Case Study: dotMobi solutions in action

Udrapartments.mobi
Presented by UDR Inc.
“We developed our mobile site to make it easy for people to access content, and developing with dotMobi made the whole process incredibly easy.”
– Chris Haller, eCommerce marketing analyst at UDR
Company
UDR is a leading multifamily real estate investment trust. UDR has a demonstrated performance history of delivering superior and dependable returns by successfully managing, buying, selling, developing and redeveloping attractive real estate properties in targeted U.S. markets.
Issue
UDR wanted to develop a mobile site so that they could attract additional apartment searchers and increase sales. Because it has a national presence and target multiple demographic and technographic segments, UDR needed their mobile content to display correctly on hundreds of different mobile devices. Rich information — floor plans, maps, contacts, searchable databases — needed to be easily navigated on handhelds, and file sizes needed to be kept small to ensure quick download times.
Solution
Udrapartments.mobi was launched with simple menus that ensured data that could be viewed correctly on the devices of their target users. They ensured this by using mobiReady (http://mobiReady.com) to test content to see if it rendered correctly on devices prior to publishing.
Udrapartments.mobi lets users search apartments by location, and provides detailed information like floor plans, amenities, prices, maps and contact information for booking reservations.
Users can also check apartment availability and sign up to receive text messages when a unit opens up or request a unit be held until a broker contacts them.
Results
Since Oct. 2009, udrapartments.mobi has seen steadily increasing monthly visitors with a total of 110,000 unique visitors for 2009. Mobile traffic has lead to more than 1,000 leads and over $600,000 in incremental revenue, at no cost of acquisition for UDR.
“We cover all sorts of demographics, so that meant our mobile site architecture and content needed to appear correctly on all types of devices,” said Chris Haller, eCommerce marketing analyst at UDR. “We are now able to penetrate the organic mobile search rankings using mobile SEO tactics — all of which is made easier by developing with a .mobi domain.”
Because the .mobi domain, unlike other mobile naming conventions, provides an entry in the Internet zone files — which search engines use to start their crawls — .mobi sites are generally found more quickly and rank higher than other mobile sites.
The company is planning to launch a national marketing campaign to further increase traffic and lead count.
Udrapartments.mobi won an Honorable Mention Webby Award in 2009 for in the “Best Mobile Listings and Updates” category.