Sothebys wanted a property management system that automated their processes and a front end that ranked for their target keywords.

Sothebys International Realty is the world's leading luxury real estate platform, with their key focus focusing on brokering and marketing of residential luxury real estate. Assemble were approached to support the Balearics and Madrid franchises who had been using a limited property management tool, supplemented by manual processes, which created a series of organizational bottlenecks that hindered the business development. Sothebys also needed to improve their performance in SEO marketing and their front end required a full redesign to close any content gaps and improve the site's performance.

We kicked off the project with collaborative immersion workshops to dive deeper into the brief and help identify the project goals and audiences. We worked with stakeholders to define the overarching project goals, identify key user personas, and map the entire customer journey from awareness all the way through to sale. We carried out rapid sketching exercises to help everyone visualise some of the key points along the customer journey and what those could look like on the new platform. We also ran a series of remote interviews with people who matched the identified persona’s in order to gain more qualitative insight into their day-to-day roles and how they might engage with companies like Sothebys at any given time. Moving into the design phase, we started with another collaborative workshop, this one focused on ideating and sketching around solution ideas. So we were not limiting creativity, we began brainstorming without any restrictions, at a place where the sky's the limit. Once we had our ideas on paper we began to shape the designs around the business needs and internal parameters, creating a clearer picture of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Taking the best concepts from the initial sketching session we moved into rapid design sprints to prototype key templates for the new tool. We worked closely with the Sothebys team throughout this process, using both remote and in-person meetings to get feedback and talk through some of the tougher interaction challenges. We set out to build a flexible, extensible and extremely easy to use tool.

Over a 24 month period we developed a bespoke property management platform for Sothebys, which transformed their business efficiency. This backend powered a custom built front end that refreshed and improved the UX/UI of the site while also optimising content and performance to meet the requirements of their SEO strategy.