Modernizing the Public Experience

Overview

The Engel & Völkers public website serves ~10k daily visitors and 60k+ weekly visitors across the Americas — connecting buyers, sellers, and homeowners with premier advisors, listings, and lifestyle content. Despite strong traffic, the data told a sharp story: 724,456 listing detail pages viewed in a single month — but only 821 contact form submissions. That gap pointed to something deeper than volume. Users weren't converting because the experience didn't inspire confidence or make the path to an advisor feel natural. The hero felt dated, local shop content was buried, and the site functioned primarily as a listings tool rather than a brand destination.

Goal: Modernize the public experience to better reflect the luxury brand, surface local content more prominently, and shift the site from a search utility to a lifestyle-driven destination.

Approach

• Partnered closely with marketing to align on brand direction and understand what "luxury" needed to communicate at every touchpoint — the hero being the most critical first impression
• Analyzed PostHog data to map the conversion gap and identify where users were dropping off between listing views and advisor contact
• Identified three strategic focus areas: the hero experience, local content surfacing, and the listing browse-to-contact flow — each addressing a different layer of the brand and conversion problem
• Worked within an existing design system across hundreds of shop sites, requiring solutions that scaled without losing market-level specificity

Solution

Luxury First Impression

Redesigned the hero experience for both the Americas site and individual shop pages to reflect a modern, elevated brand. The hero is the first thing users see — it needed to signal that Engel & Völkers is at the forefront of luxury real estate, not just a listing aggregator.

Unlocking Local Content

Introduced persistent secondary navigation that reinforces each shop's identity site-wide. This gave shops a scalable way to surface their broader range of local content — exclusive communities, investment guides, local advisors — making the site's investment in localized content visible and discoverable across every page.

Seamless Listing Detail Experience

Redesigned the listing detail page as a modal experience, keeping users anchored in their search results rather than navigating away to a separate page. The modal minimizes the header to prioritize property images, key details, and contact/share/save actions — the things users actually need when evaluating a listing. An easy exit returns them to exactly where they left off, removing a major source of friction in the browse-to-contact flow.

Impact

• Elevated the brand's first impression across a site serving 60k+ weekly visitors
• Gave individual shops a scalable mechanism to surface local content and express market identity
• Reduced browse friction by keeping users in context when viewing listing details, supporting a smoother path to advisor contact

Reflection

The central tension in this project was designing for a global luxury brand while serving hundreds of local shops with distinct identities and needs. Marketing collaboration was essential — not just for brand alignment, but for understanding the business value of local content that the data alone couldn't surface. The biggest design challenge was building components flexible enough to work across every market without becoming so generic they lost their impact. That balance between system scalability and local expression is something I'd continue to push on given more time.