Presence Real Estate
Client
Presence Real Estate, a property agency servicing the Newcastle region, specialising in higher-end residential sales, rentals and leasing, projects and investment. After 20 years operating as a PRD franchise, the business rebranded to Presence and set out to establish itself as the region’s clear industry leader.
Project Overview
A complete rebuild of the Presence website, moving off an inherited franchise platform onto WordPress. The brief was a site that reflected the new brand, made the selling, buying and renting journeys easier to follow, and handed the Presence team direct control over their own content.
Challenges
The inherited site had grown to over 1,000 pages of duplicated and unmaintained content, with no process governing changes or approvals. The architecture was locked, so even minor updates meant raising a supplier request and waiting.
Navigation had developed by accretion rather than design. Content wasn’t organised around how sellers, buyers and landlords actually search, there was no strategic approach to SEO, and the look and feel still belonged to the franchise rather than to Presence.
The practical cost: campaign pages that couldn’t be turned around quickly, a fragmented user journey, and a digital presence that undersold the business.
Objectives
- Rebuild the site around the Presence brand persona and values
- Restructure navigation around customer intent: Sell, Buy, Rent and Manage, Projects, About, Contact
- Mobile-first responsive design across all templates
- Full content control for the team through WordPress and Elementor
- Live property data drawn from Rex, with separate templates for sales and rentals
- Enquiry capture flowing into both Rex and HubSpot
- Instant online estimates via the Domain API, plus automated property alerts
- Preserve search rankings through the migration
- GA4 and GTM configured so the team can measure performance
Approach
We started with discovery rather than a redesign of what was already there. Understanding where Presence sat in the Newcastle market, and where they intended to sit, shaped the information architecture more than any aesthetic decision did.
We challenged the existing structure and proposed navigation organised around what customers are trying to do: Sell, Buy, Rent and Manage, Projects, About and Contact. The work was then phased, beginning with bespoke design for the homepage and marketing hub, followed by the full rebuild and integrations.
Execution
The homepage came first, establishing the visual language and interaction patterns for everything that followed. We worked through feedback with the Presence team until the direction was settled, then extended the design system across the site.
Every property template was rebuilt to draw dynamically from Rex, with distinct treatments for sales and rental listings. Enquiry forms were connected to both Rex and HubSpot, property alerts automated, and the instant online estimator built against the Domain API.
Alongside the structural work, CTA placement was designed to follow the reading order of each page rather than interrupt it, giving sellers, buyers and landlords an obvious next step without pushing them into one.
Over 1,000 existing URLs were mapped and redirected to protect search rankings as the site collapsed into a clean, purposeful structure.
Outcome
Presence now has a site that reads like the brand they rebuilt themselves into, and a team that can change it without asking anyone’s permission. Listing, agent and campaign pages are theirs to edit. Property data flows in from Rex automatically, enquiries land in both Rex and HubSpot, and the marketing team has a platform to run campaigns from rather than a site to work around.
The site reflects the belief the business was rebuilt on: that real estate has a knock-on effect, building wealth and wellbeing that benefits whole communities.
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