17
The Systems Behind the Success
The Client
Paragon Real Estate held the rank of number three in the Bay Area Real Estate market until it's acquisition by a larger firm in mid-2018. A boutique brand focused on luxury residential and commercial real estate, and local expertise, Paragon backed their agents with a branding and marketing powerhouse. From SF to the East Bay and Marin, their neighborhood knowledge along with widely acclaimed market analytics reports made them an iconic brand.
The Project
Paragon’s legacy operational intranet system and database were built for an outdated site and customized data management framework. With a beautiful new website and slick marketing platform, the tools and database architecture of the intranet did not translate effectively to modern data uses and sophisticated brand user interface. At minimum, their intranet tool needed an overhaul to accompany and support their luxury system.
However, Paragon had higher aspirations that would allow them to leapfrog their competition in new and exciting ways: a single expertly designed central hub for all company operations.
THE APPROACH
A full-stack team of designers, strategists, developers, and testers engaged the Scrum process to quickly iterate through user stories and identify the minimum viable criteria for each feature that would allow Paragon to completely retire their legacy system as well as log enhancements and features for future development. Each function and workflow of the staff and agent operations was re-assessed, analyzed, and re-designed based on the current and future company strategy vision, rather than being tied to legacy workflows.
Paragon’s agent-centric and experience-based values raised the bar for the user experience to be exceptional, and High Seas met the challenge head on. As part of a whole-team approach to experience design, we not only engineered the best workflows for users but considered everything from data architecture to optimal screen interactions for features that are cohesive and elegant in all aspects.
THE RESULT
A custom one-stop dashboard for everything Agents and Staff will need for their daily operational activities. Full inventory, user, and operations management systems empower staff to be more efficient at their tasks with increased autonomy to manage previously manual workflows. Sales and new listing reports and announcements are fully integrated and scheduled automatically through the customized email system. The reaction of staff was overwhelmingly positive and Paragon was able to shut down their old tools in time for the Bay Area sprint real estate rush.
For agents, this dashboard is truly a disruption to the old processes - providing one login to access their listings, marketing materials, property mini-sites and email campaigns as well as direct single-sign-on links to third-party agent tools. With specially optimized mobile screens, Paragon achieved and exceeded their goal of empowering agents with the autonomy to manage their sales process within the high standards of the Paragon brand.
Our team realized early on that technology was going to be a game changer in the real-estate industry. With our vision and High Seas’ expertise we have been able to build and iterate on valuable marketing and inventory tools that leapfrogged our competitors, advanced and streamlined our daily operations, and set us up for the future by providing excellent quality and service to our agents. High Seas team has been attentive to every detail to make the user experience unparalleled among real estate operational tools.
Brian Wilcox
VP Technology Paragon Real Estate
