The Florida Store Property Management cleans house
The Client
It was a five-word mandate: we want to save money.
The Florida Store Property Management manages vacation homes in Central Florida. Widely-known for its high moral and ethical standards, the company offers peace of mind to its stable of absentee owners by caring for their investment properties and leasing to reputable vacationers.
The Florida Store conducts its marketing and vacation booking on the web. Until recently, it did this with hosted property management software that allows realtors to promote their inventory in much the same way hosted shopping cart software permits retailers to sell online – without the muss and fuss of maintaining their own websites.
The Result
The problem wasn’t so much the service model but the price. As a specialized niche solution targeted directly at high-flying real estate agents, the hosted software to which Florida Store subscribed cost hundreds of dollars every month. It paid for itself only during the regular tourist season and ate into The Florida Store’s profits for the remainder of the year.
That is, until they came to silenceIT. In less than one month we had a live, feature-by-feature reproduction of the hosted service running on The Florida Store’s own shared server. For good measure, we added:
- permissions-based property editing accounts, so The Florida Store can maintain superuser privileges while property owners can perform basic account maintenance, such as uploads to the image gallery;
- a custom pricing module that allows The Florida Store to set seasonal rates with up-to-the-minute currency conversion;
- an improved image gallery, so that prospective vacationers can browse property pics without bandwidth-hogging page refreshes;
- a more flexible site search that reveals available homes by desired arrival and departure dates;
- a handy local weather widget; and
- a customer review/rating interface.
The new website is being updated with property listings, and will be fully operational in time for the winter tourist season. All at a fraction of The Florida Store’s earlier subscription costs – yet again proving the true value of good housekeeping!
