image and Luxury Presence.
Who Shouldn’t Use Luxury Presence
1. New Luxury Agents
If you’re a new luxury agent, you probably want to wait a couple of years before investing in an expensive website that probably won’t have much traceable ROI. There are exceptions. Maybe you just landed a fat commission and want to invest it in your digital branding.
Just be aware that clients like Jade Mills who praise LP for converting leads through her website are the exception, not the rule. It only works because she’s a headlining agent.
2. Non-Luxury Agents
If you’re not in luxury real estate, you don’t need a branding website. It would be far smarter to invest in a lead generation website.
3. Agents Who Want to Own Their Website
Unfortunately, most real estate website builders retain ownership of your website. You have to pay expensive leasing fees each month and retain no ownership over your content. Considering the fact that you paid to build the website, I find this business model kind of sleazy.
Fortunately, there are two companies that allow you to own your site. These are Agent Image and InboundREM.
Agent Image is great if you want a fully custom site. InboundREM is great if you want a semi-custom website with real SEO potential.
Client Testimonials
No Luxury Presence review would be complete without the voices of actual clients. Many Luxury Presence clients that I know personally are delighted with the results. There are also plenty of online Luxury Presence reviews we can dive into here.
Positive Luxury Presence Reviews
Google is the main source of Luxury Presence reviews, where they have a 4.4-star rating from 213 reviews (May 2023). The highly positive reviews cite the biggest values of luxury agents. That includes beautiful branding sites, excellent and responsive customer service, and professionalism.
In fact, the 5-star reviews are extremely uniform. About 90% of them include the name of the onboarding specialist, which is perhaps unusual.
Malte Kramer, the CEO of Luxury Presence, reached out and assured us that, “We survey all of our clients and do not gate or incentivize reviews in any way.” I believe him.
Here are some examples of Luxury Presence reviews that seem especially organic.
Negative Luxury Presence Reviews
Luxury Presence began in 2016. They had about 5000 clients by 2022 and an additional 2500 clients by 2023.
Obviously that’s rapid growth. Scaling an exploding client base is no easy task. I’m sure they have increased the size of their sales team a lot in the last year.
That’s probably why many of the 1-star reviews have occurred in the last 6 months. Companies that deal with a range of clients will naturally prioritize their higher-profile clients, and some of the less flashy clients can suffer from a poorer customer experience.
If you’re an inexperienced luxury agent or a small team, you may experience customer service outside the typically impressive client experience. Here are some of the recent negative Luxury Presence reviews:
Example Websites
In this section, we feature some screenshots from example Luxury Presence websites.
Here are 5 example websites from Luxury Presence clients to check out:
Agent Image vs Luxury Presence
"They are doing a lot of interesting things at Luxury Presence, and they are definitely trying to go big inside the space. I appreciate their efforts, but they are making some fairly dramatic mistakes."
This quote is from the podcast above. I invite you to watch the full video because we packed it with info.
Probably the main reason I drew the conclusion above, beyond what I’ve seen personally, is that there are certain pressures that go along with taking $30 million in venture capital.
So far, I think Malte has led Luxury Presence very well. Given time, I think he has the skills to meet that challenge. But there will be casualties, especially for clients who can’t pay $20-$30K for hyper-luxury branding sites.
The expectation when you take so much VC is to scale massively and rapidly, which is a very difficult task, especially in the real estate technology sphere.
Website Comparisons
Agent Image and Luxury Presence produce the best custom luxury branding websites. While they both produce impressive custom websites, they have different design tastes.
Agent Image sites tend to be bold, flashy, and feature a masculine aesthetic. Often they use striking color palettes and lots of moving elements. To me, they speak more to new money.
Check out some high-profile examples here:
Luxury Presence sites tend to be simple, refined, and feature a feminine aesthetic. Often they use pleasing color palettes and plenty of negative space. To me, they speak more to old money.
Overall, both companies have similar pricing plans. So much depends upon the amount of custom work your website requires, which can flex the final pricing greatly. The best way is to reach out to both sales teams for a quote.
Personally, I would still choose Agent Image over Luxury Presence for a variety of reasons. The best thing you can do is schedule a consultation with me below.
Luxury Presence vs InboundREM
InboundREM is my company, and we also offer branded websites for luxury agents. In that sense, we are competitors of Luxury Presence.
On the other hand, I think that ultimately the specialties of IREM and LP are different.
We cannot compete with Luxury Presence’s ultra-luxury branded website offerings. We’re also not trying to.
"Unless you're going with the higher tier of what Agent Image or [imaginably] what Luxury Presence offers, I think you'd be better going with a WordPress site unless you're hitting the $10,000+ mark. People underestimate the cost of going the full custom route."
As I mention in the podcast, Luxury Presence’s team is young and excited about what’s possible on the backend of websites to create gorgeous luxury branded websites.
The issue is that a lot of these cutting-edge design techniques are completely unreadable by Google and therefore do not carry their weight for an SEO results.
That’s where the strategy of IREM departs from Luxury Presence.
LP is design-driven at the cost of SEO potential. IREM’s luxury sites (we also offer Lead Generation sites) are SEO-driven at the cost of design potential.
To use a basic example, Google officially recognizes 14 fonts that they are guaranteed to read. Websites that focus purely on branding cannot stay within those limits and still create award-winning aesthetics.
Our sweet-spot client demographic includes small and medium-sized teams, contrasted to LP’s target of larger and ultra-luxury clients. Accordingly, we’re much more affordable.
To put it all together, you need to focus on two aspects when deciding on a luxury real estate website provider: cost and lead generation priorities. Luxury Presence, Agent Image, and Real Estate Webmasters prioritize branding over SEO, which leads to expensive sites. InboundREM prioritizes SEO over branding, which leads to more affordable sites with powerful long-term ROIs.
If you want to learn more about what’s the best fit for you, schedule a free 30-minute consultation with me below. I’ll be happy to give you a transparent perspective on what option is best to take your business to the next level.
Here’s the IREM Portfolio of SEO Success Stories. And our Pricing and Services.
Summary Review
In conclusion, Luxury Presence is a prominent player in the luxury real estate website development industry, offering beautifully designed and well-branded websites.
Their reputation is commendable, with many top agents entrusting them with their online presence. The company has garnered positive feedback for its customer service, onboarding process, and sales team. However, there are some negative feedback and drawbacks to consider.
One of the main concerns is the pricing, as Luxury Presence’s services come at a high cost. The pricing plans are not transparent, and obtaining a custom luxury branded website will require additional expenses.
It is important to carefully evaluate the budget and weigh the potential return on investment before committing to their services.
Although they have showcased some successful PPC campaigns, the overall effectiveness of their PPC ads may be questionable, considering the large number of clients they serve.
Furthermore, when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), Luxury Presence falls short in delivering significant organic traffic. Clients have reported drops in traffic, and the SEO success stories appear to be more linked to the high-profile reputation of the clients rather than Luxury Presence’s expertise.
If organic SEO lead generation is a priority, it may be worth exploring other options, such as InboundREM, which combines luxury branding with SEO potential.
Ultimately, Luxury Presence is an excellent choice for established luxury agents with strong marketing budgets and a focus on branding. Their websites are visually stunning and have successfully converted leads for some top agents.
However, new luxury agents, non-luxury agents, and those who value owning their website may find better alternatives elsewhere. It is crucial to carefully assess one’s specific needs and goals before making a decision.
Schedule a Meeting
Let’s chat about how an SEO-focused website that YOU OWN, Google Business Profile Campaigns, or Custom Email Campaigns can generate high-quality leads and exceptional long-term ROI. If my services aren’t the best move for you, I’ll gladly point you in the right direction
6 Comments
I spoke with Luxury Presence several times and then received several follow-up calls trying to convert me. Their websites and mapping feature looks great, but I was also suspicious of their PPC promises. Your review is thorough and backs up what I learned speaking with them. I’ve also spoken to Real Estate Webmasters who build beautiful websites, but their pricing and add-on fees were simply more than I could commit to. Thanks for the impressive detailed review of LP and Agent Image, and the REW comparisons.
Reed, it’s encouragement like this that keep us working hard on providing the best information we can on companies like Real Estate Webmasters, Cinc, Luxury Prescence and pretty much the rest of the top 10 real estate marketing companies.
Hey Reed, thanks for your comment! Did LP provide you with a quote or contract that you’d be willing to share?
My experience with Luxury Presence has been an disaster. I now consider them in breach of contract with me. They promised me 30 to 40 leads per month. This is month 4 and I have had “3” leads. Two I didn’t receive notification of the first 2 and the third lead came a day after I told them they have not produced anything.
They removed my free IDX access to the MLS and now I am paying a subscription fee for that. They are also billing $200 a month for advertising.
After 4 months they still have not produced an advertising campaign. They sent me a text message asking to approve a campaign whose graphics were so small I could not read them, and they sent it from a phone number without any identification, so you did not know who it was from.
I know feel my only recourse is litigation.
Do not let them screw you like they have screwed me! Don’t give them a dime!
Thank you for this super helpful article. It can be hard to find unbiased reviews about real estate website platforms and what kind of SEO they provide to their subscribers and also what they cost. Usually these platforms force a consultation by phone before we can even learn the cost. I love your values forward approach both in articles like this and in your YouTube videos. Thank you for being a wonderful resource for real estate agents and Realtor bloggers especially!
Comments like these and readers like you are the reason we continue to publish transparent reviews with years and years of expereince behind them.