Leading Realty Company Builds UX Friendly Website to Realize Competitive Differentiation
Our client is the largest independent, and fastest growing real estate company in Austin, Texas, with over $2.85 billion in sales in 2018. It brings together a team of exceptional realtors, an online Austin home search tool, and a highly efficient home marketing strategy. A 35-member support staff helps its 500+ agents increase their sales an average of 27% per year.
Business Challenge
Our client had an old website that was created ages ago. This meant that their competitors’ websites had better design, user experience, and overall functionality. The company also used a lot of different programs to manage the business - SEO was severely lacking, the admin panel was not user friendly, and managing pages via their old CMS was a massive headache.
The company’s goal was to become the #1 realty company in Texas and eventually the US market. To be competitive in the Texas real estate business it had to be more attractive to new agents. This required better UX and SEO than the competition, and more user-friendly functionality for agents. As our client was rapidly expanding, they needed technology that could scale and manage many agents, properties, and buyers/sellers.
Faster website management would result in lower admin expenses. Instead of creating each page via CMS, listings pages could be created automatically. The admin panel would be based on one platform, rather than having admin/CMS programs managed by other companies, such as Salesforce.
Project Description
SoftServe guided the client in creating a new website with high quality UX/UI for buyers, easy to use agent dashboards, and agent-client/client-client communication and notification tools. Our work with our client is ongoing with the following planned additions: SEO, recommendation engine, reactive app, and seller functionality.
After an initial design thinking workshop, SoftServe conducted a nine-month MVP process that brought in top producing agents to better understand where the current solutions were failing to deliver the experience that our client needed to provide its agents. This included building agent personas and competitive analysis (Keller Williams, Compass, Zillow) to outline and deliver the scope of the initial IP.
Value Delivered
The new website is much faster and will bring more leads through the implementation of user-friendly ways to search for properties and prompts for users to sign up. SEO was also optimized which should increase website traffic.
Now, instead of using an admin panel, CMS, and Salesforce separately to manage the website, agents/admins only need to manage two website dashboards for agents and Salesforce.
This saves considerable time with website management. The old website had thousands of pages that an army of admin personnel had to curate. Now, instead of neighborhood pages managed via CMS, those are automatically generated from MLS data. Instead of having to create listings pages and info via admin panel + CMS tool + Salesforce, data is now managed directly in Salesforce only and synced with the website.
