In late 2018, Edina Realty had hit a fork in the road. Their web technology platforms were not meeting their needs in terms of performance, capabilities, and results. To take their business to the next level, the team at Edina Realty decided to reflect on the current solutions and future development.
Edina Realty embarked on a search for a new development and support partner for their web properties. They wanted a partner with deep knowledge of cloud-based infrastructure, SEO and content management understanding. They also wanted a partner that would proactively bring new solutions to help meet their technology, marketing and business needs.
Edina Realty Home Services, based in Edina, Minnesota, is a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate and a wholly-owned subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc. Edina Realty is the largest real estate company in the midwest and has led the market in sales for 20 years in a row.
Edina Realty ultimately selected Valtira to be their development and support partner for their web solutions. Valtira was selected due to the company’s deep technical capabilities, digital expertise and ability to improve collaboration.
Valtira was selected to prepare Edina Realty’s website platform to scale for the future.
Performance Improvements
Working with Kym Clark, IT Director, and other team members, Valtira helped deploy new technologies and incorporated DevOps techniques to reduce the early morning deployments from 45 min to 15 min with reduced risk and no downtime. In addition, the web page load time was reduced by an average of one second which improved customer engagement and satisfaction.
The existing CMS system at Edina Realty had performance, efficiency and flexibility limitations. To address these issues, Valtira and Edina Realty developed a plan for transitioning to a new CMS system to:
Improve flexibility, control and efficiency
Deliver new content more quickly
Prepare to scale for future content and marketing needs
Kym Clark
Director of IT
“Valtira has been very responsive, trustworthy and easy to work with. They are thought leaders and are quick to adopt new technologies to meet our needs. Their ability to not only develop, but to also own solution maintenance, is unique and has been very beneficial to Edina Realty.”
Technology Solution
In parallel with the website enhancement work, Edina Realty partnered with Valtira to improve its technology solutions and platforms. This included a range of development and infrastructure initiatives including a Web Application Firewall in Microsoft Azure.
Improved Web Metrics and ROI
To improve Edina Realty’s website metrics and ROI, Valtira worked with Widell and her team on a range of initiatives. Collaboratively, they created a plan which included the selection of a new CMS, development of new website enhancements and various Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) experiments to increase traffic, engagement and conversion rates.
By leveraging UI design changes and CRO tests by Valtira, Edina Realty improved their client engagement. Organic traffic to new indexable property search result pages vs old variation of city and zip pages (list view with extra click to filter or choose map view) also showed major improvements.
A 71% increase in account creations during the test period.
An average 28% increase in account creations since the winner was deployed.
27% gain in property showing request submissions via mobile with a 96% certainty over time.
An increase of 30% in sessions, 98% in goal completions, 136% in goal value
A reduction of 60% in bounce rate YoY (12% vs 32%)
