Asprient Properties is an upscale and student housing property management company which is in charge of a number of buildings in the Central West End area of St. Louis. When Asprient came into contact with us, they were interested in improving their website to attract more residents to their locations and continue growing. At the time, they owned 9 locations in total with many of them near the Saint Louis University and Webster University areas. Their housing units are ideal for graduate students attending the local medical school programs as well as young professionals seeking out the nearby nightlife of the city.
When we re-approached their website, the existing site had been extremely outdated. We aimed to create an attractive site that easily educated users on all of the properties they had available and made the application process easy to follow through with. More importantly, our goal was to make the website easy for the staff to use to continue adding new properties, update property info, and communicate with leads generated from the new platform.
INDUSTRY: Property Management and Rentals
SERVICES: Web Development, Graphic Design
BUSINESS: Rental Unit Leasing
TARGET MARKET: Young Professionals, Medical Students, Saint Louis
Research
After researching the competitive market in their area, we saw many flaws on competitors websites. We felt that most of the other websites made it hard to navigate each individual property and quickly get information on amenities, pricing, and the area the building was in. We also saw that none of the sites focused on showcasing the user what life may be like at the new residence. Many showcased testimonials and showcased the properties they managed, but few were showcasing anything related to the nightlife and physical location of the Central West End.
We also found that other sites did not have an attractive process for submitting maintenance requests or paying bills online. The old website was not setup with Google Analytics so we had no prior site traffic information but it did not rank highly for most search terms related to central west end housing and apartments. We concluded that some of the competitors had invested in quality websites, but there was a great opportunity in re-building Asprient’s website and addressing their online presence as we felt they had better physical offerings through their units currently available.
Goals
For this project, our goal was to market the properties that Asprient had available by marketing the lifestyle of living in the Central West End area. In rebuilding the website we created custom layout styles for property pages and used a variety of plugins to make them easy to recreate when adding new properties to the website. We focused on lifestyle images showcasing mid to late 20-year-olds enjoying a classy lifestyle similar to that of the CWE in St. Louis, highlighting nightlife activities, shopping, and entertainment that was reflective of what is available in the vicinity of their properties.
A conversion related goal was to make it easy to request a showing at a property or complete a real application if a tenant was in a hurry. The old website was not attracting new residents outside of phone calls. Our goal was to create a sense of urgency while making it easy to request a showing and reserve a unit online.
Another goal was to create a site that was enjoyable to navigate, build a strong brand representation for Asprient and made a good impression as a property management company, and create a website that people enjoyed searching for properties on.
Impact
Within the first month of launching the new website, Asprient Properties had zero vacancies at all 9 of their properties. In building a new website, they hired a professional photographer that we worked with to better showcase the properties. We saw that people spent an average of 2 minutes on property pages and overall spent an average of 5 minutes on the website around the time of the site launch. The site began to rank higher in the Central West End within two weeks for specific search terms used throughout the site copy.
Within two months Asprient Properties was under contract for 3 new buildings in the area and has continued to quickly expand in their area. They are a fast growing company with a hard working and energetic young team. They continue to manage the site themselves with minimal maintenance fees and have begun utilizing digital advertising networks and increased their social media presence.