Audience

Multifamily corporate staff that include:

• Marketing Coordinators, Marketing Managers and Marketing Executives.

Multifamily property staff that include:

• Property managers and possible leasing agents

RealPage internal staff that include:

• Account Managers, Implementation Consultants, Engineering and Product Managers

Challenge

Today website providers like Wix, Weebly, GoDaddy and Squarespace provide a website solution that puts the user in charge of their website. Everything from theme selection, designing and editing their website theme, integrations with 3rd party marketing and analytic tools and publishing their site for the world to see.

RealPage has been behind in their website content management platform for years. With the LeaseLabs acquisition in 2018, the website product team was forced to look at how their clients have and will manage their RealPage / LeaseLab websites.

RealPage needed a CMS system that would put the user in control to self-service a new website theme from beginning to end. Provide a robust and powerful editing platform that could allow the user to customize their theme on the fly and also expand a design library of website widgets they could utilize. An updated design that reflected the well respected LeaseLab brand. And finally, create the ability for clients to purchase other RealPage marketing products that would help generate and capture more leads on their website.

Outcome

My team and I where able to design a comprehensive CMS Admin that would become the market leader for selecting, designing, editing and launching a RealPage website theme. We successfully created several user flows that included the following:

• Self-service website set up and purchasing

• The ability to change or upgrade website theme and category

• Powerful editing interface that includes inline editing, adding new design widgets and moving sections

• Ability to select from designer inspired color palettes, fonts and layouts.

• Easy one-click product add on’s for other top of the funnel marketing products provided by RealPage.

• Combined CMS Config and CMS Admin as one flow for engineering to have control with one platform.

For the first time, website clients at RealPage will have Property Management and Property level dashboards to view progress task, marketing analytics and one-click actions to the most used functions by RealPage clients.

Finally, the biggest improvement was a technical strategy we pitched to have engineering build an API sync so clients could update PMC or property information in CMS Admin. This was a huge win! Until this idea was approved, clients have to manage all their PMC or property information in another platform outside of CMS admin.