One map of the whole neighborhood, theirs to update
WebsiteLogoPrint
Sunset Grove is 55 homesites across 107 acres in Pittsboro, out in eastern Chatham County, five minutes from Fearrington Village and fifteen from Chapel Hill. Four local builders worked the neighborhood, with Bryan Properties developing it.
Buying a lot starts with one question: what is still available. Keeping that answer current used to mean going through a system nobody at the sales office enjoyed. The site had to carry the whole neighborhood as a map a buyer could read at a glance, and put the answer in the hands of the people who hear about a sale first.
Sunset Grove sold out, so the site is no longer online. The screens here come from a preserved copy of the build; the logo and print pictures are made from the files behind it.
The map
The whole neighborhood on one screen
Fifty-five lots drawn to the plat, every pin colored by where it stands: available, pending, sold or coming soon. A buyer reads the neighborhood before reading a word about it, and sees at a glance how much is left. It is also the honest way to show a development, because the shape of the land is half of what they are buying.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
One toggle
A home sells, and the site says so
A home goes under contract, the sales office opens that property, sets availability to sold and publishes it. No ticket, no waiting on me. A development only looks current if the people who hear first can change it themselves, and this dropdown is the whole of what they had to learn.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
The inventory
What is open, and who would build it
Available now down one side, coming soon down the other, each lot carrying its acreage and the builder attached to it. Anyone weighing two lots gets the size and the builder in the same glance, which is the comparison they are actually making. Lots with no builder yet say pick your own.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Who builds here
Four builders, each in their own words
Halcyon, Poythress, Clarity and Walker, all four of them local, each with their own logo, a photograph of the people and copy they wrote. A custom home is a long relationship, so for most buyers the builder matters as much as the lot. Letting each firm sound like itself did more for the neighborhood than describing them from the outside.
Where it is
A vicinity map redrawn so the drive times land
I redrew the vicinity map from scratch: the roads, the lakes, the towns and the landmarks anyone coming from Raleigh or Chapel Hill would recognize. Above it, the drive times as plain numbers, eight minutes to a grocery store and fifteen to Chapel Hill. The same artwork prints as the handout a prospect leaves with.
The numbers
The questions everybody asks first
Where it is, how big, how many homes, HOA dues, the tax rate and fire district, the schools, the utilities. Every one of those gets asked on the first call. Answering them on the page saves the sales office the call and saves the buyer the wait.
The mark
Their logo, with the letterforms sorted out
They had a mark they liked and wanted to keep, and they were right to keep it. What it needed was the drawing tightened: the letterforms evened out and the two lines set so they read as one object. It is the kind of change a buyer never notices and every piece printed afterwards benefits from.
The set
One mark, three ways to use it
Full color where a piece can carry it, one color where it cannot, and a horizontal lockup for a letterhead or a banner. A small developer with no design team needs the version that fits the job already drawn, because the alternative is somebody stretching the one file they have.
On paper
What a prospect leaves holding
A pocket folder, a homes-for-sale sheet with the current listings on it, a magazine ad. Somebody walks the lots on a Saturday, likes what they see, and leaves with something in their hand that looks like the site they were on the night before. The two matching is what makes a small development feel like a real one.
What held it together
One list behind two views
A pin on the map and a row in the lot list are the same record, so a property that goes to sold changes in both at once. Two places to update is how a map and a list start disagreeing with each other.
Every property had its own address
Each home and lot got a page and a URL of its own, so a salesperson could send somebody straight to the one they talked about instead of to a map and an instruction to scroll.
Both maps download
The lot map and the vicinity map sit on the page as buttons, so a buyer who wants to walk the property with something printed does not have to ask for it.
Status was the only thing to learn
Everything that changed week by week came down to one dropdown on one record. A sales office with no technical staff will keep a site current only if updating it is smaller than the job of asking somebody else to.
The print and the site shared artwork
The vicinity map, the mark and the color all came from one set of files, which is why the handout somebody left with looked like the site they found it on.
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Craig WoodCEO, Definian
Your great work deserves to look great.
Twenty-five minutes. Tell me what you're trying to do and who needs to see it, and I'll tell you what I'd build first and roughly what it costs.