We were so honoured and humbled to receive the Best Website 2018 Award from Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate last week in Austin, TX.

Michael Edlund, VP of Interactive Media for Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate presented us with the award. He himself is an award winning web developer and programmer. He’s a Webby Award Honoree, and was in charge of the development team that lead luxuryrealestate.com to be voted ‘Best of the Web’ in its category by Forbes magazine, so his opinion means a lot to us. Here’s what he had to say about the RE/MAX Sea to Sky Real Estate site that we designed:

“I smiled as I stepped through the winning website, because it was so delightfully deliberate with every single choice.

It does have what I’d expect from any great real estate website in terms of searches, slideshows, neighborhood pages and more, but what really makes it stand apart is that it has a narrative.

It starts with a simple question, a mantra that is repeated throughout the experience, addressing buyers and sellers.

“Are you ready to start your next adventure?”

It drags you in from there. There’s a full screen timelapse video background showing off the views that is quite mesmerizing. There’s gorgeous photography that communicates the lifestyle right off the bat. There’s an elegant and stylish design.

Agents are shown off both through photography and blog posts as ambassadors and rock stars and you get the sense that the agents ARE the company.

The company has two Matterport cameras that they use aggressively with all their properties, and show off 3D Tours prominently right on the homepage.

But they also make Matterport tours of other things than real estate. For example, a temporary museum exhibit by a local artist. By creating these kinds of virtual tours, they tie in to the community and give locals a reason to visit their website even if they’re not in the market of buying or selling. Yet.

They show off some guts by taking ownership of the code and hosting the website and the database themselves on dedicated servers.

They import both their local MLSs to create the most comprehensive search of any competitor in town.

Additionally, hosting their own database allows them to search fields that their competitors just don’t have access to, which further distinguishes their search from their competition.

To wrap things up, there is a custom interactive statistical dashboard that lets visitors explore 20 YEARS worth of local property sales by year, quarter, or even buyer origin by country. All of this is sliced up by property type, so that you can see how the breakdown of sales have been year over year for different property segments.

To wrap it up, this is the finest example I’ve seen to date of blending visual design with extremely deliberate content, and with the self confidence of deciding their own set of features instead of simply replicating what others have already done.

Thank you for redefining the bar that we all now must beat.

It is an absolute pleasure for me to award Best Website to:

RE/MAX Sea to Sky Real Estate.”

-Michael Edlund