Knight Frank, synonymous with high quality residential and commercial property,
has commercial offices serving property developers, buyers, sellers, investors and occupiers throughout the UK, and internationally.
Some of their specialist departments, including Residential Development, Institutional Consultancy and Hotels, required a specialised online presence, allowing them to focus on their intended audience, and keep them up to date with the newest information about properties available.
Their Needs
The Development Process
Knight Frank engaged Acumen to initially develop a prototype of the online portfolio manager.
They were very pleased with the prototype, and extended development to a full version.
Acumen understood and interpreted our business needs fantastically – they understand the requirements we communicate to them, and put them into language that make sense from a technical perspective, but still make perfect sense to us.
Our Solution: Portfolio Manager
From initially having just one administrator, the system has grown to have users from departments across the country, with over 500 documents added, and more than 2000 images.
Users can add and edit properties, and change their settings to determine who can view them.
New normal user accounts can be added by Knight Frank staff, and normal users can only view properties they themselves have created, avoiding information overload, and ensuring transparency and accountability in the system.
Changing certain aspects of a property’s record will cause all public viewers of the property’s online pages to enter their details before they can proceed; Knight Frank staff can then view a record of all the recorded viewings for a property, and follow up on these leads.
These viewings can also be downloaded in spreadsheet format.
Both the web application and client facing pages are consistently branded with the main Knight Frank site, so transition from one to the other is seamless.
Attaching files and images for a property was a key feature of the system.
Users can easily add, order and categorise documents and images, which appear alongside a property.Images can also be added regardless of their size and dimensions – no matter what image you upload, the intelligent imaging features of the portfolio manager ensure that a clean, high quality image is displayed every time, so Knight Frank staff don’t require knowledge or training in imaging and graphics.The image features are great – we just upload our original images, and they appear perfectly on the site, at various different sizes.
Moving Forward
Ongoing Support
Knight Frank’s ongoing support contract ensures they have a quick response time to questions raised or for required maintenance, at discounted rates.
Although Acumen were always accommodating to our needs, having a support contract gives us the peace of mind we need for something so critical to our business – and at discounted rate.
Future Development
Knight Frank have already greatly expanded the scope of the project since its inception, and this trend will continue over 2008.
The Last Word
‘We can update our online portfolio so much more easily and efficiently than before.
This saves us a lot of time, enables us to get more done, and allows us to be more responsive to potential buyers, and to changes in the market.
We’re very happy with Acumen’s work, and would recommend them.’
