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Estate agency

List a property and the brochure is ready: website and backend for Immobilien am Zoo

Enter a property once, and everything else happens by itself: property page, brochure, social media, newsletter. For the estate agency Immobilien am Zoo in Hannover we built both the website and the backend from scratch. No page builder, no third-party content system, four tools fewer in the working day.

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less weight on the home page
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fewer tools in the working day
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questions and answers for search and AI

Six decades,
finally visible

Immobilien am Zoo has been selling and letting flats and houses in Hannover since 1967. Local knowledge across generations, and clients who come back: no competitor can recreate that, but online little of it was visible. So the brief was not a new look, it was a presence that shows this experience.

The design stays calm. Gold as the only accent, a classical serif, generous white space, large photographs of real properties. Anyone looking for a property is making one of the biggest decisions of their life. A website that gets loud about it loses.

People are looking for a home, not a form

The search does not sit on a subpage, it sits in the cover image of the home page: buy or rent, location, property type, go. The overview adds free text, district, availability and five sort orders, from the newest listing to the price per square metre.

Many people, though, are not looking for a property type, they are looking for an area. So the districts are a way in of their own, each with a real photograph and the number of available properties: Zooviertel, List, Kirchrode, Südstadt, Mitte, Kleefeld. One click, and the overview shows that district alone.

If a property appeals, the heart on the card is enough. The shortlist needs no account and no sign-up, it lives in the visitor’s browser alone. Anyone coming back finds their selection waiting, without ever having left any data behind.

A property page on Immobilien am Zoo with gallery, key figures and map

Every property gets
an address of its own

The property page shows everything in one place: an image gallery with a lightbox, the key figures, the description, the fittings, the location on the map, the agent responsible and the enquiry form right beside it. Similar properties sit below, so the visit does not end when one listing turns out not to fit.

Every property runs under a readable address rather than a running number. It is fixed on the first save and stays valid, even when things are reordered or deleted in the backend. A shared link still leads to the same house months later, and Google does not lose the page.

Photographs are the heavy part of any property site. Every image is therefore served automatically in four widths and in WebP, with fixed dimensions against jumping layouts and loading only once the visitor scrolls. On the home page 10.66 megabytes became 3.34, with no loss of impact.

The brochure writes itself

In an agent’s working day nothing costs as much time as the property brochure: typing the same figures into a layout file again, placing photographs, exporting, sending. That step disappears here entirely. Anyone listing a property already has the brochure.

It is produced fresh on every download from the data already entered: a cover with the lead photograph and the logo, then the description, the fittings, the image gallery and the contact with a direct line. Interested buyers download it from the property page, the office produces it in the backend straight from the list.

More important than the convenience is the reliability. There is no stored version that can go out of date. If the price changes, the brochure changes in the same moment. A document with an old price simply cannot be in circulation any more.

The property list in the Immobilien am Zoo backend on a tablet, with a create brochure button on every property
The property form in the Immobilien am Zoo backend on a laptop, with key figures, cover image and a create brochure button

A backend the office
runs itself

Behind the website there is no WordPress and no third-party content system, but a backend built for this office. The menu is labelled in plain language: properties, articles, pages, districts, agents, leads, media, users, settings. Nobody working here has to learn jargon first.

On signing in, the dashboard shows what is due: visits, open enquiries, the properties listed most recently. A property can be duplicated when the next one is in the same building. Agents are assigned per property and appear automatically on the property page, in the brochure and in the team. Two roles separate the rights: administrators may do everything, editors maintain content without access to users and settings.

Images are cropped in the backend as well, in a window shaped the way the image will later appear. The original stays untouched. And the visitor figures stay in house: the trend, devices, origin on a world map, referrers and, separately, the AI services fetching the site. Counting happens without IP addresses. No analytics service, no advertising script, nothing passed on to third parties.

One click, and the property
is out there

A new listing is only worth something once someone sees it. The usual route means four tools, four logins and the same data four times: write the text, find an image, post to each network separately, then set up the newsletter in the next programme.

Here there is a button on every property and every article. One click puts it on the office’s social media channels with the lead photograph, the key figures and a link, a second sends it as a newsletter to the confirmed recipients. The newsletter is created in the same go as the property or the article. It goes out at the touch of a button, or rides along automatically as soon as the entry is published.

All of it in the same system the property already sits in. Nothing is copied, nothing is maintained twice, and a listing cannot be current in one channel and out of date in another.

A property page and the home page of Immobilien am Zoo side by side in the browser

Anyone selling asks
about the value first

Half the business is not in the listings, it is with the owners who are still thinking about it. Their first question is always the same: what is my property worth? There is a page of its own for that, with a form for the valuation request and the answers people need before they send it: how a valuation works, what it costs, which documents to bring to the appointment.

Alongside it sit pages for sellers, such as selling a property, selling a house in Hannover or selling a flat in Hannover. They can be created freely in the backend, with sections, lists, a source note and an automatic list of the properties in that district.

Every enquiry from a property, from the valuation page or from the contact form becomes a case in the backend with a timestamp, the subject, the source, the property and a status, open or done. Nothing sits in one person’s inbox, nothing gets lost between two holidays.

Being found, in the answers
the machines give too

A property search starts on Google, but more and more often on ChatGPT or Perplexity as well. The foundation is the same for both, and it is in place: readable addresses, canonicals, a sitemap, visible breadcrumbs, individual page titles and descriptions for every property, article and page.

For Google a connected data graph describes what is on each page: the agency as a local business with address, telephone and opening hours, every listing as a property entry, plus guidance articles, questions, services and places. The graph reads the opening hours from the same lines as the contact page, so display and markup can never drift apart.

For answer engines it is being quotable that counts. The AI crawlers are explicitly allowed in robots.txt, which is a decision rather than a default. Twenty-five questions in five groups answer the points that come up most, and the texts follow fixed rules: answer the question in the first paragraph, back every figure with a source and a date, write the company name instead of „we“ wherever a passage might be quoted, and put Hannover into the statement. A passage torn out of its context has to hold up on its own.

What changes in daily work

In the end the whole project can be measured against one process. A property comes in, it is entered once, and everything else follows from that.

  • The listing appears on the home page, in the search, in its district and on the map.
  • The brochure is ready without anyone touching a file.
  • One click puts it on the social media channels, a second sends it as a newsletter.
  • Enquiries about it land as cases in the backend, not in one person's inbox.
  • Search engines and answer engines get the data in the form they can read.

That is the difference between a website and a tool. One has to be maintained, the other takes work off your hands. Anyone considering a similar system is best off starting with the task that costs their own office the most time.

The Immobilien am Zoo property form on a phone, with key figures and a create brochure button
The scope

What the website and the backend do.

Back to references Visit immobilien-am-zoo.de
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