Case Studies

Tartesso is a new master planned community located in the town of Buckeye, Arizona, in the growing West Valley. Upon completion, the community will feature 50,000 residential units as well as schools, recreational areas and nature trails on 12,000 acres of land close to the picturesque White Tank mountains. Tartesso includes homes designs from some of today's most highly regarded builders such as Pulte Homes, Hacienda Homes, Trend Homes and Elliot Homes. Tartesso offers large homes on oversized lots at affordable prices.

Tartesso is just one of the six active projects in the state of Arizona for Stardust Companies, which was founded in 1992 with the goal of being "A catalyst for building stable neighborhoods, through active involvement and engagement in our community."

The Challenge: Site visitors were leaving the site on the "homes" page where it linked directly to the individual builders sites. I-ology was tasked developing a navigation process that would enable qualified prospects to find the information they were looking for quickly and easily, leading to increased home sales.

Tartesso needed an enhancement to the site that would showcase the wide range of homes appropriate for any size family or lifestyle as well as the value proposition of owning a home in the community. The enhancement needed to:

• Attract qualified prospects and drive them to builders.
• Drive visitors to request appointments.
• Showcase home plans on Tartesso Web site instead of leading them to the individual builders' sites, where potential buyers were "dropping off."

I-ology recommended integrating a home search tool within the site to keep potential home buyers engaged, and on the site longer. The "homes" page previously provided a general overview of the individual builders; potential home buyers were then linked to the builders' site where they could search for more information on particular models. By providing site visitors with all the information they needed within the Tartesso site, the information was easier to retrieve and more helpful to qualified buyers.

I-ology also developed an e-mail marketing campaign that was received by Tartesso's list of subscribers, which highlighted the benefits of the new home search tool.

Within five days of the site redesign, Tartesso saw the following results:

• 9 "Request an Appointment" forms submitted
• 304 Click-Thru to the builders Web sites
• Average time spent on site went up 58.68%
• Page views are up 148.4%
• Pages per visit are up 141.2%
• Bounce rate has decreased 28%
• 56% decrease in people exiting the homes

In addition, the e-mail campaign had an open rate of 39% (the average for the real estate industry is 20.75%).