Letting Agency Web Design with Arthur Online Integration

Before they came to us, Edgbaston Lettings had a very old website, probably in excess of eight years old. And although it had done very well for them, it was looking very dated. More importantly though, they wanted to be able to display their properties in real time as opposed to occasionally uploading their properties manually.

They use Arthur Online as a property management platform and wanted their properties to come directly from Arthur Online through to their website. After initially finding us through search engines, they followed up with Arthur Online who recommended us as integration experts.

Designed for the target audience: So we started off with a road mapping exercise to define the persona of the people we were aiming at, and also look at where those people might come from, how they might search for such properties and basically position the website to attract those people. We also did a competitor analysis to ensure that the new Edgbaston Lettings website looked better than the rest of the letting agents in that area.

The target demographic was young professionals living in Edgbaston in Birmingham. They wanted the website to appeal to social people who would be happy living in shared housing. Edgbaston Lettings are quite unique in that their model is that they have a very large number of properties in a very small area, so the website should have information on the area as well that might be useful for the target demographic.

We designed the website to satisfy the target demographic’s needs. The bright colours and photography certainly reflects this and the way everything is laid out is far more mobile orientated. This means large areas for buttons and heavily icon based. The properties page also has a large map and the whole page is split in two. Again, that’s very much mobile orientated to suit the preferences of the target demographic.

Emphasis on what makes them unique: We also looked at the sort of benefits of some of the services that Edgbaston provides to their tenants. They wanted to make that very clear. One of the points that was made was that Edgbaston actually employs their own in-house maintenance team. That includes cleaners, gardeners and handymen, which means that they’re on the end of the phone very quickly, there’s no waiting around for maintenance people to come and sort the house out and it’s done straight away. We made sure that this was emphasised when designing this website.

They also have been modernising the houses that the tenants rent. So some of the latest properties they’ve done up have solar panels, something that appeals to the target demographic. We made the design to get across a lot of these benefits, to make it really easy for the tenants to contact Edgbaston and they could have a look around the property virtually, or they could book a time to come and view the property. So that was very clear in how we visually put the website together.

Arthur Online Integration: In terms of the backend, again, we provided a very good CMS that is easy to edit, easy for them to add content and easy for them to create new pages and new information. All of the data for the properties and any viewing requests go straight into Arthur Online and they get a notification every time that happens. So we try to automate the process as best as we could for Edgbaston Lettings.

Benefits: Edgbaston Lettings got to the point where they were actually currently fully let for the first time in six years. They now have a waiting list of tenants. The challenge moving forward is adding more properties to the portfolio of the standard that they currently have. The website being integrated with Arthur Online gives them the infrastructure to add houses to their portfolio and market them efficiently straight away. 

From an analytical standpoint, if we look at 2022 Q3 compared to Q2, total website visitors is up by 39%. And organic search visitors are up by 44.81%. But just from a positioning point of view of a professional-run company, it’s unmeasurable. It’s completely different from what they had before. They are seen as a slick, professional company in the Edgbaston area. They can also keep up to date with their progress too, as they are now able to check their analytics and see that the site has actually grown since we put the website together.