Room for success: the real estate portal erfolgsraeume.de
The real estate portal with intelligent search and filter functions
Erfolgsraeume.de is a state-of-the-art portal for researching commercial real estate, in which the focus is not on the broker, but on the real estate properties and those looking for it. Visitors to the website experience the implementation of user-oriented service requirements in digital form with intelligent search and filter functions.
The portal is operated by Erfolgsräume GmbH as an initiative of the renowned brokerage company Engel & Völkers Commercial Rheinland.
The still young platform is initially focusing on the most important commercial locations in Germany in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne and Stuttgart. In the next steps, the range of locations is to be gradually expanded with the support of the license partners.
erfolgsraeume.de: Maximum service for providers and users
Engel & Völkers provides a supra-regional platform for its regionally operating license partners to market their commercial real estate.
The main objectives of the conception of the portal were, on the one hand, to offer users search results tailored precisely to the request and, on the other hand, to enable licensees to post their real estate offers as efficiently as possible despite different software requirements.
Great importance was also attached to ensuring that both the usability and the graphic appearance of the website and the search and control elements correspond to the high-quality branding of Engel und Völkers.
The user perspective
The location-based search with an intelligent drill-down filter
With the drill-down filter, which intelligently combines the SolR extension, the Google Address API and the Google Geolocation API, zdrei.com has developed an extremely effective tool for localization and display.
The office space calculator
The office space calculator offers a useful tool for visitors who need orientation with regard to the size of the space required: The space required can be determined here - differentiated according to departments, number of employees and the specification from individual to open-plan offices.
Challenges & highlights
The challenges of portal development resulted primarily from the requirement to take into account the different needs of users, and different software requirements of providers (licensees) in particular.
Unique partial area logic with optimized search results
Larger commercial properties in particular usually consist of a large number of sub-areas that differ not only in their size, but also in terms of their use (office, retail, industrial and storage space). Thanks to the innovative partial area concept with its filter system and the innovative merging of available areas, the variety of hits was reduced to the essentials, thereby significantly increasing the convenience of searching and finding.
An example: When researching a retail space, the user immediately finds out on the detail page associated with the hit, whether the selected property also has office space and / or storage space.
This partial area logic with its innovative differentiation between objects and individual areas has meanwhile also been taken up by one or the other well-known portal operator.
Complex multi-level search technologies
The location-based hit accuracy meets all expectations thanks to a complex search technology and an architecture made up of multi-level SolR requests. In addition, the intelligent search mechanism ensures that zero results are reliably prevented.
The user is offered hits both via a map view and via a list display: While all relevant locations are immediately displayed on the map, the list is loaded successively in partial steps in order to optimize performance.
The geographic data of the objects are automatically determined on the basis of Open Streetmaps and updated if necessary.
Notepad and dynamic contact form
With an additional feature, the platform simplifies the establishment of contact through an object-related dynamic form, through which the request is specifically sent to the responsible licensee or contact person: with a notepad, individual areas or objects can be saved and sent as a list by email.
Maximum convenience for licensees
In order to minimize technical hurdles for licensees and to make handling as efficient as possible, zdrei.com designed the platform so that brokers can use their existing software to list their properties.
The implementation of the industry standard "OpenImmo" provided the technical basis of the interface for filling the platform. In order to guarantee a uniform and homogeneous object presentation on the platform, OpenImmo had to be extended because of very individuel broker software landscapes in brokerage agencies: An architecture in a layer model and the development of different connectors made it possible to integrate the heterogeneous content into the portal.
Additional internal area for individual locations
In addition to the opportunity to present their own offer on erfolgsraeume.de via an additional sales channel, broker agencies are also provided with an exclusive internal area for their own location. It is possible to use this to present property objects to selected interested parties via password-protected access, which, for example, should not be marketed via a public area at the request of the owner.
The client Erfolgsräume GmbH
Full Service für die Vermittlung attraktiver Gewerbeimmobilien
The aim of the client Erfolgsräume GmbH, who developed the portal on the initiative of Engel & Völkers Commercial Rheinland, is to provide high-quality offices, practices and shops in metropolises and other interesting regions of Germany. Engel & Völkers, with its network of licensees, operates internationally at around 100 locations (including around 60 throughout Germany) with a range of services that includes both advising owners and the specific mediation of purchases, sales and leases.
