Fading West, a Colorado startup, develops attainable, high-quality, architecturally-interesting, fee-simple homes for Rocky Mountain towns' essential workforces.
Fading West set out to solve a significant housing problem in Chafee County. Owning a home in Buena Vista was expensive. So expensive, most of the area's employees lived in towns over 45 minutes away. Fading West developed a solution to put home ownership within reach.
The Farm at Buena Vista is an innovative, turnkey development, which has lowered the cost of new homes and cut the design/build process time by almost six months. Onboard Creative was engaged to develop a website for The Farm. The resulting site gives homebuyers the ability to easily customize and price out homes, thereby avoiding the administrative burden and additional staff which would otherwise be needed during the construction phase.
A typical challenge many startups face is the prospect of starting from scratch. Onboard Creative worked closely with the Fading West team to dive deep into their goals and identify the markers which would yield a successful and effective website. Chief among them was the need for interested homebuyers to easily understand the new offering and quickly move through their home's customization process online.
Beautiful exterior renderings of the models from award-winning landscape architect Brian Burke of B. Burke Associates were used and we built the site specifically to educate, direct, and onboard buyers. The home page immediately showcased the home renderings and directed visitors into learning more about them.
Since Fading West hadn't yet built the homes, Onboard Creative created detailed, to-scale, finished floor plans, as well as screenshots of furnished interiors. This enabled visitors to better envision the homes, all the way down to dimensions, countertops, and furniture. The customized floor plans and interior views we worked into the site became a massive selling point to homebuyers.
To help alleviate pre-sale administration, Onboard Creative developed a detailed, interactive map of the property which allowed visitors to zoom in on and select individual lots, customize and price out their home, and then email the results in a neat and organized printable.
After selecting the desired lot and model, visitors could customize kitchen packages, cabinet options, countertops, bathroom features, interior finishes, flooring, porches, paint colors, insulation, water heaters, and garage options—all of this without visiting a showroom.
To date, 100% of the lots have sold. The onboarding process of allowing potential homebuyers the ability to customize their home has over 3,000 entries! To put this in perspective, the entire town of Buena Vista has under 3,000 residents.
Onboard Creative provided the following services: Requirement development, research and competitive audit, information architecture, user interface design, custom floor plans, interior furnished drawings, custom interactive property map, CSS/XHTML template development, content management integration, and web hosting.
If you want to learn more about how Onboard Creative can help your business succeed online, get in touch.
