A broker website that breaks the rules

It was a creative agency’s dream. A client who says things like:

“We are not afraid. We also don’t limit ourselves to blue suits or the country club attitudes of old.”

Or describes their outlook as a “willingness to embrace ‘new’ to roll past our competition.”

Jason Sherman and Justin Levitch own the fast-growing brokerage RLAH in Washington, D.C. Last fall, they approached 1000WATT to help re-architect and design their website.

We knew from the kickoff that these guys were going to be a treat to work with. Their words were music to our ears.

The fruit of our collective labor went live this week at rlahre.com.

We’re super excited about the end result, which reveals moments of delight woven into every nook and cranny of the experience. The reasons we were able to accomplish this are straightforward.

Our strategy was as follows:

Ditch IDX

Look, the truth is that in 2017 your market really doesn’t need another place to find homes online. And when you stop and acknowledge that your web traffic as a listing broker is largely you, your agents, the agents across the street checking you out and your sellers looking for their listings on your site, the need to generate buyer leads off non-differentiated inventory becomes less and less mission critical. RLAH knew this instinctively and it’s why we ditched search as a core component. Instead…

Play to your strengths

RLAH was already doing a fantastic job demonstrating its marketing prowess online. They had built in-depth microsites for each of their listings. We chose, then, to roll all of those together into a single experience. The inspiration? Treat every property like it was a piece of art hanging in the halls of a gallery.

Because we wanted to…

Inject some personality into the site

What impressed us from day one, perhaps more than their digital savvy, was RLAH’s team. This is a group of young, energetic, smart people who are willing to embrace fun. Their new site needed to reflect that. We commissioned new photography that showed off their agents, their work environment and the places they call home. We designed custom filters that told their story visually through color and words.

We did all of this to…

Push the limits

We found design inspiration in much of what RLAH was doing already – the shapes on the homepage hero image came from their listing presentation, for example – but instructed our design team to really push the boundaries of creativity. We thought about design in multiple axes. We animated things. We brought depth and movement to the experience. Those decisions informed many of the small interactions found across the site.

With a relatively modest investment, RLAH now has a web presence that does not look like anything else in its marketplace and, more importantly, does not feel like anything else in the country.

This is what a real estate brokerage website can look like when fear and limitations are set aside.

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Work with 1000watt. Would you like a groundbreaking website strategy for your company? We are now accepting design engagements for 2018. Space is limited. Reach out today.