The Client
Orchards Estates are a top performing estate agent based in South Somerset. Although relatively new, being founded in 2014, they’ve quickly established themselves in the local area and regularly feature in the Zoopla “Property Power 100”. While the business is new, the staff and founders are all experienced agents, some with 20+ years in the business. They are part of the “Experts in Property” group which is a collective of 80+ agents in the South West of England area.
The Website
The Orchards Estates website was a collaborative project between Estate Apps and Precision Property Marketing (PPM). While PPM dealt with the rebranding and videography, the website design and development plus the content, was our responsibility.
Working closely with PPM, we ensured that the branding was clear and consistent throughout every page and strongly represented their business wherever possible.
In addition to our standard package, we developed some new features for the Orchards Estates website. The main challenge was processing a feed containing 4000+ property listings (which is a combined total of the 80+ agents in the “Experts in Property” group). In order to handle this effectively, we developed extensions to our existing platform which enabled this huge volume of data to be handled outside of our core system. This new feed system is pretty robust and we’ll be developing this more in the future.
With so many property listings, we needed a more intuitive approach to enabling the visitor to quickly find what they are looking for. Our standard feature wouldn't have worked in this case so we developed a predictive text search, which, combined with a radius in miles, was a complex but effective solution.
There are numerous videos embedded within the website, some on the new landing pages and others within the property detail pages themselves. All of which help to promote Orchards Estates people, their core values and their strengths.
We also incorporated a wide variety of SEO-focussed enhancements to almost all of the secondary pages within the website. Essentially, they are more targeted toward specific types of user and include additional calls-to-action - for example, a greater focus on pushing the user to the “Value my Home” form to extract those all-important leads.
This website was on a much greater scale than our usual projects but we were really pleased to see the final result launched to a lot of positive feedback.
If you’d like to see it for yourself, click here.
