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REA Group Customer Website
A new customer hub for one of the world’s biggest property platforms
realestate.com.au doesn’t just attract millions of Australians looking for their perfect property every day. It’s also a vital resource for agents, vendors and developers to manage their listings and run their day-to-day business. But with so many audiences requiring in-depth information, how do you juggle it all? Answer: you build a hub.
THE CHALLENGE
Work smarter, not harder. As the market-leading property platform in Australia, REA Group provides a vast number of products, resources, and information specific to each of their customer groups – residential real estate agents, commercial agents, property managers, developers, project marketers, and more.
REA Group wanted to create a more cohesive experience across all customer groups by streamlining the customer-specific content hubs into one solution that works for all audiences, to make it easier to navigate for their customers, and easier to manage for their team.
SOLUTION
Three resource centers into one hub. Having collaborated with realestate.com.au on their digital projects for a number of years, V.I. knew their brand and their needs better than anyone. First, the V.I. digital team conducted an audit of all three existing platforms – residential, commercial and developers – and used these insights to develop a new information architecture to help us wrangle the vast content in the most streamlined and user-friendly way possible. We grouped customer-specific and overarching content, allowing us to create a simple and effective structure that condensed over 500 pages of content into just over 250.
OUTCOME
A web experience that makes it easier for customers to do business. Once the site was fully designed, developed and built, content was migrated across to align with the new architecture and the site was thoroughly tested. The three customer groups are differentiated using colour-coding, with easy navigation to help users find exactly what they need.
The new combined hub presents a streamlined singular resource for customers to learn about products and subscriptions pre-purchase, tools and reporting to support their day-to-day business needs.
The new hub demonstrates REA Group’s commitment to their customers by improving their interactions and, ultimately, their business.
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DESIGNING A SYSTEM FOR STREAMLINED CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Using REA’s recent rebranding as a launch pad, the V.I. design team developed a design system which enabled marketing teams to quickly create new content on the site in a consistent and flexible manner.
By colour-coding product and market segments and creating an ultra-flexible component library with a ‘clicks not code’ approach, admin users can create new content quickly and easily, while maintaining brand identity and ensuring a consistent experience for the end user.
TOOLS, TOOLS AND MORE TOOLS
To further engage with customers, a set of reporting and marketing tools are also available on the new content hub. These have been built as stand-alone React applications, and are embedded into the main site. Custom API’s call upon external resources and data in real-time to keep them current and useful.
Agents can dynamically create a personalised set of marketing material to support their client appraisals, download a fast-fact sheet that talks to site and market performance, and even log in and see market demand data.
CONTENT (AND SEO) IS KING
With over 500 pages of content across the original three sites, our team had to think about how SEO and content migration was handled from the outset.
V.I. worked closely with multiple product teams to collate, subedit and optimise product copy and imagery.Beyond the hygiene factors of keyword density, page titles and descriptions, we had to effectively plan and launch hundreds of redirects across multiple domains, ensuring no downtime was experienced.
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