A brokerage website that works like a portal.
A boutique South Florida brokerage got the tools buyers expect from national portals — financial calculators, smart listing pages, a dedicated seller funnel — while every client still works directly with the broker.
- Client
- The Bloemhof Group
- Market
- Miami-Dade · Broward · Palm Beach
- Stack
- Next.js · Prismic · MLS/IDX
- Scope
- Strategy · UX · Design · Build
- average time on site — 8× longer
- 0:24 → 3:11
- visitors from paid channels who become leads
- 11.3%
- Google rating · 19 reviews, pulled in automatically
- 5.0★
- calculators built in-house
- 3
We started with “redesign the website”. We ended with “give the client no reason to open Zillow”.
Listings on a broker's site are the same listings buyers already see on Zillow and Realtor.com — with more filters and a familiar interface. A boutique brokerage wins somewhere else: the broker runs every deal personally, knows the buildings and the HOAs, answers fast, and works in English and Russian.
The old site showed none of that: a listing feed, a nine-item menu and a “Contact us” form. So we changed the brief before we drew anything.
Disclosure. Point Higher's founder also serves as COO of The Bloemhof Group. That gave us something an outside vendor rarely has during design: real lead, call and deal data from the brokerage — and the questions its clients actually ask.
How the brief changed in three steps
Every decision after this was tested against one question: does it keep the client on our site and closer to the broker?
The brief as given
Refresh the site: cleaner design, a shorter menu, listings that load fast. A normal website project.
The question we asked
Where does the client go when they leave — and what does it cost? To a portal: to check the payment, compare areas, request a tour. There, the same client is one click from another agent.
The brief we set
Own the entire client experience. Every question a buyer or seller asks gets answered on bloemhofgroup.com — by our tools and by our people.
A boutique brokerage that looked like every other IDX feed.
Three problems, all of them about what the site failed to say.
- Problem 01
The feed loses to portals: nothing beyond MLS data gave a buyer a reason to stay.
- Problem 02
The edge was invisible: direct work with the founder, local expertise and bilingual service were packaged nowhere.
- Problem 03
Offers were buried: a vague “Solutions” dropdown hid the brokerage's programs.
Six questions every client asks
Each one used to send them to a portal. We mapped the journey question by question, then gave the site its own answer at every step.
| The Client Asks | Before · Went To | Now · Answered By |
|---|---|---|
| What's for sale? | Zillow, Realtor.com | IDX search on live MLS data |
| Is this home — and this area — right for me? | Portal listing, Google | Listing page + neighborhood guides |
| What will I actually pay per month? | Portal or bank calculators | Three in-house calculators, a payment on every listing, pre-qualification |
| Who do I talk to? | A “tour” button routed to a rotation agent | The agent on the deal, answering immediately |
| What's my home worth? | An automated estimate | Free valuation + a staged launch plan |
| Where is my deal right now? | Texts, emails, five apps | Next phase: the client portal |
The website stopped being a brochure and became the brokerage's client experience layer — where the whole relationship lives, from the first search to the closing table.
Three kinds of competitor. None owned both the tools and the relationship.
- 01
National portals
The best search and tools on the market — and they own the buyer. A tour request goes to a paid partner agent, not necessarily the listing broker.
- 02
National brokerages
Strong tech platforms built for thousands of agents. The brand is the company; the person who runs your deal is secondary.
- 03
Local boutiques
Genuinely personal service — on a template IDX feed with a contact form. For tools, the client leaves for a portal.
- 04
Our position
Portal-grade tools, a direct line to the founder-broker, and a local niche: bilingual EN/RU, the buildings, the HOAs.
The portal math is simple. A typical portal referral fee is 15–40% of the commission, so a client routed back through a portal's referral program costs the brokerage a share of its own deal. A client who never leaves bloemhofgroup.com costs 0% — and stays in a relationship the brokerage controls. Zillow does not publish Flex rates; the range is from industry reporting (The Close, Mike DelPrete, 2023–2026), with ~35% most commonly cited.
What we chose — and what we said no to
| We Chose | Instead Of | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Calculators built in-house | A lender's or IDX vendor's widget | Widgets send users off-site or to someone else's brand. Ours tie the payment to our listings and our broker. |
| A monthly payment on every listing | Price only, like most broker sites | Buyers decide in dollars per month. That number is the reason they'd otherwise open a portal. |
| A dedicated seller funnel with a launch method | A generic “Contact us” | Sellers are the highest-value lead. They need a plan that answers their fear, not a form. |
| Buy and Sell as equal front doors | A menu mirroring every service | The menu follows revenue: Buy and Sell earn roughly the same. Rent and Commercial moved inside Properties. |
| Programs as extra ways in | Leading with Heroes or Relocation | The core business is the local brokerage. Programs widen the funnel; they don't define the brand. |
| Inquiries straight to the agent on the deal | A shared inbox or a call center | Direct access to the people who run the deal is the edge. The site should show it, not hide it. |
| Tools kept in the header | Tools buried in the footer | Calculators are a reason to come back. They earned top-level space. |
| Custom Next.js + headless CMS | An off-the-shelf real estate template | Full control over UX, speed and SEO — while the team still edits content without a developer. |
Navigation built around revenue, not around sections
Nine flat items became six sections structured by client scenario: Properties, Sell, Resources, Programs, Insights, About.
Two equal front doors
Buy and Sell bring in roughly equal revenue, so each leads to its own funnel and its own call to action.
Residual lines, tucked in
Rent and Commercial stay searchable inside Properties without competing for attention.
Always-on conversion
“Free valuation” and a click-to-call phone number sit in the header on every page.
Dark, editorial, unmistakably Miami — and fast.
One platform, four moves: search that starts on the map, neighborhoods that build authority, listings that never go stale, and trust shown on arrival.
- 01 · Search
Search that starts with the map.
Every South Florida listing is plotted with a live price, updating as you pan and filter. Buyers read the market the way a local broker does — spatially, and instantly.
bloemhofgroup.com/properties - 02 · Authority
Ten neighborhoods, ten front doors.
Forty-nine community guides, filterable by county — the kind of local depth that ranks in Google and tells a buyer they’re in the right hands.
bloemhofgroup.com/neighborhoods - 03 · Freshness
Always current, never stale.
Listings sync straight from the MLS with real photos, price and specs — nothing to update by hand, nothing out of date the day a buyer calls.
bloemhofgroup.com — featured homes - 04 · Trust
Proof, built into the page.
Curated featured homes, a 5.0★ record and real local expertise — shown up front, so trust is the first thing a visitor feels, not something they have to dig for.
bloemhofgroup.com — video stories
A listing page that does the buyer's math
- 01
Payment next to price
Buyers think in dollars per month. Both numbers show at once.
- 02
One-click pre-qualification
A warm lead with financial context — and a bridge to lender partners.
- 03
Neighborhood guide
Every listing links to a local guide: schools, dining, what it's like to live there.
- 04
Inquiry goes to the agent
Not a portal call center — the agent handling this home.
- 05
Full calculator in context
Taxes, insurance, HOA and cash to close, for this exact home.
Sellers are the most valuable lead. They got their own funnel.
Instead of “List with us” — a launch methodology that answers the seller's biggest fear: sitting on the market and cutting the price.
- Days 1–3
Quiet price discovery
Price is validated through the agent network and live MLS data — before the days-on-market counter starts.
- Weeks 1–2
Pre-launch demand
A staged pre-launch builds interest, so real buyers are waiting on launch day.
- Launch Day
Go to market
MLS and every major portal — with demand and pricing confidence already in place.
The entry point asks for one thing: the address. The estimate lands in the seller's inbox, and a 15-minute call is the alternative path. Sellers who aren't ready get three gated guides — The Miami Seller's Guide, the Pre-Listing Checklist and the Condo & HOA Seller's Playbook — as a PDF for an email. The promise on the page: you pay nothing until your home sells, with the commission agreed in writing before listing.
Every program is a separate way in
Each program is its own landing page, its own ad angle, its own search entry — and a pre-qualified lead in the CRM, tagged by segment.
Heroes Program
Up to 5% of the brokerage's commission credited at closing for teachers, nurses, firefighters, police, military and first responders. Qualification form, full terms, lender-credit limits, and a clear line between this program and the state's Florida Hometown Heroes.
Relocation from NYC
A dedicated scenario for people moving from New York to South Florida — same time zone, no state income tax — with its own offer, landing page and ad entry.
Lender Partners
A B2B page for mortgage brokers and loan officers: why work with Bloemhof and how the brokerage protects the lender's deal in front of the client. Built RESPA-clean — no referral fees, only value.
Compliance is built in: TCPA consent language on every form, written program terms, disclaimers of any government affiliation, and Equal Housing Opportunity. For a licensed brokerage, this is not optional.
How it was built — strategy first, pixels second
Design started only after the funnel was agreed. Every page on the site maps to a step in it.
- 01 · Discovery
Brief rewritten: own the client experience
Brokerage lead and deal data, the questions clients actually ask, a portal and competitor review.
- 02 · Architecture
Sitemap and funnel map approved
Revenue-based navigation, buyer and seller funnels, program entry points, page inventory.
- 03 · Copy & UX
Wireframes and copy
Offer packaging, the seller launch method, listing-page logic, calculator scenarios.
- 04 · UI Design
Approved design system
Desktop and mobile, a component system, listing and calculator states.
- 05 · Development
Staging site
Next.js, Prismic CMS, MLS/IDX sync, three calculators, forms routed to the CRM, SEO structure.
- 06 · Launch & Iterate
Live at bloemhofgroup.com
QA, launch, then new modules on the same foundation — next: the client portal.
Built by Nick Fedorov (engineering), Alex Yaremenko (SEO and technical) and Jacob (design), on Next.js, Prismic CMS and MLS/IDX. After launch the team edits content in Prismic — reviews, the journal and the pages themselves — with no developer needed.
A senior-only team — the people who scoped it are the people who shipped it.
- Founder · Strategy
Valerii Fedorov
Set the direction — search-first, seller-first, proof-first — and reviewed every release.
- Web & Engineering
Nick Fedorov
Built the platform — Next.js, live MLS/IDX sync and a headless CMS the team actually uses.
- SEO · Technical
Alex Yaremenko
Schema, Core Web Vitals and clean indexation — search that ranks and flies.
- COO · Delivery
Veronika Bloemhof
Ran delivery — scope, sprints and the promises we kept along the way.
- senior operators
- 4
- brief to launch
- 8 wk
- two-week sprints
- 4
- juniors on the build
- 0
The Design System
- Crimson
#B12B33 - Charcoal
#1A1A1A - Bone
#F5F2F0 - Slate
#7A7A7A
Find your placein South Florida
- Palette
- Miami crimson on near-black charcoal, with a warm bone for light surfaces — bold, confident, unmistakably local.
- Type
- A tall condensed display for headlines, a clean grotesk for everything else — editorial, not corporate.
- Voice
- Direct and broker-honest. It sounds like the person who actually closes the deal.
- System
- A square-cornered card system that scales from a listing tile to a full neighborhood guide without breaking rhythm.
One system, not five disconnected tools.
Data flows in, decisions come out — every part wired to the next, so the site stays fast, ranks, and reports the truth.
- Live MLS / IDX feed
- Headless CMS
- SEO & schema
The EngineOne Next.js platform — search, content and tracking in a single place.
- Instant map search
- Local authority
- Warm seller leads
What it changed
Visitors stopped bouncing to portals and started using the tools: average time on site went from 0:24 to 3:11, eight times longer, and 11.3% of visitors arriving from paid channels now become leads.
- 0:24 → 3:11
Average time on site
Eight times longer — the tools kept people on the site.
- 11.3%
Paid traffic to lead
More than one in ten visitors from paid channels becomes a lead.
- 6
Top-level sections, by revenue
Down from nine flat menu items.
- 3
Calculators built in-house
Mortgage, refinance, rent vs buy — on local defaults.
- 3
Program landing pages
Heroes, NYC relocation and lender partners.
- ∞
MLS listings, each indexable
Every listing syncs and gets its own page Google can rank.
From website to platform: the client portal.
The site wins the client. The portal keeps them through the whole deal — status, documents and the broker in one window, instead of five messaging apps. It is in development now, on the same foundation.
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