Real estate
A family brokerage with a quarter century behind it was running a page-builder template and a stock skyline photo. Now the site looks like the business.
The story
Odell Realty has been selling homes since 1997. Lloyd and Karen built it, their family runs it, and they have closed more than a thousand homes across Charlotte and the Carolinas. None of that came through on the website. It was a page-builder template with a stock photo of the Charlotte skyline on it, the same skyline on a hundred other sites, above a headline set in the builder’s default bold. A buyer landing there had no way to tell a twenty-five-year family brokerage from someone who signed up last week.
So the brief was not really about speed or search. It was about looking like the business. Here is the site page by page, with the old one beside it where the old one still survives.
A walk through the site
The old home page opened on a stock photograph of the Charlotte skyline, the same one that sells everything from law firms to gyms, under a headline in the page builder's default bold. It said nothing a hundred other sites were not already saying. The new one opens on a house, in a real neighbourhood, with the name of the business set in a serif that has some age to it. Same brokerage, twenty-five years in. It just finally reads that way.
See it live
The old About page gave the team a grey band, a heading that said "Our Team", and a paragraph about being "comprised of a team of local real estate professionals". The family that built the business in 1997 was nowhere in it. The new one leads with them: the photograph, the years, the homes closed, and then nine agents underneath, each with a page of their own.
See it live
The old contact page put a stock photograph of a marble staircase behind the words "Contact us", then listed an email address. The new one says what a buyer actually wants to know, which is that a person will answer: the note goes to an agent on the team, and someone replies inside a business day.
See it live
A brokerage sells the area as much as the house, and the old site had no room to say so. Now every area they work has a guide, grouped by state, and the market gets described the way an agent would describe it out loud rather than the way a listing portal would.
See it live
Since launch the business moved into Oklahoma, and the site went with it: Tulsa, Owasso, Bartlesville, Claremore and Oologah, written the same way as the Carolina guides. Thirteen guides now, across three states. That is the part I am most pleased about, because it happened after the handover.
See it live
Six steps, numbered, in order, starting with the money rather than the houses. It is the conversation the team has with every buyer anyway. Putting it on the page means the first call starts further along.
See it live
Financing is where most buyers stall, so it gets a page instead of a footnote, in plain English, with the one thing to do before looking at a single house.
See it live
Nine agents, nine pages, each with a portrait, a licence number, and a way to call or email that person directly rather than a shared inbox. Garrett keeps his own up to date, which is the whole point of handing over a site somebody owns.
See it live
Ready when you are
Tell me about your business. We will talk it through, then I will put together a free preview of your new site before you pay anything. No pressure, no commitment.
