A new home(page) for real estate

In 2021/2022, Mather Carroll was rebranding. When they approached me to improve their landing page for prospective clients and investors, I jumped at the chance to develop design and copy for a well established B2B enterprise.

I had an idea for a campaign already.

“Rethink Real Estate”

A pithy turn of phrase that invokes a sense of modernity, and of revolution. Amidst the great resignation in the wake of the global pandemic and rise of hybrid and remote work, offices and warehouses the world over were being left for dead. I wanted to sell the idea that this was not a death toll for the real estate industry, rather, an opportunity - at least in the hands of Mather Carroll.

The company, I came to understand, sees value where others don’t. Their ethos is one of excellent service in niche and novel real estate development. The website had to convey their pedigree and scale, so I opted for a simple color scheme. White, Black, and Red & Yellow (their brand identity).

It was designed to be a pure and simple landing page. A single page funnel towards the company’s contact information for their east and west coast offices.

Obviously, I put them in their respective sides of the footer.

Personally, I find contact information like that to be imposing. It reeks of automated response and button pushing, and the invariable dread of waiting around. Whilst this is certainly not so in MC’s case, I added a query submission form on the webpage as a larger, simpler call to action for those like-minded folks out there. Quick and simple, both to create and use.

The majority of web traffic for the page before my design was, unsurprisingly, mobile. I’d have gone for a mobile first design regardless as a futureproofing measure, but this gave me more confidence in that decision.

The next thing on my plate was an ‘About Us’ section. I could have borrowed or paraphrased their previous text, but companies and tastes change. This was an opportunity to revisit it, and that we did. This was my chance to get some facetime with the stakeholders, and better understand their views so I could better condense them.

A welcome relief in developing copy for this website was the lack of a need for (much) SEO optimisation. This granted a lot of leeway as now much less of my strict word count would be wrapped up in buzzwords. Sometimes it’s harder to write less than more.