Challenge
Slate Asset Management, one of Canada’s fastest-growing real estate asset management companies, found that its website was not keeping pace with its expanding needs and the sophistication of its global brand and reach.
Slate Asset Management’s previous environment posed five principal challenges which created a tremendous opportunity for growth:
- SEO: Search engine rankings did not reflect the company’s unique position as a top commercial real estate investor/manager with over $4 billion in assets under management in Canada, the United States, and Germany.
- Complexity: The company’s rapid growth required a website partner with advanced development acumen and broad marketplace experience in multiple nations and industries.
- Content management: Slate depended on the technical team of its previous provider to revise its website, slowing content updates to a crawl. Because of these delays, the previous website said nothing about several new lines of business and recent forays into new markets.
- Proprietary technology: Slate developed a proprietary asset-management tool that required better documentation and technical support than the previous vendor could provide.
- User experience: The old site often overwhelmed users with large volumes of information and needed more intuitive navigation features to create a more fluid user experience.
Solution
OnX’s engagement with Slate opened with a deep assessment of the company’s marketplace, business goals, technical capacities, and other business fundamentals. Agile development methods accelerated the process, which included:
- Creating a main website and two special-interest sites that better served the company’s principal target audience of private equity investors, institutional investors, and pension funds.
- Aligning Slate’s marketing staff in SEO best practices to better influence search engine rankings.
- Installing a Drupal-based content management system (CMS) that allows Slate staff to update content on their own without IT having to be involved. Staff were trained on Drupal and the user interface customized to meet Slate’s precise needs.
- Integrating Slate’s proprietary asset-management tool into the new site to give investors a point-and-click interface as well as real time pricing for exploring Slate’s real estate portfolio.
- Crafting a more intuitive, easy-to-use interface for web and mobile users.
Results
Today, Slate Asset Management has a development partner who understands how to adapt its website to meet accelerating business demands. A modern CMS enables the company to quickly add fresh content and revise existing pages to reflect its changing business.
Search engine rankings have improved substantially, and the ability to easily add relevant, high-quality content to the website sets the stage for even better rankings.
Website users can conduct precise, targeted searches of the company’s real estate holdings, which can be sorted by industry category, nation, and square footage. Google Maps integration shows the exact location of properties and the real time pricing and portfolio value provide up to the minute data for investors
The new and improved site is a true representation of our firm and its particular cache and we are thrilled with the result and representation.
“We were looking for a cultural fit and a partner that could move as fast as we do to meet an aggressive timeline,” said Katie Fasken, Associate, Business Development and Investor Relations. “The new and improved site is a true representation of our firm and its particular cache and we are thrilled with the result and representation.”