No charge for the photo: marketing Cambridge’s biggest landlord

How many properties do you think the biggest landlord in Cambridge owns? 20? 50? 100? Amazingly, having bought his first home in 1965, Dennis Whitfield has accumulated a portfolio of over 500 properties in the area. That’s a lot of houses.

The Whitfield Group are a genuine, local success story. The only thing they didn’t have in place was a useful presence on the web so they approached us at Endis Solutions asking for a simple site to advertise their services and empty properties.

The challenges from the content side:

• Appealing to different markets, professional and student
• Helping Whitfield to raise their game with photos and copy for the property descriptions
• Finding a unique sales message in a very crowded market
• SEO, in an even more crowded market

To appeal distinctly to their two main types of tenant, we gave them a site each: Whitfield Residential and Whitfield Students. We wrote the student site in a chatty tone, replete with puns. The message is: no agents means fewer fees, plus it’s perfect for Anglia Ruskin University.

Whitfield Students web site

The Residential site does not joke around but we kept the collar loose. The selling point is simplicity. For a long time I had ‘the uncomplicated way to rent’ as the strapline, but had to concede, based in part on cognitive fluency, that simple was simpler than uncomplicated.

We also put an umbrella page up at their old address to build on the search engine ranking. This has worked well: on UK Google searching for ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

Googling ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

As for helping their staff to create compelling property pages, I wrote them a style guide for descriptions as well as a guide to taking photos with their specific (and somewhat lower end) model cameras. Remember the blog post? A bonus was giving a photo of my own – a quick snap during my son’s nursery’s annual float down the River Cam – to our designer, who turned it into an image for the front page. Whitfield have since adopted it for their wider branding.

We are hopefully about to do another raft of work for Whitfield, adding some advanced features to the sites. But in this first stage it was a pleasure to focus on creating something simple, well executed and with a clear message.

Uncomplicated, even.

My River Cam photo, coming soon to some lettings signage near you