Creating a sitemap for commercial real estate firm websites

Key quotes:

• "A metasearch engine that provides you with the most up-to-date listings of commercial real estate in Vancouver, B.C."
• "You can now search for commercial property by neighbourhood, receive notifications about new listings, and flag listings that are no longer available."
• "The consensus among William-Wright’s team is that using existing search engines to find commercial properties is tedious and time-consuming as listings are often not up-to-date, are no longer available, or are scattered among several different websites."
• "The objective was to deliver a high-fidelity prototype of a metasearch engine that demonstrates how users can search for up-to-date commercial real estate listings in Vancouver, British Columbia."
• "Creating a user flow allowed us visualize the way that Steve, our user persona, would use the website to search for a listing and, if necessary, report a listing that is no longer available."

Key quotes:

• "No matter how successful you are as an individual or how large a firm you work (at), you are simply not going to get listing information in front of all prospective buyers if you seek to identify the buyer on your own.” — Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO of Sperry Van Nessextracted from The Financial Post This was the problem our client, David Hemmings from William Wright Commercial Real Estate came to us with."
• "“The way the industry works today, most brokerages will try to sell a client’s property on their own stable of clients.” — Derek Lobo, founder of Rock Advisors Incextracted from The Financial Post So there’s less of an incentive from those brokers to sign their companies onto platforms that aggregate their listings into one place for more exposure to other buyers."

Key quotes:

• "But the most successful real estate companies understand that real value comes from not only location but also insight and timing."
• "The David Hicks Company is a four-person commercial real estate, consulting, and brokerage firm based in Allen, Texas."
• "Hicks and his staff have established a relationship with Datastory Consulting to enhance the company’s website and implement ArcGIS Online, which provides an interactive mapping interface to help explore locations and information about them such as demographics."
• "In an assessor’s office, spatial analysis can help reduce appeals, communicate assessment information with maps, and defend commercial appeals."
• "This story map includes detailed text that describes the data and analysis available for supporting commercial appraisal as well as the two workflows developed in collaboration with the Johnson County, Kansas Assessor’s Office."
• "This story map showcases the recent and future growth of condominium development in Washington, DC."

Key quotes:

• "Since you can submit as many different sitemaps to Google Search Console as you want, a good approach would be to have at least two sitemaps, one for the “static” part of your website that doesn’t change that often and another one for the “dynamic” part of your website which is updated frequently, like the blog section for example."
• "When Google comes across a canonical link that points to a different page it says to him “Hey don’t index this page, the actual source you should index is there.”."
• "Here are some links that could be helpful, as well: Google Business, among other things, is essentially a more user friendly way of adding LocalBusiness structured data, and you should definitely do it! It is best to combine this method and adding structured data manually because if Google’s Knowledge Graph is populated with your social media pages and B2B platforms like Clutch it will automatically link them to your business and your reviews will be shown in the rich results."

Key quotes:

• "User goal is to help commercial real estate broker save their time on finding a listing."
• "In this project, we divide all the work in 4 step which is Since we had limited time and our target audience is very niche so we decided to do our research with 3 methods."
• "The most important factors when looking for a property are location, price, and size Some other important property details are the floor plans and amenities Currently, commercial brokers have to go to multiple websites to see the listings available."
• "From the research having notifications for new listings would save time and effort by not having to constantly be actively entering search criteria to get new listings."
• "Let me introduce you to our persona “STEVE WANG” From our screener question and the information that we got from our interview/ survey combined, we came up with a persona which we will be referred to throughout the design process as he is our target market."