Client meetings, user research and a few initial internal discussions led us to taking a unique approach for this site. Namely not showing any real estate on the homepage. We then created the site based on this — that most users would land on the site through third party referrals, such as realestate.co.nz. Those that land on the homepage would be more likely to be looking for property management and so we would take them on a journey from there leading them to where they needed.

The result was a site that introduced custom built API connections, constant client collaboration and a sleek digital lead funnel reminiscent of the real Watson’s office.

The Palace application is provided with an API (application programming Interface), which essentially provides a way for other software to send and retrieve information. They don’t talk all the time, so we program the website to initiate contact regularly to retrieve new listings or updates and then ‘translate’ that information to present it on the site.

We worked with the Property Suite Team, who were able to deposit an XML (Extensible Markup Language) file onto our server every time there was a change made in their property information. The website then checks every hour to see if there has been a change and if so, it updates or adds the relevant listings.

We discovered that people looking for properties to rent or sell traditionally came from third party referrals such as realestate.co.nz.

While the front end of the site achieved what we needed it to. Behind all of this was the property management system. In order to get up to date listings and make the website easy to use we integrated two external software applications: Property Suite and Palace.