Cambridge Real Estate

Cambridge Real Estate is the leading real estate brokerage in Cambridge, Waikato, with a passion and dedication to building their strong and vibrant community.

Cambridge Real Estate approached Black Sheep to help invigorate their website, modernising the user experience and ensuring that their online identity was aligned with their offline one.

Facing an imminent shift to a new property management system (VaultRE), a website that could support Vault became critical.

Challenges:

• Unclear and irrelevant calls to action muddied the user experience and impacted conversion goals.

• Lack of mobile responsiveness and clunky property search resulted in poor user experience.

• The dated design aesthetic underminded trust and did not reflect Cambridge Real Estate’s market-leading position.

• The impending release of a new property management system required significant development integration.
  

A website refresh gave Cambridge Real Estate the opportunity to start from scratch and get it right.

In the collaborative discovery session, we unpacked the desired user journey and learnt that while the website worked on a basic usability level, it was sorely lacking clear calls to action for driving and capturing leads, and the property and agent search was slow and under performing. 

One of the biggest issues the Cambridge Real Estate team has was that the website was outdated and felt old, reflecting poorly on their market-leading brand and reputed as a trusted real estate partner. 

Design

In building the wireframes, we focused on streamlining the property search UI with clear and responsive filtering options. In-page navigation elements would aid in highlighting properties and giving users multiple ways to discover. 

Bespoke website design allowed us to remove superfluous elements and focus users' attention on conversion funnels, show off the property imagery to sell the dream, and amplify the brand personality.

Stunning full-width imagery, "coffee table book" property listings, and friendly agent profiles all help build a feeling of polished, modern charm; aspects of the Cambridge Real Estate brand that they’re known for. 

Development

The development of the website was completed by two of Black Sheep’s developers; one managing the website build and the other taking care of the VaultRE property management integration. 

The elemental site provided the Cambridge Real Estate web team plenty of flexibility to shape the pages to the content they had available, without the need of costly development changes further down the line. 

The website was built by Black Sheep on Silverstripe CMS. Full user guides and CMS training was provided to the Cambridge Real Estate team when the website was handed over. 

The Cambridge Real Estate website went live on November 9th.

The site's elemental design allows content admins to manage updates without developer assistance, providing flexibility for future content updates. 

Automated data syncs between VaultRE and the website means property and agent management is a breeze for the content team. Further enhancements to VaultRE are planned to provide even deeper analytical insights around property views.

Cambridge Real Estate now have a modern, sophisticated, and user-friendly website that strengthens their brand and achieves its goal of increasing engagement and streamlining enquiries.