CoStar Group: Apartments.com

The Client

CoStar Group is the leading provider of commercial real estate information, analytics, and online marketplaces. Founded in 1987, CoStar conducts expansive, ongoing research to produce and maintain the largest and most comprehensive database of commercial real estate information. Powered by CoStar, Apartments.com is the leading online apartment listing website, offering renters access to information on more than 1 million available units for rent.

The Situation

Grow is an ongoing Apartments.com campaign encouraging property owners to advertise their rentable units across CoStar’s network of 12 home-related sites, including Apartments.com, Realtor.com, Homes.com, and ForRent.com. The goal is to help customers understand how they can promote their listings and optimize their campaigns with the help of dedicated account managers. In addition to making the Grow campaign site more manageable, CoStar’s design team had big ideas to raise awareness with a new design full of engaging elements to drive conversion and grow the advertising business.

The Challenge

In order to help customers understand all the ways they can promote their listings and optimize their campaigns, Apartments.com had to do a complete 180 and refresh and update the Grow site to reflect a lively, appealing brand whose performance matched the appealing site aesthetic. 

The old Grow site was difficult to maintain and was starting to show its age, so driving more leads by leveling up digital design standards was the project’s primary focus. Site admins needed a thoughtful set of options that provided flexibility without being overwhelming. The team needed to strike a balance between an impactful design, content management, and technical performance to deliver a digital experience that would ultimately drive leads.

The Solution

The CoStar design team created an entire new design to drive conversion and grow the advertising business. This allows admins to manage and change website content with fresh creative campaign assets to keep the site up-to-date for customers. CoStar chose Drupal as their CMS and partnered with enterprise Drupal web development agency Elevated Third to “Drupalize” the page designs into a set of finished UI designs. The team decided to leverage Acquia Site Studio for its strengths: component management and layout control. The collaboration between Elevated Third’s Drupal-centric UX and development teams and CoStar’s designers determined how the site should look and work. 

Together with the CoStar team, Elevated Third determined the possible content permutations, how components needed to scale and adapt visually across devices, and ultimately how editable, optional, movable, or removable each piece of content needed to be. By striking a happy medium between flexibility, consistency, and complexity, the Grow site will allow the Apartments.com team to market more and manage content less. 

The Results

The new site is much easier to keep up-to-date for customers and the CoStar and Elevated Third team were able to maintain a balance of site speed without compromising design quality. Admins can now easily manage and change website content in Drupal with fresh creative campaign assets quickly and at scale, thanks to Acquia Site Studio.

Acquia Site Studio’s low-code approach to managing enterprise websites provided CoStar’s large organization with numerous advantages right out of the box. Maintaining cohesion between the digital properties was paramount with so many teams working across brands – each with unique standards and UI elements. Acquia Site Studio also offered a flexible implementation, allowing Elevated Third to adapt it to the Grow site’s needs and find the best balance between ambitious design and ultimate sustainability.