Real estate sites have a problem other industries do not share. They have to look expensive, because they sell expensive things. And they have to be fast, because half of their visitors are on a phone, often on a mediocre connection, often in passing.
Those two demands pull in opposite directions. Large images, soft motion and depth cost load time. Optimise for speed alone and you end up with a site that looks like a spreadsheet.
For MVC Properties in Palma we tried to get both.
Motion That Explains Something#
The entry of the site works with parallax, layers that move at different speeds while scrolling. That creates depth without a single extra image being loaded.
The featured properties run through a pin timeline. The section holds still while scrolling and the properties pass through one after another. That is not only an effect: it forces attention onto one property at a time instead of spreading it across a grid full of tiles. For high-priced properties that is exactly right, because nobody compares here the way they compare in a supermarket.
The property cards tilt slightly with the cursor. A small effect with a practical job: it shows that the card is clickable without a button being pasted on top of it.
Every one of these motions is built to run reduced on touch devices or not at all. A tilt effect needs a cursor. On a phone it is pointless and still costs processing time. And anyone who has set their operating system to prefer less motion gets less motion. That is one line of effort and the difference between a site that impresses and one that makes somebody queasy.
In Spain WhatsApp Is Not A Side Channel#
A detail that gets misjudged from Germany: in Spain business contact runs over WhatsApp. Not as a fallback but as the first route. A real estate site without a visible WhatsApp contact leaves enquiries on the table here.
So next to the form there is a direct route into it. The form itself sits as a glass surface over an image of the cathedral, translucent, blurred behind. It looks good and has a second effect: the form does not read as a foreign object at the bottom of the page but as part of the visual language.
Plus an AI chat for the questions that come before an enquiry. What does the area cost, is there anything in that size, how does buying work as a foreigner. Questions where people do not want to call but are happy to type.
The Area Visitors Never See#
Part of the site is password protected. Not everything a real estate office needs digitally belongs in the shop window. Some properties are handled discreetly, some documents are meant for prospects with an appointment and not for the general public.
Designing that area in changes the structure of the whole site. You cannot bolt it on afterwards without creating two systems that have to be maintained twice. Build it into the same site from the start and it is simply one more area you enter with a login.
Three Languages, And One Of Them Is The Main One#
The site exists in Spanish, German and English. Unlike most of our projects, Spanish is the main language here, not German. That sounds like a detail and is a structural decision: whoever opens the site without a language in the address lands on the Spanish version, and that is exactly what search engines are told is the default.
Get that wrong and you create a silent contradiction. The server sends visitors to the Spanish page while the markup in the source names German as the default. Google then believes the markup and shows the German version in Spanish search results.
What I Take Away#
The most interesting part of this project was not the animation but the question of where it stops. Every effect got the counter question: what does this do on a three-year-old Android device on a mediocre network?
That question deletes roughly half of all ideas. The other half gets better for it, because it no longer has to justify itself.
