Godfrey & Barr: Residential Estate Agent Case Study

Context and brief

Godfrey & Barr is a well established independant firm of residential estate agents operating in the prestigious north west London area. To service their customer's needs, they required a website that not only visually communicated the value of their brand, but also offered their clients and registrants enhanced functionality befitting the quality of their sales and lettings inventory.

From a functional perspective, Godfrey & Barr required the ability to fully content manage property imagery and details as well as other copy based web pages. A further requirement was for FIFO to develop an array of enhanced functionality tools (listed below), but to make them only available to registered customers in order to encourage registrations by vendors, landlords or applicants.

Results

From a visual perspective, FIFO redesigned the Godfrey & Barr website with a fresh modern uncluttered feel sitting within a larger 1024 x 768 format - suitable to current customer technical specifications. This larger format not only enables the publishing of more information per page, but it enhances the website usability by offering larger digestible chunks of information.

From a functional perspective, FIFO built the website on Calligram Application Server platform allowing full permissions-based content management throughout the website. All property information is fully content manageable including an additional feature where imagery is auto-resized to thumbnail sizes, greatly reducing the time required by Godfrey & Barr to create property imagery at the right sizes.

Other features include:

  • Dynamic slide-show for each property automatically created by the content management system
  • Google mapping - based on each property's post-code - displaying a property location map, satellite view and a hybrid of the two views
  • *Email-a-friend feature allowing registered customers to send their favourite properties to friends and family via email
  • *Wish list feature allowing registered customers to add properties to their wish list; the wish list for each registrant is stored on the server and is available every time they log in
  • *Arrange-a-viewing feature allowing registered customers to select their first and second choice preferred meeting dates and times to view a chosen property. Godfrey & Barr are informed of the customer's preferred meeting times and make final arrangements accordingly
  • *Large floor plan imagery available to registered customers
  • Ability for vendors, landlords, tenants or potential buyers to register their interest online. All registrants are required to activate their account via an email to ensure a greater level of security
  • 'My account' feature allowing registered customers to edit their details or wish lists, or to reset their passwords
  • 'Quick search' or 'advanced search' mechanisms allowing visitors to refine their search criteria by price, area or detailed property specifications. This applies to sale and lettings.
  • Customers can control how search results are displayed and ordered
  • Automatic feed into Prime Location system - managed via the content management system where Godfrey & Barr select which properties they would like to 'export' to Prime Location
  • Online behaviour analysis and conversion tracking via Google Analytics

* As a means of encouraging registrations, these features are visible on the website but "greyed out"; when the feature is clicked by a non-registered customer, they are prompted to register in order to activate that feature.

If you would like to learn more about this case study or FIFO's services in general, please call Jonathan Saipe on 0845 680 1236 or email us.