Increasing Community Visibility for Sierra Pacific Properties
Sierra Pacific Properties (SPPI) does it all. They are a developer, owner, and operator of commercial real estate in the East Bay, spread across office buildings, business parks, shopping centers, and multi-family residential communities. With nearly four decades of presence in the Concord and Solano County markets, the company's community presence was strong, however they lacked any real online presence.
The Challenge
38 years in the market and no digital strategy.
For 38 years, SPPI built a massive real estate portfolio relying exclusively on offline acquisition channels: word-of-mouth and physical leasing signage. To stay competitive and capture modern prospective tenants, they needed to urgently translate their analog dominance into a scalable digital discovery platform.
24%
Increased average engagement time
31%
Growth in total users
35%
Boost in mobile engagement time
The Solution
Understanding the Problem Space
How do successful commercial real estate companies organize their website?
Rather than jumping straight into wireframes, I wanted to understand how successful commercial real estate companies organized their information.
Before making any design decisions, I audited 11 commercial real estate websites across 12 feature categories, ranging from local Bay Area property managers to national REITs like Prologis and Simon Property Group.
The audit revealed a consistent pattern: competitors were investing in digital discovery experiences while SPPI remained difficult to find, explore, and measure online.
My Findings
SPPI lacked industry standard features.
9 of 11 competitors offered interactive property maps, 8 had news sections, and 7 had careers pages. SPPI offered none of them despite managing a large commercial portfolio.
We were unable to measure success.
The site had no analytics, conversion tracking, or SEO infrastructure, making it impossible to understand visitor behavior or business impact.
Budget constraints led the strategy.
Leadership wanted dedicated pages for every property, but vendor solutions couldn’t support that vision affordably.
What Others Said
"Elise was able to expertly integrate stakeholder visions, technical considerations, and work as the intermediary driving the development team to ensure that the resulting product not only met but exceeded the designs aspirations of everyone involved…She is exceptionally motivated, endlessly curious, and ultimately committed to the possibility of technology as a tool to improve human experience."
— Sr. Systems Engineer & Administrator, The Seeno Companies