Much like scope, the timeline depends on the overall project. A standard website moves quickly, while a custom site with complex property integrations, CRM syncs, and interactive maps takes considerably longer. At Social Design House, we focus on creating efficient, high-quality workflows so you can get your site live without sacrificing design or functionality.
Commercial real estate sites fall into rough tiers, and the difference between them is almost always integration depth rather than page count.
A brochure or credibility site carrying a firm profile, team bios, service pages, and manually maintained featured properties is the fastest kind of build. A listing-driven site with searchable inventory, filtering by asset class and submarket, and lead routing into a CRM takes substantially longer. A portfolio or institutional platform with tenant portals, investor reporting, interactive stacking plans, and live property management synchronization is longer still, and the schedule there is driven less by design than by data modeling and integration approvals.
A representative project moves through discovery and content audit, information architecture and wireframes, visual design and stakeholder review, development and CMS modeling, integration build and testing, then content population, QA, and launch preparation.
Those phases overlap rather than running strictly in series. Development often begins on approved templates while later pages are still in design, and integration work frequently runs in parallel with creative.
In our experience the delays cluster in predictable places. Waiting on property photography is the most frequent. Second is integration credentials, because enterprise property management platforms gate API access behind partner enrollment, and that approval runs on the vendor's calendar rather than yours. Third is late-stage scope addition, usually an interactive feature that seemed optional during discovery and became essential once stakeholders saw the design.
None of these are unusual. They are just worth naming at kickoff so the schedule reflects them honestly instead of absorbing them as slippage.
We start integration discovery during the design phase rather than after it, so credentialing and partner enrollment run alongside creative work instead of sequentially behind it. We model CMS Collections before content arrives, which turns population into a data entry task rather than a structural one. And we run a content inventory at the outset so gaps surface early, while there is still runway to fill them.
We will also tell you when a phased launch makes more sense than a single date. Getting a credible firm site live first and adding the listing engine in a second phase is often better than holding everything for one launch, particularly if you have a leasing push or a capital raise on the calendar.
Because scope drives schedule so heavily, we build a timeline specific to each project during discovery rather than working from a standard duration. For a fuller picture, see what drives commercial real estate website cost, or learn more about our commercial real estate web and marketing practice.
