Revolutionizing Real Estate: Lennar LMC's Unified Platform for Community Sites

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LMC, a multifamily real estate development and operating company, faced a significant challenge in managing its community websites. The company's previous sites were designed and built by various agency partners using different hosting solutions, leading to inconsistent user experiences. The creation and management of new sites required the assistance of the agency partner, and the time to market was slow, as sites had to be built from scratch each time a new community was launched. The LMC team wanted to design and implement a platform that would unify all of its community websites under a single hosting and management platform. They aimed to provide their content marketers with modern, user-friendly web authoring tools, create more consistency in structure, branding, and wayfinding among community sites, while still allowing for flexibility. They also wanted a platform that would allow them to import community data, rooms, and floor plans and allow extra metadata to enhance users’ ability to search.

Launched in 2011 by Lennar, LMC is a multifamily real estate development and operating company that has quickly grown to be among the nation’s most active developers. The company builds innovative, quality high-rise, mid-rise, and garden apartment communities across the U.S. LMC's team was seeking a solution to unify all of its community websites under a single hosting and management platform, providing their content marketers with modern, user-friendly web authoring tools. They also aimed to create more consistency in structure, wayfinding, and branding among community sites, while still allowing for flexibility.

Partner Velir conducted a thorough analysis of existing web properties and created wireframes to define key pages and a set of flexible components required to roll out community sites. Designers and developers began prototyping collaboratively to determine the best use of out-of-the-box Site Studio components paired with custom components needed to add functionality to the new Drupal site experience. After defining all components, the teams developed three unique web templates that allowed design variation as new community sites were spun up. Velir also worked with LMC to create a theme framework for the branded site experiences. Based on a comprehensive branding review, Velir developed three distinct design themes based on property type, market, and style, which allowed content creators to easily swap out key brand elements to deliver new and unique community websites on the fly. This approach simplified the process so that content creators can select a designated community from a drop-down menu without requiring any external help or technical ability to make it work.

• The new solution has revolutionized Lennar's operations. The company can now quickly spin up new sites for their communities without the aid of a developer. This has significantly reduced their time-to-live process from many months or weeks to a week or less. With minimal effort, anyone at the Lennar organization can create a new site, import property and floor plan data from third-party services, set up analytics, and build out a full working site in just a day. This has empowered even the least technical person on the team to be as capable as the most technical person on the team, fostering a more inclusive and efficient work environment.

• Reduced time-to-live process from many months or weeks to a week or less.
• Enabled non-technical staff to create and manage new sites, eliminating the need for developer assistance.
• Streamlined the process of importing property and floor plan data from third-party services.