Sector(s)
Team Members
Stanford University attracts leading professors from around the country with competitive salaries, but purchasing a home in Silicon Valley is challenging with skyrocketing real estate prices. University Terrace offers professors a unique opportunity to purchase a beautiful, thoughtfully designed home right down the street from campus. With contemporary condominiums and stylish single-family homes available, professors and their families can enjoy everything Palo Alto has to offer in a tight knit community.
As a new development and given the unique lottery-driven approach to address demand, University Terrace needed a website that would allow potential buyers to explore the options before the property was fully built out and get them to sign up for the purchase program. At the same time, the site needed to have longevity for ongoing sales after the initial opening.
About the project
Stanford needed to drum up interest in University Terrace and give potential buyers an in-depth experience of what each home was going to be like while the property was being built. They enlisted WebEnertia to create a website to showcase all the possible layout and interior options and manage the inventory of houses and condos as they sell. They also needed a way to vet potential buyers, who must be a Stanford University professor to qualify for the purchase program. When the completed site launched, the lottery filled up immediately and all available single-family homes were sold. Now that initial phases of the property have opened, University Terrace uses the website to manage available properties, continue the sales process, and connect with the community.
Our work with University Terrace started with the creation of the property logo and brand style guide. The home renderings and the connection to Stanford were key points of inspiration for the look and feel, and the website extended this approach into the digital realm.
The back-end was a critical focus for this site as sales needs drove specific site functionality. At the launch, professors interested in buying a home had to enter a lottery for available homes. The first step for inclusion in the lottery was verifying their eligibility. To facilitate this we created a custom form using the Views and Webform modules, which potential buyers can submit through the website. University Terrace uses these forms to manage submissions on the backend.
We also used the Views module to create a complex interactive map of the community that updates property availability in real time. The map contains multiple fields that can be easily edited to update information and display it across different maps and layouts on the site. On the backend, we created four different levels of admin users who can access and edit selected areas of the website. Lower level admins can only mark properties as available or unavailable, while the top-level admin can make core edits to content, like changing the price.
We used the Service module to build the website displays of floorplans and finish options. We also added a blog so admin users can keep homeowners and residents informed about the latest news and events.
Within weeks of the University Terrace website launching the lottery filled up, with all available single-family homes being sold. Some condo properties are still available and University Terrace uses the site to manage ongoing property sales and availability, and provide a place for residents to stay informed.
Why Drupal was chosen
WebEnertia chose Drupal because we needed to cost-effectively custom build several unique components of the website, including a lottery qualification form and an interactive map showing available and sold houses. Drupal allows us to hook into core functionality and customize what we need the website to do with features not available from other content management system (CMS) platforms. Drupal also allowed us to leverage a single back-end content repository to power in-person, interactive monitors in the University Terrace sales showroom. This created consistency in the experience and efficiency in implementation for the Stanford team.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The View module let us display the list of available homes and floor plans in different areas of the site and in different formats while only entering the data into the system once. The Webform module enabled us to create the application form. The Services module made it possible to display elements specific to a property within the interactive map.
