Custom Real Estate Brokerage Websites, CRM, IDX, Email Marketing | TRIBUS

UX Teams: We Spy Because We Care About Your Real Estate Brokerage Clients

Katie Ragusa — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:29:03 +0000

This time of year it’s hard not to notice the creepy factor in the lyrics to the song “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.” “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake…” No matter how much you like Santa, that level of attention is probably a bit much. User experience teams don’t go that far, but we do have tools in place to observe a user’s activity while they’re active in our applications. Just like how Santa keeping an eye on you is actually a good thing (you might get extra presents), UX teams monitor users so that product improvements can be made without ever interrupting them. It’s also the best way to make sure we’re not getting biased or rehearsed feedback — people often try to be polite when I interview them one-on-one, but online behavior doesn’t lie.

I’m never afraid to hear criticism from a user who is willing to share. I think every user experience team would agree that negative feedback is every bit as useful as positive, because negative feedback gives my team the opportunity to consider a change and correct the situation for good. Hopefully that change also prevents any other users from experiencing the same frustration points. What actually terrifies me is that some users will log in once, and for whatever reason, decide that our product just won’t do for them. The worst-case scenario for a product team is a silent user who ultimately leaves the system dissatisfied, never to return again.

Here’s where monitoring tools come in

A user monitoring tool is anything that can be integrated with your product and deliver analytics. Usually the tool would provide you with a script that you can load in the tag of your application, and that’s all it takes for the monitoring to begin!

Now you can track who logs in, how frequently, from what type of device and what actually goes on while they’re using your app. These tools also create visuals, so you can run reports later.

Above, left to right: Hotjar’s Click Heatmap feature, Mixpanel’s Engagement feature and Google Analytics’ Behavior Flow feature

There are hundreds of options available and I do have my favorites, but I also like to see what other companies are doing. Thanks to the powers of social media and a poll from a Product Managers page I follow, I no longer have to wonder. Here’s how the most popular user monitoring tools were ranked.

Mixpanel won by a landslide with 107 votes — even beating the behemoth, Google. I’ve had an account for some time, but figured I need to dig in deeper since social proof has obviously told me to. Here’s what I liked most about Mixpanel:

It’s simple to integrate into your application (script in the header)
The graphs are informative and they provide many useful reporting filters
You can see who’s engaged and also where you’re losing users — similar to Google Analytics’ Behavior Flow, but you will need to define the specific “events” you’d like to track
You can send messages to your users and run A/B tests, which could eliminate the need to use other platforms for those features

Even though I like many features within Mixpanel, our team will keep our multi-platform approach, because there are just some things that I believe Hotjar and Google Analytics do better. Another thing to consider is that our application is a responsive website rather than a native mobile app, which would surely affect how monitoring tools stack up.

Solving the puzzle

Of course, when monitoring users like this, we don’t get the opportunity to actually speak to them, so we’re forced to make some assumptions. Monitoring tools give us insight so that we can work backwards from what users are doing to find out their why.

Just like snowflakes, every person is unique – their needs, motivation, technical expertise, familiarity with our product, available time, and so on. It’s impractical to think that we can solve everything for every user, so what I look for are trends – where are many users who demonstrate very similar behaviors and patterns? We want to build solutions for common patterns that end in a undesirable result.

Prioritizing changes

Now that you’ve defined where changes need to be made, it’s time to actually get the work done. When you are a champion for your users the way that our Concierge Support team is, it’s tempting to want to call every single change as high-priority item. I force myself to take a step back, and weigh the importance of the change (we rely on user feedback for this) with its potential impact (only a single brokerage, only users with a certain role, only users in a certain region, or possibly all users).

When I’m creating a roadmap, I’ll draw the chart below on a big whiteboard and mark dots to represent each change. That allows me to commit to things on the right side of the chart right away, forget about the things in the bottom left (at least for now), and continue to consider the rest for our longer-term agenda.

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Watch: Real Estate Brokerage Management by Guesswork

J. Michael Osborne — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 17:55:43 +0000

Plenty of real estate brokerages do certain things for no real reason other than, well, that’s the way they’ve always done it. For instance, your brokerage may still be taking out ads in the local phone book. Maybe that’s working for you, maybe you’re throwing money into the wind — do you know for sure? That’s what our session, “Management by Guesswork” is all about: seeing if old habits are tanking your profits, and using data to drive what’s next.

This presentation by TRIBUS CEO & Director of Strategy Eric Stegemann was given at the 2018 REALTORS Conference & Expo in Boston. Stegemann brings his many years of experience, both as a broker and as a creator of real estate technology, to show how you can reconsider some of your business practices and maximize your profitability and efficiency.

To get the most out of the “Management by Guesswork” session, be sure to download our real estate brokerage management by guesswork companion workbook.

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Building a Visual Language for Real Estate Brokerages

Jason Bustamante — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 14:32:34 +0000

Not to be confused with your brand or your logo, a visual language consists of a long list of assets and elements that should have a cohesive link to each other that complement your brand — but not necessarily be your brand. The first step is identifying all the places (website, business cards and billboards, just to name a few) you can/will influence with this design language. It then allows you to have constraints that will focus your set of designs and promote consistency in your messaging and allows others working on assets, who are not otherwise familiar with your style, the ability to carry on the standard your team will set. Let’s dive into some of the larger aspects that apply no matter what assets your real estate brokerage has or how large it is.

Building a Consistent Color Palette

A color palette is certainly part of brand building and visual language: A singular, powerful component that gives users a cue that they are immersed within a certain brokerage and its personality.

If you have a bold primary color, there are numerous ways to effectively assert its presence. Take Coca-Cola and Target, two red brands that choose to use their color in different ways on their websites. Coke takes a minimal approach. It’s an iconic brand that most people are familiar with, and they don’t feel the need to plaster the color all over the place. They let the emotion of their imagery and the physical product take center stage.

Target, on the other hand, also iconic, takes a much more bold approach as part of their visual language. They use simple patterns of red to exert the visual brand influence. And notice that, just because they have a bold color, it doesn’t mean they just plaster it everywhere flatly. They use different shades of red, use it as a checkerboard or circle to keep your mind interested in the content around the page, mixed with other imagery.

Making Type Memorable (and Readable)

There is no escaping the amount of content associated with your brand, and no matter how minimal or complicated your brand is, you’ll have to convey some literal message. How people read it (in capital letters, large/small text, spaced out, colored in, etc.) is incredibly important. Creating a hierarchy of type families, sizes and placements will not only show off that brand personality, but more importantly, make the page easier to perceive. For instance, Dropbox recently went through a redesign, and a custom typeface they use in a variety of ways (seen below) was a central element they used to build their new visual language, along with strong color palettes.

Choose a Direct Theme and Style for Your Imagery

This includes videos and illustration. But the consistency isn’t just always using humans or clear photos, which certainly are important, but more so: Do you use up-close, detailed shots? Do you want to portray a specific emotion within your assets? Are there colors that your could filter over them? The fine folks over at Climb Real Estate exemplify this. They use big, bright, local imagery that complements the clean look of their website.

Create a Library of Common Assets

Traditionally in the web development world, this would refer to having buttons, shapes and even animations that you could implement across devices, but I would take it a step further. This means creating things like icons and photography that will look good on any device, print material and beyond. The aforementioned colors and type could also be a part of this shared library, but the difference would be all the different ways you can implement these items in conjunction with specific elements that pair with them. Such as color in icons, or type within buttons.

This library might be a more generic, wide-reaching document, such as a style guide (a term you’ll hear thrown around in tech all the time), as all things don’t fit all mediums. Keeping that range of examples will focus your team when you have to elaborate your visual language in the future. As you can imagine, a company the size of Google has excellent documentation on how to build exactly this type of document. And because they are so massive, they not only show you what their guidelines entail, but how to implement their Material Design philosophy on your own products.

Examples of Visual Language Evolution in Real Estate

RE/MAX and Century 21 were the latest companies to give their languages a high-profile refresh, and regardless of how you feel about the changes, they both have done a good job of keeping a consistent system, made up of the points I’ve outlined and applicable across all their platforms.

It’s a big job, but it goes a long way in making the visual personality of your company stand out in a unified, iconic way. And one of the last important parts to building your visual infrastructure is to keep in mind that it is a living document. It should be built to evolve over time and mature as the design atmosphere and technology amongst us does.

Have fun and check out how we applied visual languages of other companies, including RE/MAX Results, here.

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Why Care About a Custom Real Estate Brokerage Website?

J. Michael Osborne — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 15:10:42 +0000

We make a big deal about custom products at TRIBUS. Take literally one second and you’ll see it’s written all over our site — custom real estate brokerage websites, brokerage CRMs, custom platforms. Custom is, clearly, our bread and butter. We don’t have to tell you the importance of having a website for your brokerage; you know by know their significant importance for branding, lead generation and connecting with your customers. (If you don’t know this, you can learn why you need a company website here.) But right now, many websites tend to just be different information packed into the same two or three molds over and over again. Creativity in web design has often taken a back seat in favor of functionality. So why should you care about a custom website? Why not skip the heavy lifting and deliver your content in a reliable, if not exactly unique, package?

Now, I’m not here to talk down about a good templated website. At TRIBUS, we offer plenty of those, in the form of our “Ashland”-theme websites, and we have many happy clients using them. A templated website is a great call for a brokerage for many reasons: You can get set up and launch far faster, you spend less money on development and design, and for a growing brokerage, it’ll scale alongside you without breaking the bank. But of course there’s a difference between an outfit you buy off the rack and one tailored specifically for you — and there’s good reasons why that tailored suit is going to cost you more and some time to prepare.

Custom Websites: Tailored to Your Needs

We say it all the time here at TRIBUS: No two real estate brokerages are exactly alike. A brokerage in San Francisco is going to operate quite differently than one in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For that matter, a brokerage in San Francisco is probably quite different than another on two streets away in San Francisco. Different listings, different agents, different goals, different ways of doing business, different outlooks on life. So why should those brokerages all share the same basic website with the same basic user experience? If you’re a brokerage with a brand that’s fun and friendly, perhaps you’re angling for millennial buyers, you shouldn’t settle for a website design that’s all boxes and blandness. If you’re a brokerage with a brand that’s sophisticated like a single-malt scotch, you shouldn’t settle for a website that looks like it’s for Bud Light.

A website that represents your brokerage’s aims will not only suit your brand better, it will also help you generate and convert leads better. For instance, if you’re more concerned about booking showing requests for your agents than anything else, a custom website can drive focus to that specific function. If your brokerage specializes in luxury listings, an out-of-a-box website isn’t going to help you turn a classy spotlight onto them. And the best part is, at least where TRIBUS is concerned, you own your custom site, you’re not leasing from us; if our contract ends and you feel like moving forward with another platform, you keep your website we custom-built together.

There are a boatload of reasons why a custom website is an invaluable tool for the brokerage who can afford it, many of them tangible (like good SEO built into the bones of each and every page during development and beyond), many of them intangible (like the kick you’ll get out of using all the tools you personally helped design and build). The joy of custom real estate brokerage websites is that — and here’s another saying you’ll here in the halls of TRIBUS — we start with only a blank page, ready to fill with your goals and ideas. So what do you want out of a website? We’re ready to listen and help achieve that dream.

Interested in learning more about TRIBUS’ custom websites? Learn all about the process of building them here, and about what happens when we launch a site here. Or you can learn about the websites of a few of our fully custom clients, RE/MAX Results, Zephyr Real Estate and Climb Real Estate.

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Real Estate Brokerage Websites Are a Wealth of Information

Calvin LaDue — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 17:00:35 +0000

Real estate has gone digital. That’s a cold, hard fact. Actually, maybe that’s just a fact. You could certainly argue that it’s a good thing, and I would agree with you. Plus, you can’t argue with the consumer. According to the National Association of REALTORS®, 44 percent of people look for a property online first, before using any other medium. Why, you ask? Convenience and huge amounts of time saved. People can compare thousands of properties, and they get help narrowing down their choices with a wealth of information. This includes excellent home-searching experiences, none better than on TRIBUS’ custom real estate broker websites.

How are real estate websites being used?

As I mentioned earlier, we know that 44 percent of all buyers looked online for properties for sale as the first step taken during the homebuying process. If you consider any point in the process, 99 percent of Millennials will have consulted an online website for their home search. You can’t count out the older generations, either — 89 percent of older Baby Boomers (born 1946-1954) and 77 percent of the Silent Generation (born 1925-1945) will search online at some point in the homebuying process. Websites are clearly being used heavily, but what about them makes them useful?

Thankfully, NAR has done some pertinent research on this topic. Again, what is most useful to people tends to differ by their age, so it’s important to cover many features. Photos and online information about properties were most important to Millennials, whereas agent contact information and virtual tours were most important to the Silent Generation. This matches up well with the data that is already on real estate websites: 95 percent have property listings, 78 percent have agent/staff photos, and 56 percent have community information.

How could a brokerage stand out?

A great start would be to make sure your website is compatible with as many services and features as possible. Although TRIBUS strives to do as much as possible in-house, we can’t cover all of the bases. That’s why TRIBUS has optimized 100-plus integrations, so you’re able to use and display everything you need on your website, seamlessly. Another good option is a real estate blog. Only 11 percent of all Realtors have a blog, so make sure you get ahead of the pack! Since TRIBUS builds its platforms on WordPress, brokers can use its powerful content-management system for their real estate blog.

And as always, software and other technology is continuing to expand. When you’re with TRIBUS, you can be confident that your brokerage will keep up with the changing trends.

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TRIBUS First to Send Solds to Zillow

J. Michael Osborne — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 22:07:22 +0000

TRIBUS Becomes First Broker Platform Vendor to Automatically Send Agent Sold Data to Zillow, Claimed Immediately After Closing

TRIBUS, the leading provider of custom real estate brokerage platforms, including custom real estate brokerage websites, CRM, company intranet and more, has become the first such vendor in the industry to provide its broker clients with the ability to automatically send all their sold data to online real estate database portal Zillow. These sold listings will automatically be claimed for the correct listing or selling agent immediately after closing.

TRIBUS — whose custom clients include the largest RE/MAX franchise in the U.S., RE/MAX Results, as well as San Francisco’s Zephyr Real Estate and Realogy’s Climb Real Estate — will be saving large brokerage clients and their agents countless hours in data entry. This new connection entirely eliminates the need to manually enter thousands of sold homes into Zillow. An agent who displays their past and recent sales on their Zillow profile engenders trust with consumers and can be more likely to be contacted as a result, the past sales working as a track record of success.

“We’re excited to work with TRIBUS on behalf of our mutual broker partners to automate the publishing of a broker’s sold data to Zillow Group sites,” said Sara Bonert, Vice President of Broker Services for Zillow Group. “This means their data will get to our sites faster and more accurately, eliminating the need for public records and manual data entry. This also helps buyers’ agents get marketing exposure for their participation in a deal — something not typically available through public record sources. Faster, more accurate data and augmented branding on Zillow Group sites is a big win for brokers, agents and consumers.”

Before now, agents needed to manually match their sold listings on Zillow.com in order to display this information on their Zillow profiles, one by one or by emailing in a CSV file. Now, TRIBUS’ API connection with Zillow can do all this work automatically and immediately after closing.

This kind of quantifiable credibility can make a world of difference for agents to be competitive on Zillow. Particularly for brokers with large rosters of agents, it can be nearly impossible to ensure they are all entering this sort of information after each and every sale they make. Through this new connection with TRIBUS, they no longer have to worry.

“At TRIBUS, we are always looking for ways we can use data to improve agents’ productivity in their day-to-day lives,” said TRIBUS VP of Product Katie Ragusa. “Not only does this new connection with Zillow improve upon our existing integration, it charts a new path for unifying brokerage operations while taking advantage of all-important marketing opportunities on Zillow.”

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How TRIBUS Has Developed a User Experience Strategy

Katie Ragusa — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 17:28:25 +0000

The term User Experience (or “UX”) is so on-trend right now that it can be tough to distinguish between companies who are consistently investing in their UX efforts and those who have simply worked the term into their vocabulary because it’s an effective buzzword.

You may think of UX as research or product testing, but those are just some of the actions teams like ours take to deliver a great experience for our users. When implemented well, UX can have a positive and long-lasting effect on a company’s growth. It can also be the difference between systems we find mundane (or maybe even dreadful) and those that are a joy to use.

The goal of the UX team is to delight your users.

I love the term “delight” because it means multiple critical things are coming together seamlessly.

The “on/off button” was obvious
The process to achieve the goal was clear
The action could be completed in few steps and with little cognitive load
The application provided value
There was some sort of wow factor or pleasant surprise — this is key

Here’s how we get there at TRIBUS.

Develop a deep understanding of who your users are

The best way to get to know your users is to talk to them — often. Here are a few questions I urge you to be able to answer on your user’s behalf as soon as possible.

What motivates them to use your platform?
From what device and type of internet are they connecting?
Are they visiting to browse around or are they in a hurry to complete an action?

I’ll never forget one of the statements made during my interview with Redfin’s Senior Director of Product, Pei-Chin Wang, earlier this year: Imagine that mom searching for nearby homes while riding in a car with noisy children in the backseat. You can’t help but visualize her urgency, possible distractions and her need to complete the task at hand.

Embed customer empathy into your culture

First, define what types of users you have and create a detailed persona for each. Then, when making product decisions, frame them around the users from your personas: “How would feature X help Sally to do Y?” Just don’t forget to update your personas or add variations regularly as things change!

You can also collect lots of valuable information and trends from current customers by talking with your support team. We even go so far as to have our managers and executives rotate into our live chat and help desk systems regularly, so we can all experience customer communication (positive and negative) first-hand. No matter how you collect feedback from your customers, make sure you maintain some level of customer interaction in every department. That’s an obvious task for sales and support, but what about design and development? Include customer quotes along with analytics and metrics so it becomes more personal and you never lose context. I also record some of my calls so that key moments can be shared with my team later.

Conduct continuous testing

It’s imperative to validate design decisions through many user testing sessions. These are just a few ways we’ve worked testing into our process:

Eliminate your own bias by forcing your team to begin with a testable hypothesis and not a solution.
Design>test>iterate and repeat. It helps when you can test early and often because if you find the right path from the beginning stages, you can avoid some code debt later on.
Invest in user monitoring and feedback tools so that you’re collecting data even when you’re not actively hosting tests. We love Google Analytics (of course), Hotjar and short in-app polls.
Remember that the goal is consistent improvement. It’s far better to get something into a user’s hands that could be improved upon than launch nothing as you strive for perfection.

No matter what your budget or team looks like, there’s some form of user experience efforts that can fit into your workflow. I covered a few of my favorite usability tests in a previous post — the best part is that each one from that list requires very little setup time, user interruption and cost.

Share the results

I have a much happier team when I can explain that we’re building/changing X because it won out during our usability testing. Or that a certain percentage of our users agree that Y works best for them. Especially when the results surprise you, share that news with your team.

We also host post mortem meetings after big projects so that everyone involved can share their feedback and learn the rest of the story — what actually happened once the feature was in the wild. When you’ve spent months designing and building, you surely want to know how customers are using it and what their feedback has been.

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Take Advantage of All Your Real Estate Brokerage CRM Has to Offer

KerryAnn McCrosson — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 16:03:26 +0000

Back in my days as a Realtor, the winter months always brought with it a bit of quiet for the market. The sun is setting earlier, temperatures are dropping, and with the holiday season just around the corner, buyers and sellers tend to cool off in their home search. While this is a well-deserved break for agents, brokers should be encouraging them to use this time to focus on some of the resources they have access to, but perhaps not mastery over — which will ultimately help them be far more productive when the sun comes back out and the spring market gets going in full swing! One easy and very important option: help them take advantage of the CRM your brokerage provides, including setting up competitive email marketing. Not only could this powerful technology help them make their lives feel less cluttered, but they may even get a new spring lead from sending that “Happy Holidays!” blast email to their contact lists. The best part is: they can do it from the comfort of their own couch! Take a look at these handy tips to help your agents make the most of your CRM during these winter months.

Take a closer look at your CRM contacts

When they first start using a CRM, it’s not uncommon for your agents to have just imported whatever contact database that may have already had. For some agents, this means handing their office admin a spreadsheet of every contact from their email, phone, social media, et cetera. Some of those contacts might not even have a name or email associated with it, so now’s a great time to clean up unused contacts. Delete unsubscribes or contacts with emails that consistently bounce — no need to keep sending emails to that lead who came onto the site and gave a fake name/email. By doing this, you’ll also be able to better monitor your real estate brokerage email marketing platform with more accuracy and see what campaigns are giving you more opens and therefore more success. Plus, the more your agents send bounced emails, the more likely their emails are to be filtered straight into the spam folder!

Set up strategic email campaigns

Once they have their contacts clean and organized, it’s time to take advantage of setting up your email marketing. A CRM allows you to not only keep track of clients individually but also allows you to send out emails based on an automated system or even in bulk. Anyone can send a “Call Me to Sell Your House” email, so encourage your agents to add some personality to theirs! Using this time to come up with catchy emails or set up links in the email to your website for additional traffic can prove incredibly useful. Just make sure contacts are set up for the appropriate email campaign! Nothing scares away a new buyer like accidentally sending them, for instance, a “Tips for Getting Your House Show Ready” email. While these emails are automated, try to add a bit of a personal touch to them so leads don’t feel like they are just another contact on your list — the branded headers and footers that come with our email marketing platform can help with that. Need advice on topics for your email templates? Our team at TRIBUS is made up of former real estate agents and brokers and are more than happy to give you any tips — read more about automations you can set up within your brokerage CRM here.

Actually use your CRM

This may seem simple, but your CRM can take a big hit when your agents are all out showing houses all day for months on end. Don’t let all the hard work you and your agents put into your system these next few months go to waste. Your CRM is there to make things easier, so take advantage of all it has to offer! Your agents should make it a habit to jot down notes about a lead within your brokerage CRM — a client will be so impressed whenever you remember something they told you at the first house they met you at. Set up automatic reminders for important dates like birthdays, anniversaries and especially closing dates. Make sure your agents are updating contacts’ accounts as they change from buyer to seller, to past client, et cetera; this is as easy as applying a tag to the contact. Most importantly, keep adding leads to your CRM from your custom real estate brokerage website!

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Next-Level Real Estate Brokerage Web Design Trends

Jason Bustamante — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 13:22:22 +0000

I introduced trends in an earlier post, setting a solid foundation of elements we are pretty familiar with and how they have evolved, recycled into the modern day. Those are essential, but the training wheels are off and there is a vast landscape of next-level web design trends that can take your custom real estate brokerage website to the cutting edge. These ideas are not only beautiful, but are designed with specific purpose to keep your users engaged, entertained and more likely to get in touch with one of your agents. Let’s dive in.

Mouse Movement Animations

Animation and interactivity have been commonly used elements in the web design community over the years, but a growing trend has been movement tied to your mouse movements. “Parallax movement” has been the latest example, where, as you scroll down a page, two different elements move at different speeds to create an effect of more depth on the screen. And another wave has been virtual reality immersion. But there is a happier middle ground between the two, and it is a bit more subtle. If you look at Italian wine makers De Buris’ site, you’ll find that they take a very immersive experience that involves more movement than your average sites this year.

You almost feel like you’re in a funnel every time you scroll to another section, which creates a narrative about the company that comes to life. As you move your mouse around, the site moves with you.

Now, in the real estate world, it might be a stretch to apply it exactly like the wine makers, but a less-distorted effect across your neighborhood pages could go a long way in immersing your users within the community, as much as you possibly can within a screen — which should be your objective with every page. You want to give users a sense that they could see themselves living in this neighborhood, and instead of just looking at it, they can get a preview of what it would be like to move through it. It might be a very difficult style to apply to listing photos, as you want your user to have a very concrete sense of the property that this particular style might ruin, but it is not impossible. But for wide-scale images of your communities, you’ll have something that will definitely set you apart in the industry.

Next-Level Parallax

I talked in the previous paragraph about parallax, and traditionally, its first inception was with wide hero images that would move at a different pace than your scroll. There was not an incredible amount of utility outside of looking cool. But parallax in 2018 and beyond has gone next-level, having a lot to do with showcasing physical products. The results are incredible.

I’ve always admired for their attention to their design, and their latest iteration is a peach. Almost every page has some sort of advanced parallax effect that showcases their products. As you scroll, products come from the sides of the screen as if it’s a vaudeville show, and as you scroll further, the stereo products presented start to turn like in a fashion show.

Apple is another popular example of recent that uses this technique for their new product launch pages.

This interaction might be a little more tough to pull off for a real estate brokerage website, as you would need 3D images to piece together, and in real estate, our products are quite large. But if you are a very tech-savvy firm, you could showcase a featured agent on your home page or you could incorporate elements of your logo to pop out from the sides or bottom of your website to add that touch of brand recognition that hammers home what type of brokerage you actually are. The more practical route is to use your 2D images and use direction for your parallax that indicates intent and control of what content a user should consume, and where they do it.

Seamless Interactive Grids

I’m always a big proponent of seamless experiences, where any interactivity you encounter stays (or at least appears to stay) on the page that you landed on. Domino’s Pizza built a great site that accomplishes just that. Not only do they have incredible illustrations that set a very strong brand utility, but they fully immerse you with a simple concept that spreads across the page and makes it appear huge. And when you finally decide to interact with the pages, the cards within the grid pop off the page and focus in on a single interaction you have to make, which, in this case, is tying specific events toward ordering pizza.

This might be the most practical trend that you could apply to your real estate brokerage website, as the grid is a natural way to browse for listings. Having them sprawled across the entire page may be a bit overbearing, but over time, with next-level advances in accessible technology, I think these types of layouts are going to become the norm. And being able to lay listings out on your proverbial “digital table” and flipping card after card up — for real estate, that means flipping through photos and ultimately reaching out to contact an agent or schedule a showing — makes this an incredibly useful layout trend to watch and follow.

At TRIBUS, we always have an ear or two to the ground for next-level web design trends. Check out some of our projects here.

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