Buitenstate approached us with a challenging question to redesign their existing website and help transform it to a lifestyle platform. The ambitions of team Buitenstate caught our attention immediately. Buitenstate already had a large audience of thousands of people who are interested in buying or selling luxurious real estate. However, next to buyers and sellers, there was barely engagement with other personas - the mass of people with a dream or interest to acquire an exclusive rural house in the future. We took on this big project without hesitation and kicked-off an extensive co-creative process.

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Highlights

• Hybrid infrastructure with Webflow and an external server
• Development of a custom dashboard and CMS for the 20+ partnered Buitenstate makelaars
• Implementation of 40+ API connections with Realworks, Goes & Roos, Google Analytics and Activecampaign
• Powerful property meta search with all kinds of filters and over 200 exclusive properties listed
• 7+ Blogging categories with different (persona) lead funnels
• Various automations such as automatic subscriber adds to different mailing lists
• Real-time property statistics (views and other data)
• Extensive functionality for creating a search query: receive e-mails when a new property within your search is pulled in
• Smart filters such as the horse filter that scrapes all API data for keywords. It labels properties as “horse object” with X amount of boxes accordingly
• Custom Google Maps integration with multi-object views and clustering

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We started off with several strategy sessions in order to get clear the website objective, target groups and tone of voice. It became clear that the mass of people - the explorative personas who are just orienting on the exclusive lifestyle - was not engaged enough on the current website. The former website was mainly focused on the metasearch part - finding the perfect fit listing with some handy filters. Everything was focused on the buying and selling personas. This is how Buitenstate decided to go from into the direction of a lifestyle platform: engaging and establishing a relationship with the people that are orienting and looking for inspiration. On the long term, these personas could turn into a large pool of potential buyers by using the right funnels.

We helped translating these personas and customer journeys into actionable online content. So, next to redesigning and redeveloping the existing metasearch features, we developed an extensive lifestyle section with content categorized by persona. By integrating webforms on the blog article pages, we streamline potential leads into pools of personas for Buitenstate and their partners. We also developed a powerful back-end / CRM for the Buitenstate partners (the partnered real estate brokers): this CRM is called the "makelaars CMS" and contains all relevant lead information and statistics for the listings, accessible for each independent Buitenstate broker (partner).

In order to make this whole platform working, we spent much time in designing the infrastructure with two webservers and dozens of API connections. After a month or six, the platform went live, yet delivering Buitenstate crystal-clear leads and pools of personas, right in their existing mailing tool and the powerful custom-developed makelaars CMS. In short, a very complex but elegant project that we worked on with passion and still lives among our team.