Luxury goods are defined by rarity. When clients understand that you offer something unique and fully customized, something that they won’t find anywhere else — your value proposition soars. If your clients don’t feel it, you won’t convince them otherwise. This is why luxury brand marketing needs a unique website that stands out, one that demonstrates the investment in making it original.
What are the design principles for luxury real estate website development
These days, a website is a powerful tool for attracting and converting clients. It integrates all the marketing technologies of the past: brochures, presentations, videos, interviews, and the like. An outstanding real estate website design will make potential customers fall in love with your project and appreciate its unique value. It will make your project memorable and will distinguish it among the dozens of competitors. Your clients will return to get new information and find new arguments to buy it. A mediocre website will squander these opportunities, making your project look lackluster and disappointing.
A website that measures up to a premium brand must be original and informative, with a cohesive structure, rich content, and sophisticated design. You must ensure that it creates a striking impression, exciting with novelty, and inspiring trust.
The Best Marketing Strategy for Luxury Real Estate Websites — Be Remarkable
So that your brand gets noticed
At their core, luxury marketing communications serve to find the most efficient way of conveying what your brand is all about. They need to provide a maximum of information in a minimum of time. We receive most information subconsciously, therefore your website must appeal to your clients’ emotions. And there is always too little time — just as long as you can hold your client’s attention.
Seth Godin, the guru of modern marketing, argues that brands need to be remarkable to be successful. He asks you to imagine that you’ve met a purple cow — something unique, impressive, exciting, and news-worthy. Your brand must become that purple cow to be noticed at all.
If what you’re offering is completely unremarkable, it will stay unnoticed.Seth GodinMarketing expert, entrepreneur,
So that your brand is remembered
Potential real estate clients scroll through dozens of websites and hundreds of offers. Website development is a battle for staying memorable. It is your brand that clients need to remember when they are making their decision.
We best remember things that evoke emotions — this is in our brain’s nature. Finding a brand can create a vivid and long-lasting memory, a flashbulb memory as the experts call it. You need to astonish your client with something impressive, surprising, and fun in order to create such an impression. This is why it is so important to find the right creative solution.
If you are making a real estate website without striving to make it memorable and eye-catching, you are wasting your money. You are losing clients and flushing your marketing potential down the drain.
What’s stopping you from developing a remarkable luxury website design?
Your desire to follow trends
Following trends is a guaranteed way to become exactly like everyone else. Intuitively, it seems like it also guarantees results. In fact, it is an inherent psychological mechanism that compels us to be “just like the rest.” Psychologists call it a normative social influence that we experience because we want to be liked and accepted by others. This influence can play havoc when we are making marketing decisions.
If a certain visual effect or a design element becomes popular, it appears to be effective. In fact, there is zero correlation between the two. Looking for popular solutions and following trends is totally useless if you want clients to choose your brand. On the contrary, you should study your competitors to be different from them.
Fear of taking risks
Original solutions scare many companies away because it seems like they create additional risks. Going for a “standard website” looks more reliable than being original. In fact, you can never escape taking risks, but our misconceptions prevent us from accurately assessing them.
Solutions that look intuitively reliable guarantee nothing. To give you an example, when Hertz, the automobile company, needed a website, they tasked Accenture, an international IT-giant, with developing it. It would appear that such a global developer would find such a small task as creating a corporate website extremely easy. Although Hertz spent thirty-two million dollars, the website never launched. They were too afraid to go to find a specialized contractor, and instead they chose a big IT-company that lacked experience in their field. They made a superficial decision that looked safe instead of thinking it through.
Doing what everyone does, instead of carefully examining your own decision-making, is the biggest risk of all. You won’t notice that context might change because you didn’t take it into account, relying on formulaic solutions. When you act like the rest, you risk becoming the protagonists of Pieter Brueghel’s painting “The Blind leading the Blind.”
It is dangerous to use real estate website templates or follow luxury marketing trends without understanding their essence. Customary solutions are neither effective nor profitable.
Pursuit of minimalism
There is an antiquated misconception that minimalism is the best solution for a premium brand. Allegedly, quality speaks for itself, and a premium product doesn’t need an introduction — you only need to showcase it. The less we say, the better.
Perhaps, this design philosophy is a reaction to the tasteless and meaningless amalgamation of trendy visual effects. As a result, companies head into the opposite extreme and create incoherent and featureless websites.
Minimalism, just as any other style, is an instrument one should use deliberately. Today, it would be a poor choice for the luxury real estate market, but there are cases when intentional minimalism could be effective:
- When the brand is ultra-famous. Brands that have invested billions into luxury marketing have already said everything. Even if you don’t care at all about cars, you’ve heard something about Rolls-Royce. These brands can afford to be concise. The majority of the real estate projects are designed differently, they have a different life span. When a new real estate project enters the market, clients know nothing about it.
- When the value is obvious from a single photo. Jewelry, accessorizes, watches, clothes — their value is easy to demonstrate and explain. Clients can see them, understand them, and appreciate them in full. For instance, Vacheron Constantin, a Swiss luxury watch website, focuses on simply demonstrating the product. Real estate, however, is a multifaceted and complex product. Clients need to assess numerous aspects: location, architecture, quality of the material, layout, etc. What’s most important is that they want to feel what it would be like to live there. What kind of emotions does it evoke? It is impossible to demonstrate this on a single screen.
- When minimalism is the essence of the brand. Minimalism works when it becomes a foundation of the luxury brand marketing strategy and imbues it with meaning, instead of impoverishing it. A minimalist decision should be deliberated and meticulously developed conceptually. For example, the laconic style of Dom 22 website is informed by references to classical architecture and moderation as a key element of the brand.
In all other cases, a website should communicate the unique rhetoric of the brand and express its character. Mood and emotions convey a unique real estate marketing idea to its clients. If you choose minimalism for the sake of minimalism, you lose an essential tool to influence clients. It is like playing chess with pawns only. It is easier to win using all chess figures — communicating your message on rational and emotional levels.
Lack of website strategy
There are websites where you can change the logo — and nothing else will change. It means that they communicate nothing about the brand. Companies can spend big money on them, but their effectiveness is next to zero. A website must carry meaning.
This meaning doesn’t appear independently, it is developed alongside a communicative strategy that demonstrates a profound understanding of the project and its context: the structure of the real estate market, the main competitors, clients’ expectations and needs.
Communication falls apart when there is no comprehensive website strategy. Your message will appear incoherent, users won’t understand it, and they won’t become clients.
Meaningless flashy effects can be entertaining, but they communicate nothing about the brand and can even conflict with its mission. For example, a website can offer an outdated concept of luxury to the demanding real-estate clients, trying to pass it for a sophisticated taste. Such tricks communicate only artificiality and deceit. Best case scenario, your clients will trust the brand less, worst case — they will get confused and close the website.
What should a luxury real estate website feature?
1. Brand idea
Exact and relevant brand positioning is the foundation of successful customer acquisition. Choose your unique selling point and identify its emotional core — something that possesses symbolic value, is essential to the client, and responds to the client’s needs. Such an idea elevates communication. It evokes a sensation, sometimes subconsciously, that becomes a decisive factor in completing the purchase.
Springs
- Unique selling point: Residency with a wellness center (spa, swimming pool, and fitness center) surrounded by city parks.
- Idea: Home is your source of renewal and your personal happy place. Here, you can be restored in body and soul, find peace and inner harmony.
Era
- Unique selling point: Outstanding architecture and design that reinvent the Art Deco style.
- Idea: Home as a moveable fantastical jubilee. Here you delight in the diversity of life.
Poklonnaia 9
- Unique selling point: five-star-hotel level of infrastructure and service
- Idea: House that satisfies the needs of sophisticated hedonists and aesthetes.
The idea is more than a tagline that you write and set aside. It is a point where meaning intersects with emotion. Like an electric charge, it shoots through and animates every design element of your website: texts, visual content, color palette, shapes, typography, animation, and UI-design. Your idea ties them together, creates a cohesive client experience, and drives purchases. If a flashy visual effect doesn’t represent your idea, then, most probably, you don’t need it.
2. Storytelling
Storytelling is a means to represent your idea through a webpage narrative structure. Every particular structure highly depends on the brand and the specific tasks of the project, but there are certain common rules that can serve as a stepping stone.
Your clients want to be understood, they want to see that the brand knows their pain and their needs — and that it offers a solution. All the advantages of the project are parts of that solution. Your idea unites them, presenting them from the client’s point of view. You can present a story about home improvement as taking care of your family, while location and infrastructure can speak for recreation and career opportunities.
Storytelling is a synthesis of texts, visual narration, and design that incorporates all elements of the website. Animations and transitions between screens can guide the user’s attention, highlight key points, and create rhythm.
Your story should be consistent, cohesive, and coherent, so that the client would get a general impression of the project even while skimming through the home page, whereas a thorough reading would only provide more arguments for the purchase. Your story should culminate with a call for action, providing your client with an opportunity to call or send a request.
3. Lifestyle demonstration
When luxury real estate clients look for an apartment, they care not about the square footage and the roof over their heads, they are choosing a lifestyle and a status that comes with it. They care about keeping their family in good health, giving their children quality education, doing sports, working and resting with ease, and admiring beautiful surroundings. Here are a few real estate website elements that would convey to your potential customers the feeling of living in their future home:
Visualization
Intuitive high-quality renders are the best means to demonstrate your project. They can convey way more than the building’s look: the façades, the yard, the interiors, and the rest. It is a window that transports your clients into their new life.
In order to enhance this immersive experience, you should choose a setting that represents a particular time of day during a particular season: a mysterious autumnal evening, a frosty wintry noon, or a fresh springtime morning. Clients can relate better to concrete scenarios that grasp their attention as opposed to generic daytime renders. You should take full advantage of staffage, which is to say that your settings should include people as affiliation points for your clients.
Mood content
Photos and videos that convey a certain mood can influence your clients just as much as renders, even though they do not exactly portray your project. When your website features images of people enjoying their morning coffee, running, playing with children, and walking their dogs, we subconsciously react to their facial and body language, empathize with their emotions, and role-play their imaginary scenarios.
Customized content — your own photoshoot always works better than stock or generated photos. You can better demonstrate advantages and create lasting associations via concrete, emotionally-charged images. When you put together a photoshoot, consider your website’s strategy. A beautiful but superficial photoshoot won’t perform better than stock photos.
Interactive infographics
You should find a creative solution to demonstrate all the unique amenities and infrastructure, letting your clients imagine how they’d use them. Something like a large dial that allows you to experience a typical day in a resident’s life.
Such details necessitate a balance between creativity and informativity, so that the users feel immersed, rather than distracted by interacting with them.
Gallery
For a large website, consider grouping all images of the project into a dedicated gallery, so that your clients could locate the features that interest them more easily. If your website features a lot of images, categorize them: exterior design and landscaping, common interiors, apartments and panoramic views.
4. Reliability guarantee
Buying real estate is a decision made with careful consideration. Your website defines your clients’ impression of the project. How they assess its design, its quality, convenience of its interface, and your effort is how they assess the project. How can you make potential clients feel confident about the project?
Beauty
This is every brand’s most powerful persuasive strategy. People subconsciously associate beauty with truth, therefore the more aesthetically-pleasing your website is, the better your clients trust it. This article will explain how it works.
Aesthetics and quality of execution comprise the general impression of a luxury real estate website. Creating a website is like composing a symphony. You need to act with good taste, experience, creative intuition, and moderation to develop and harmonize specific, emotionally-charged texts with balanced design and stunning animations. And this is only half the work — your symphony needs to be performed.
Underdeveloped frontend can completely ruin websites with the most refined aesthetics. The quality of your experience plummets if you encounter broken features, freezing animations, or scrappy layout. You should carefully adapt your designs and make sure that they work well on different devices.
High-quality UI/UX design
When UI/UX-design is well thought-through, it is both aesthetically-pleasing and functional. Clients can navigate it with ease, intuitively find all the necessary information, and get emotionally invested in the project.
Our experience in luxury real estate website development allows us to map the main information categories that clients typically look for. Your website should include:
- Location
- Internal housing complex infrastructure and amenities
- Architecture and interior design
- Floor plans and unique apartment features (as well as other lots)
- About the project (general facts and technical details)
- Project team (property developer and main contractors)
Regularly updated information
Clients will better trust your project if they can see that the website keeps being updated with news and current lot information. It would be best if your website visually represents construction progress — if you regularly post photos and feature live-cam footage from the construction site.
Sense of tact
If your first screen features an aggressive call for action, it might ruin the initial impression for potential clients. Such tactics are seen as brutish in the luxury brand marketing. Creating a cohesive website structure will make a positive impression, build trust, and elevate the value of your project for potential clients.
5. Innovative design elements
When you use modern technologies, you create websites that excite and make a lasting impression. Obviously, clients are discouraged and turned off by websites that are filled with meaningless flashy effects. You should, nonetheless, take advantage of the wow-factor to fulfill your website’s full potential.
Clients establish emotional connection to the brand when they think: “Oh, wow! I’ve never thought that websites could do that!” If your project looks impressive, modern, and innovative, it raises its value. What are some innovative design elements that you can use for your luxury real estate website?
The map of the neighborhood
Location is one of the most important aspects for real estate clients. Maps and plans can concisely convey key information about the housing complex amenities, neighborhood infrastructure, and its location within the city. You could create a neighborhood plan that could filter for the nearest fitness, food, education, and shopping opportunities.
You should emphasize the benefits provided by the location, it is a certain way to impress your client. An interactive 3D map could tangibly represent an area within the city. WebGL works best for such creative solutions.
Evidently, all visual solutions should match the overall design of your website, otherwise they would create an incoherent impression of the brand. You emphasize the synergy between the elements by using brand-specific animations, icons, and other details.
Selection tool
Your selection tool is your main client conversion tool. It is a catalogue of all lots on sale: apartments, penthouses, and the rest. Your clients use it to search for specific offers after you lead them through an emotionally-charged narrative. It doesn’t mean that your selection tool should only be functional and simple. If it doesn’t reflect the brand and contrasts with the rest of your website design, it will bring the quality of your website down. An effective selection tool completes your client’s cohesive impression of the project.
- Visual selection tool. An interactive image of the façade that leads you to a floor plan and then to the apartment page. It solidifies your client’s complete impression of the project — it presents not an abstract floor plan, but a residence within the building and the city. Aesthetically-appealing visualization turns a housing project into a comprehensive and memorable sensory image.
- Selection filters. A more conventional solution. It presents a list of all the available housing lots, letting you filter by criteria: price, number of rooms, etc. Clients interact more actively with this tool than with the rest of the website, therefore it strongly influences their impression of the brand.
Ideally, your website should feature both. Your clients might have a specific request, or they could be open to a variety of options.
Your visual selection tool may include several filters, but don’t overload the interface. If your project is comprised of multiple buildings, consider creating separate screens for each of them and a general one for the entire project.
You can elevate the value of your project by using motion design or creating a 3D selection tool in WebGL.
6. Content that elevates symbolic value
Premium brands attract an audience that wants more than simply a high-quality product. Your clients want to highlight their status and increase their symbolic capital. They anticipate that purchasing an apartment will introduce them to a particular way of life — one that is intellectually fulfilling, something that expands their horizons and demonstrates their taste. Your number of parking spaces and ceiling height won’t speak to that need. This is why your real estate website should feature expansive content that demonstrates symbolic value as opposed to practical benefits.
Architecture and design
High-quality architecture manifests itself not only in a beautiful and comfortable home, but also in creative work with meaning and cultural contexts. Reveal to your clients the backstage of architectural and design decisions.
Your clients will appreciate a glimpse into the history of your styles. To illustrate it, we represented the ERA housing complex alongside the world-renown art-deco masterpieces.
You could record a few video interviews with the architects. When experts speak passionately about their work, your clients appreciate the intellectual labor behind the architecture, and they can better understand what informs the value of the project.
Neighborhood’s history and development potential
Your clients care about the location of the house not only because they want to know about the level of infrastructure and understand how convenient it would be to get to work. They want to live in a neighborhood with a certain atmosphere, where they can find themselves, feel at home and among their peers. If important historical figures lived in your neighborhood, your clients signal that they belong alongside them by buying an apartment there. You raise your project’s value by telling a story about the culture of the neighborhood.
Your clients that focus on building a family nest will appreciate the content that narrates the history of the neighborhood. You could also tell a story about the neighborhood’s development potential, highlighting its place in the transforming city environment.
Abundant content will allow your clients to keep discovering new details each time they open the website. They will find new arguments for purchasing the apartment, and they will appreciate the project’s value more and more.
Final Thoughts
If you create your luxury real estate website with the same care for quality and attention to detail that you apply to your projects, it will be memorable. Your clients will perceive a reliable, high-quality modern project conveyed by your beautiful design and exceptional execution. They will develop a sensory impression of what it would feel like to live in that house. Your project’s cohesive and vivid image will leave a meaningful, emotionally-charged imprint in their hearts and minds, solidifying their choice.
Developing your website’s full luxury marketing potential is an arduous enterprise — from strategy, texts, and design to coding. You must find a balance between creativity and functionality that will fulfill the tasks of the project. In order to achieve that, you need more than being proficient in website development. You should also understand the intricacies of this industry.
Vide Infra, arguably, possesses the most extensive experience in premium and luxury real estate website design. Seven of our real estate websites won “Site of the Day” category of Awwwards, one of the most prestigious international awards in web-design. We perfectly understand the market and its specific demands, and we know how to unlock the uniqueness of each brand. Vide Infra is your ideal partner to develop the website for your premium project.