When you’re looking to buy or rent a property, you often have a clear idea of the area in which you want to live.
Draw A Map makes it easy for your website visitors to highlight their chosen area, directly on a map.
Without wanting to dwell on the technicalities here, we’ve gone beyond the point-and-click approach to allow customers to draw a polygon with curves. It works with fingers on tablets, or with a computer mouse.
The area selected can be easily changed, by adjusting each point.
Then the customer can see exactly which properties lie within their search area. #Resources / Sitemap – 7. Draw-a-Map Done Properly
This is a little trick to help customers when they’re typing in their choice of search location.
When the customer starts typing – e.g. ‘Far’ – they will be shown all matching areas within your database. This could be Farnborough, or Farnham.
All they have to do is select the right suggestion.
This makes life easier for your customers, and limits the chances of finding zero results – either because they’ve spelt the location incorrectly, or because you have no properties in that particular area.
Infinite Scroll is an easy way to show a long list of properties, whilst keeping page load times down.
You can either show your property listings in batches – e.g. 20 at a time – with a previous/next button at the bottom of the list to navigate to the next batch. This is the model used by Amazon and many online retailers.
Or you can choose Infinite Scroll. This is where when the customer reaches the bottom of the property list, the next set of results are automatically loaded beneath. You’ll see it on many social media sites, including your Facebook news feed.
Infinite Scroll can make it easier to view properties on smaller screens, particularly mobile.
This nifty applicant feature allows your users to save searches and properties so seamlessly that they barely notice they’re being enticed into registering on your site.
It’s a bit like creating a shopping basket of products on an ecommerce site.
The feature uses website cookies to recognise a customer, each time they visit your site. They can choose to save searches – for example, in a particular draw-a-map area. Or they can choose to save a shortlist of properties.
Each time they return, they can see the same saved lists and continue their search.
If they choose to, they can then go on to create an account, with a username and password.
When customers enquire about a property, you need to take the opportunity to send them a beautiful, branded email response.
Your site should work out what they are looking for, and send relevant email alerts, including staff profiles, so they know who to contact.
Email, when done well, can bring a customer back to your site time and time again.