The Corcoran Group launched a redesigned website this week; the new site adds functionality, integrates social media and aims to improve user experience on mobile devices.
Instead of just posting a listing, the website now offers more information on the neighborhood where the listing is.”[It gives] people a sense beyond the four walls of the apartment or home what it’s like to live there,” Christina Lowris-Panos, Corcoran’s chief marketing officer, told The Real Deal.
On the “neighborhoods” tab on the new site, users can see how many homes in a particular neighborhood are being listed for sale or rent by Corcoran, and can find location-specific information — culled from Zagat listings and the location-based social media site FourSquare – about grocers, restaurants and health clubs in New York City, Hamptons and South Florida neighborhoods.
Matthew Shadbolt, Corcoran’s director of interactive products and marketing, who also worked on the redesign, said the inclusion of social media was necessary, as Corcoran’s robust social media platforms were previously not incorporating comments and information gathered from them into the listings. For example, the same Zagat information that shows up in neighborhood pages also appears at the bottom of listings.
Both Lowris-Panos and Shadbolt said the planning for the redesign began 18 months ago.They enlisted a Toronto-based interactive design firm, Teehan and Lax, to work on the strategy. Lowris-Panos said she could not comment on the cost of the redesign, but said “I would say it’s a significant investment.”
As The Real Deal previously reported, Stribling spent more than $1 million on a rebranding campaign that spanned from new stationery to a new website.
The Corcoran redesign also optimizes the site for mobile users. In addition, the enhancements were integrated into the brokerage’s existing iPad app and have made for smoother operations of the iPhone and Android apps — separate user platforms.
Aashish Jethra, a sales associate at Citi Habitats, which shares a parent company with Corcoran, told The Real Deal that the redesign “is more in line with the way people are searching … people want overviews,” he said.