We checked "Powered by Carrot" sites: how alike they look, how fast they load, what they share.
Updated
We measured 103 live investor websites built on Carrot, found among the local cash home buyers listed for 70 US cities, on 14 November 2026: in a lab test on a phone screen they load fast, with half drawing their largest element within 1.5 seconds, but they are built from the same parts. Two in three ask "Need to sell your house fast?" in exactly those words, 82% open their page title with "We Buy Houses" or "Sell My House Fast", and only 8 of the 103 show a real person's face in the first screen.
A few words first, in case any of this is new. A real estate investor buys houses directly from the owners, and the owners find the investor online, so the investor needs a website that shows up on Google and asks for the owner's details. Carrot is the company most investors use to build that website. Below are the numbers for speed, page weight, titles, forms, faces and the sentences the sites share, how we got each one, and every limit of the test. The raw rows, one per site, are free to download.
This study is by Apex Vivus, which builds websites for investors too, so we compete with Carrot. To keep that from tilting it, we ran every site through the same script on the same day, measured our own site the same way, and say plainly where Carrot sites did better than ours. We name no individual Carrot site: these are real people's businesses, so you only see totals.
What did we find on 103 Carrot websites?
On 103 Carrot websites we found fast pages that share a backbone: the same questions, the same title openings, the same form, and very few faces. This card is the short version of everything below, with each number measured on 14 November 2026.
- What we measured
- The homepage of every Carrot site among the local cash home buyers listed for 70 US cities: 103 of 239 company websites, or 43%. One load each, on a phone-sized screen, recording speed, weight, titles, headings, the first form, structured data, faces and shared sentences.
- How fast they load
- Half drew their largest picture or headline within 1.5 seconds. 86% made Google's 2.5-second line for "good", and 87% barely shifted while loading. A lab test on a fast line, so real phones will be slower.
- How heavy they are
- A typical homepage weighs 1.7 megabytes and asks the server for 53 files. Half sit between 1.0 and 2.3 megabytes.
- How much they share
- 66% ask "Need to sell your house fast?" word for word, 82% open their title with one of two phrases, two homepages share a third of their style names, and only 8% show a real face first.
- What we did not measure
- Leads, Google rankings or sales. A site that looks like the others can still bring sellers, and a fast one can still bring none. This study describes the sites; it can't tell you which ones work.
Every figure comes from the raw rows in carrot-websites-study-2026-11.csv, one row per site, numbered in a shuffled order, with no web addresses.
How many investor websites run on Carrot?
Of the investor websites we could load, 43% run on Carrot: 103 of 239. We needed a fair way to find Carrot sites that real sellers see, not the demo sites Carrot shows off. So we started from lists a seller might read: articles on a national real estate website that name the local cash home buyers in a city, one article per city, for 70 US cities from Albuquerque to Tacoma.
Those 70 articles linked to 291 websites. Forty were not house-buying companies (directories, agents, news sites), and 12 did not load at all, which leaves 239 companies. We count the 136 that don't run on Carrot as "something else" without naming what they use: some are built by hand and some on other platforms.
How we knew a site runs on Carrot. Every one of the 103 loads its pictures from Carrot's own image server, the fingerprint every Carrot site carries whatever its design. Seven also carry the style names of Carrot's older designs; 96 are on the newer ones. We did not rely on a "Powered by Carrot" line at the bottom of the page, because many sites hide it.
What this sample is, and what it isn't. It is the Carrot sites among the companies those city lists name, which is where a seller reading a list would land. It is not every Carrot site: Carrot says it has thousands of customers, and the lists favor companies that have been around long enough to be listed. We tried web searches first, and they mostly turned up Carrot's own demo and test sites, which is why we switched to the city lists; none of those search results are in the sample.
How fast do Carrot websites load on a phone?
Carrot websites load fast in our test: half drew their largest picture or headline within 1.5 seconds on a phone-sized screen, and 89 of 103 made Google's line for "good". Google measures page experience with a few numbers it calls Core Web Vitals. Two of them can be measured on a single load, and those are the two we used.
- 0–1 s17 sites
- 1–2 s54 sites
- 2–3 s27 sites
- 3–4 s4 sites
- 4–5 s1 sites
Largest Contentful Paint is how long it takes for the biggest thing in the first screen, usually the headline or the background picture, to appear. Google calls 2.5 seconds or less good and over 4 seconds poor. The middle Carrot homepage took 1.5 seconds, half took between 1.2 and 2.1, and only one went over 4 seconds, at 4.1. Layout shift measures how much the page jumps while it loads, the jump that makes you tap the wrong button. Google calls 0.1 or less good and over 0.25 poor. Most Carrot homepages scored 0, and only one went over 0.25.
We also timed two moments Google does not score. The page's text and structure were ready (the browser's DOMContentLoaded event) after a median 2.7 seconds, and everything, pictures and scripts included, had finished loading after a median 3.4 seconds, with the slowest at 16.9. Visitors see the page long before the last script finishes, so the first two numbers matter more to a seller than the last.
Read these as best-case numbers. We loaded each page once, from a computer in a data center with a fast connection, pretending to be a phone. A real phone on a weak signal will be slower, sometimes much slower, and a second load can differ from the first. We did not measure Total Blocking Time or Interaction to Next Paint, the measures of how quickly a page responds to a tap, because they need throttled tests or real visitors. If you own one of these sites, Google Search Console shows what your real visitors got.
How heavy is a Carrot homepage?
A Carrot homepage weighs about 1.7 megabytes on a phone, the median of the 103, and makes 53 requests, each one a file the browser has to ask the server for. Page weight is what a visitor downloads: pictures, fonts, scripts and the page itself, as it travels over the network. It matters most for sellers on a weak phone signal or a capped data plan.
- 0–1 MB22 sites
- 1–2 MB42 sites
- 2–3 MB27 sites
- 3–4 MB11 sites
- 4–6 MB0 sites
- 6+ MB1 sites
| Measure | What it means | Lightest quarter | Median | Heaviest quarter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Page weight | Everything downloaded, as sent | 1.0 MB | 1.7 MB | 2.3 MB |
| Requests | Files the browser asked for | 40 | 53 | 64 |
| Images | Pictures in the page | 17 | 29 | 42 |
| Words | Words a visitor can read | 1,454 | 2,082 | 3,103 |
The lightest and heaviest quarter columns are the 25th and 75th percentiles: a quarter of the sites are lighter than the first figure and a quarter heavier than the last. The lightest homepage weighed 0.4 MB with 13 requests; the heaviest 6.2 MB, and the busiest made 150 requests.
For a sense of scale, a page under 1 megabyte is light by today's standards, and 1.7 megabytes is ordinary. The weight rarely comes from Carrot's own code: the heaviest pages carry large photos, background videos, chat windows, review widgets and tracking scripts their owners added. The seven older-design sites were not lighter or faster in any way we could tell apart from the newer ones; seven is too few to say more.
Do Carrot websites all look the same?
Carrot websites don't all look the same, but they are built from the same parts. Colors, logos and photos differ from site to site; underneath, the code and many of the words are shared. We measured that two ways, and compared the Carrot sites with the 135 other company sites from the same city lists whose pages we could read, so the comparison is fair.
The code. Every web page labels its parts with style names, the names that tell the browser how each part should look. For each pair of homepages we counted the names they share as a share of all the names either one uses. Two Carrot homepages share a median 33%. Two homepages from the other 135 company sites we could read share a median of under 1%, which is what you would expect from sites built by different people. A third is a lot of common skeleton: it is what makes many Carrot sites feel familiar even when the colors change.
The words. We split each homepage's text into sentences of six words or more and looked for the same sentence, word for word, on other sites. "Need to sell your house fast?" is on 68 of the 103 Carrot homepages, and on 5 of the 135 others. 84 Carrot homepages carry at least one sentence that appears word for word on 10 or more of them, and 27 carry five or more. These are the most common:
39 sites "We are a real estate solutions and investment firm that specializes in helping homeowners get rid of burdensome houses fast."
37 sites "We are investors and problem solvers who can buy your house fast with a fair all cash offer."
15 sites "It doesn't matter whether you live in it, you're renting it out, it's vacant, or not even habitable."
12 sites "We help property owners just like you, in all kinds of situations."
8 sites "On average, 6% in commissions/fees are paid by a seller."
Most of each homepage is still its own: city names, the company's story, its own pictures. On the median site, only about 4% of its sentences appear on five or more other Carrot sites. But the shared ones sit in the places a seller reads first, the headline, the promise and the "how it works" box, which is why the sites feel alike. A seller comparing three investors in one city can easily read the same sentence three times. If you are on Carrot, rewriting those lines in your own words costs nothing and is the easiest way to stand apart.
What does a Carrot homepage show a seller first?
A Carrot homepage usually shows a seller a headline promising a fast cash sale and a form asking for the property's address, and rarely a person. We took a picture of the first screen of every homepage, exactly what a phone shows before you scroll, and read every title, main heading and first form.
Titles. A page's title is the blue line Google shows in its results, so it is the first thing a seller reads before they even visit. 44 Carrot homepage titles begin with "We Buy Houses" and 40 with "Sell My House Fast" or "Sell Your House Fast": 84 of 103 between them. 71% put "sell" and "fast" in the title, and almost half say "cash". The main heading on the page follows suit: 54% say "we buy houses" and 51% "sell" and "fast". Those words match what sellers type into Google, so the sameness has a reason; it also means ten results on one page can read the same.
The form. Every one of the 103 homepages has a form, and 94 ask for the property address, usually first. The most common label in the first box is "Enter Your Address", word for word on 54 sites. On 69 sites the address box splits into the same four parts (street, city, state, ZIP) under the same field number, and on 102 the form carries the same hidden box that catches spam robots. In other words, the forms are built from one blueprint. Only 30 ask for an email in the first form and only 6 for a name, so the address and a phone number do most of the work.
Faces. Only 8 of the 103 show a real person's face in the first screen, and 5 of those 8 are the still picture of a video. The rest open with a logo, a headline, a trust badge and the form. Sellers are deciding whether to trust a stranger with their house, and a face is the cheapest way to stop being a stranger, but we did not measure whether faces bring more leads, so take that as our view, not a finding.
Reviews and structured data. 81 homepages talk about reviews or testimonials somewhere in the text, but only 5 carry review or rating markup, the structured data search engines read. 57 describe the company as a local business in code, and 25 mark up questions and answers. The median homepage declares 3 kinds of structured data. Google limits star ratings for reviews a business shows about itself, so missing review markup is not necessarily a mistake.
How does an Apex Vivus site compare, measured the same way?
An Apex Vivus site, measured the same way, is a little heavier than most Carrot homepages, and it shifted more while loading than any of them. We have only one Apex Vivus site to compare fairly: Jerryll's own Connecticut house-buying site, which runs on Apex Vivus. We ran it through the same script four times on the same day, so you can see how much one site varies between loads.
| Measure | 103 Carrot homepages | One Apex Vivus site, 4 loads |
|---|---|---|
| Largest element appeared | Median 1.5 s; 86% within 2.5 s | 1.4, 1.7 and 2.1 s; 6.0 s on one load |
| Layout shift | Median 0; worst 0.40 | 0.53 to 0.55, every time: poor, and worse than all 103 |
| Page weight | Median 1.7 MB | 2.1 to 2.5 MB, heavier than 70 of the 103 |
| Requests | Median 53 | 52 to 55 |
| A face in the first screen | 8 of 103 | Yes, but a welcome window from its AI assistant covers it on a first visit |
What this comparison can and can't say. One site is not a sample: it tells you how that site did, not how every Apex Vivus site does. On speed and weight our site is ordinary next to the Carrot homepages. On layout shift it is the worst of all 104, every time we loaded it, which means something on the page moves after it first appears. That is a real fault, it is ours to fix, and it is the most useful thing this study found for us. Its welcome window also covers the first screen on a first visit, the face included, which is worth a second look too.
- Fast in a lab test: 86% drew their largest element within 2.5 seconds
- Steady while loading: 87% barely moved
- Ordinary page weight, 1.7 MB at the median
- A form in a predictable place, asking for the address first
- Titles that use the words sellers type into Google
- Each site is designed around the investor, their face and their story, not started from shared pages
- Your own words from the start, instead of sentences other sites carry
- A full CRM and a tool for every step after the lead, up to your paycheck
- One price for any team size: $97 a month
- But our one measured site shifts while loading, and that needs fixing
And what do Apex Vivus users say? It has far fewer public reviews than Carrot: on Trustpilot, a public review site, REILink, the company behind Apex Vivus, had six when we checked on November 14, 2026, five good and one bad. Here are the good ones, word for word, each linked; the link at the bottom shows all six:
“This company is giving more value than anyone else out there.”
Anthony B · on Trustpilot
“I am so excited for this new system Jerryll has created. This is a true ALL IN ONE system for everyone in Real Eatate!”
Elizabeth · on Trustpilot
“Jerryll and his team have worked hard at making sure that REI Link does what it says it will”
Michelle Couey Wolfson · on Trustpilot
“Apex Vivus is a powerful all-in-one system, and although we're just getting started, […] everything I've seen so far points to a very promising journey ahead.”
Touazeng Lor · on Trustpilot
Word for word, each linked to the review. Read every review on Trustpilot, good and bad.
How did we measure 103 Carrot websites?
We measured 103 Carrot websites with one script, on one day, one homepage load each, and kept every raw number. Here is exactly what that meant, so you can check it or repeat it, and every limit we know of.
Articles on a national real estate website listing local cash home buyers, one per city, for 70 US cities, read on 14 November 2026. They linked 291 websites; 239 were house-buying companies that loaded. A site counted as Carrot when its homepage loaded pictures from Carrot's image server. Carrot's own demo and test sites, which web searches mostly find, are not in it.
Each homepage was loaded once in an automated Chromium browser pretending to be a 393-pixel-wide phone, from a data center, without slowing the connection down. Sites that showed a blank page at their bare address were measured again at their "www." address. Bytes and requests came from the browser's own network records; Largest Contentful Paint and layout shift from the browser's performance tools.
From the same load: title, description, headings, the first form's boxes, structured data and words. For sameness we read each homepage's HTML and compared every pair of sites by shared style names, and counted sentences of six words or more that appear word for word on other sites. The 135 other company sites we could read were treated exactly the same way.
One load per site, so a slow server on that minute counts. A lab, not real visitors. Lists favor older companies. Faces were judged from the screenshots by one person, with no second coder; video stills counted as faces. The reviews count is a word test that also catches menu links named "Reviews". Hidden text, like a closed menu, counted as text. And one Apex Vivus site is not a sample.
Download the raw rows (CSV, 103 rows)One row per Carrot homepage, numbered in a shuffled order, with every measure on this page. No web addresses, by design: the totals are the finding, not any one person's site.
Apex Vivus competes with Carrot, and we would like you to choose us. Jerryll Noorden, who did this study and built Apex Vivus, ran his own investing business on Carrot for years and recommended it in public. He left because he wanted a site that looked like nobody else's, and this study is partly about exactly that, so read it with that in mind. That is why the script was the same for every site, why our own site is measured beside the others with its worst number in plain sight, and why every raw row is here to download.
Carrot website questions, answered.
Do all Carrot websites look the same?
Carrot websites don't all look the same, but they are built from the same parts. Two Carrot homepages share a median 33% of their style names, against 1% for two other investor sites from the same city lists. Two in three ask "Need to sell your house fast?" in those exact words, and 82% open their page title with "We Buy Houses" or "Sell My House Fast".
Is my Carrot website fast enough?
Your Carrot website is probably fast enough in a lab test: 86% of the 103 we measured drew their largest picture or headline within 2.5 seconds, Google's line for "good", and 87% stayed still while loading. A lab test on a fast connection flatters every site, so check your own site in Google Search Console, which shows what real visitors got.
How heavy is a typical Carrot homepage?
A typical Carrot homepage weighs about 1.7 megabytes and makes 53 requests on a phone. Half of the 103 homepages we measured were between 1.0 and 2.3 megabytes. The lightest was 0.4 megabytes and the heaviest 6.2 megabytes, with 150 requests.
Should my investor website show my face?
Your investor website should show your face if you want to look different from almost everyone else on Carrot: only 8 of the 103 homepages we checked showed a real person in the first screen on a phone, and 5 of those were a video still. We can't tell you from this study that a face brings more leads; we only measured how rare it is.
How many investor websites in a city run on Carrot?
Of the local cash home buyers listed for 70 US cities, 43% run on Carrot: 103 of the 239 company websites we could load. Those lists are one source, not every investor in each city, so read 43% as a measure of the companies those lists name, not of the whole market.
Why does my Carrot site say the same things as my competitor's?
Your Carrot site says the same things as your competitor's because many Carrot sites start from the same written pages. We found sentences like "We are investors and problem solvers who can buy your house fast with a fair all cash offer" word for word on 37 of 103 homepages. Rewriting them in your own words is free.
Does my Carrot site tell Google about my reviews?
Your Carrot site probably doesn't tell Google about your reviews in code. 81 of the 103 homepages talk about reviews or testimonials, but only 5 carry review or rating markup, the structured data Google reads. Google limits star ratings for a business's reviews of itself, so check the rules before you add it.
Can I check my own site the same way?
You can check your own site the same way: open it on your phone, look at what the first screen shows, read your title and your first form, and run it through PageSpeed Insights for speed. Then compare your numbers with the medians on this page or with the raw rows in our download.
Is Apex Vivus faster than Carrot?
Apex Vivus is not faster than Carrot in this test, and we're saying so. The one Apex Vivus site we measured the same way drew its largest element in 1.4 to 2.1 seconds on three loads and 6.0 on one, weighed 2.1 to 2.5 megabytes, and shifted more while loading than any of the 103 Carrot homepages. That shift is ours to fix.
Who did this study, and are you neutral?
This study was done by Jerryll Noorden for Apex Vivus, which competes with Carrot, so we are not neutral. To keep that from tilting it, we measured every site with the same script on the same day, published every raw row, named no individual site, and showed where Carrot sites did better than our own.
Where every number comes from.
- Carrot websites study, raw rows (CSV): 103 Carrot homepages measured by Apex Vivus on 14 November 2026.
- City-by-city lists of local cash home buyers on a national real estate website, 70 US cities, 291 linked websites. Read 14 November 2026. The website is not named, and the list of the 103 sites is not published, so no investor is singled out.
- Web Vitals, web.dev: the "good" and "poor" lines for Largest Contentful Paint and layout shift. Read 14 November 2026.
- Largest Contentful Paint, web.dev: what it measures. Read 14 November 2026.
- Cumulative Layout Shift, web.dev: what it measures. Read 14 November 2026.
- Review snippet guidelines, Google Search Central: when star ratings can show for a business's own reviews. Read 14 November 2026.
- carrot.com/reviews: Carrot's own page, which says thousands of real estate professionals use it. Read 14 November 2026.
- Apex Vivus pricing: Core $97 a month. Read 14 November 2026.
Everything else about Carrot, in plain words.
On Carrot and want a site that looks like you? See how the move works.
If you are on Carrot and want a site that doesn't read like the one next to it, the move to Apex Vivus is free. Your pages, blog posts, pictures and leads come with you, at the same web addresses, and your new site is built and checked before anything changes. See every step, or book a short call and we'll look at your Carrot site with you.
Hi, I'm Humphrey.
Want to know what Carrot websites really have in common? Let me walk you through the 103 we measured, out loud: how fast they load, how heavy they are, what they share, and how our own site did. About five minutes, and you can stop me or ask me anything.
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