Building a High-End Estate Agency Website with Property Hive

We’re pleased to launch a new website for long-standing client Jean Oddy & Company, an independent estate agency specialising in Prime Central London property and helping international and expatriate families relocating to London.

Jean Oddy’s previous website was launched back in 2015 and had served them well for more than a decade. With high-end properties at the heart of the business, the site made extensive use of large, full-screen photography, something we were keen to retain while bringing the overall design and technology up to date.

A key part of the project was also moving the website’s property functionality to Property Hive, giving Jean Oddy a more established and flexible platform for managing their property portfolio and integrations.

A fresh look, with the properties taking centre stage

As part of the project, Jean Oddy wanted to introduce refreshed branding and a new colour palette that better reflected the expectations of their clientele.

The result is deliberately clean and minimal. Large property photography remains the focus, complemented by considered typography, plenty of space and subtle design details to create a suitably high-end feel.

The branding evolved during the project, which gave us a good opportunity to put the flexibility of our in-house WordPress framework to work.

Built around ACF blocks and CodyFrame, our framework uses a system of global CSS variables and semantically named colour utilities. Rather than tying components to specific colours, styles reference colours such as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’, allowing the underlying palette to be changed globally.

This proved particularly useful when Jean Oddy’s updated branding arrived during the project. We were able to introduce the new colour palette across the site quickly, without having to revisit and restyle individual components.

Building with Property Hive

One of the biggest changes behind the scenes was moving the property functionality to Property Hive, an established WordPress property platform built specifically for estate agents.

The previous website stored properties using a bespoke WordPress custom post type. We exported the existing property information to CSV and used Property Hive’s import tools to map that data into the new system.

As part of the migration, we wrote custom scripts to transform and tidy some of the existing data. This included cleaning up property titles and geocoding the existing portfolio so properties could be accurately displayed on maps on the new property detail pages.

Property Hive gives us a solid foundation for functionality such as property searches and listings, along with integrations with a number of external property portals. We were then able to build on top of that, creating distinct sales and lettings sections and giving the Jean Oddy team control over the additional content blocks that appear on those pages.

It also makes extending the website much easier. For example, when the requirement for downloadable property brochures came up, we were able to use Property Hive’s existing PDF brochure add-on and templating system to introduce individually generated brochures for each property without having to develop the underlying functionality from scratch.

Built for flexibility and performance

The site uses our in-house WordPress framework, combining flexible ACF content blocks with the CodyFrame front-end framework.

CodyFrame gives us a library of well-designed components to use as a starting point, while its combination of utility classes, CSS variables and BEM methodology helps us keep the resulting codebase lean. We can create highly bespoke designs without the amount of CSS necessarily growing at the same rate as the project.

That approach helps keep the front end lightweight and performant, while ACF blocks give the Jean Oddy team the flexibility to manage and update their content within WordPress.

The finished site provides Jean Oddy with a modern and flexible platform, designed to showcase their high-end property portfolio while giving them the tools and integrations they need to manage it effectively.

Looking for a Property Hive developer?

If you’re an estate agent using Property Hive, or considering it for a new website, we can help.

We’re an established WordPress agency with nearly 30 years of experience building websites, including bespoke integrations and technically complex projects. We can design and build Property Hive websites around the needs of your agency, from property imports and portal integrations through to bespoke search, listing and property detail experiences.

Whether you’re replacing an existing estate agency website, migrating property data or looking to get more from Property Hive, get in touch to talk to us about your project.