A2 Immobilien

Property brokerage is a business with a changing portfolio. Listings arrive, get reserved, leave the market, and they do so at a pace nobody can plan. A website for an agency has to follow that pace without somebody having to rework it every time.

That is why the dynamic integration of the property listings was the focus of this project. Maintaining properties one by one as individual pages works while there are few of them and collapses afterwards. The effort grows with every listing, and the source of error is always the same: outdated properties still sitting online.

Then there is the appearance itself. Anyone selling or letting a property chooses a person, not a search mask. So the site has to do two things at once: make the listings searchable and present the sender as somebody you would trust with a property. In design terms those two requirements pull in different directions.

The web design created for A2Immo takes up the company's brand guidelines throughout. Throughout is the operative word. Brand guidelines almost always hold on the home page, the question is what survives on the twentieth listing page. As soon as content is generated dynamically, the design has to cope with material nobody has seen in advance: labels of varying length, varying numbers of images, missing entries.

The second requirement was a maintenance-friendly implementation. On an estate agency site that is not a matter of comfort. Updating happens alongside the actual business, often under time pressure, and anything awkward simply does not get done.

Together this leads to a clear division of labour: the design sits in the template, the content comes from the portfolio. Visitors can search the listings directly on the website rather than moving to another platform. For the agency it means the site stays current without every change turning into a design exercise.

With estate agency sites, the early decision is where the property data lives. As soon as there are two places where a listing can be edited, the two drift apart. It is better to have one leading source that the website reads from, plus a defined route by which a property becomes visible and invisible again.

The second point is mandatory information. Property advertisements in Germany are subject to legal requirements about the details they have to contain. Those fields belong in the structure of the listing rather than in free text, otherwise one property will eventually be missing them and nobody will notice.

Third, making contact. Once somebody is seriously interested, a listing page has exactly one job: to establish contact. The route to it should sit in the same place on every listing page and work on a phone as well as it does on a desktop.

Finally, images. Property photos are taken under very different conditions. A layout for agency sites has to look right even when a listing comes with only three shots.