South Western based chain Marchand Petit have a customer profile that is over 75% out of town buyers. For them, having a strong web presence is therefore vital in ensuring these buyers find their properties. 

Like many companies though, a few years ago they found themselves with several web sites and lots of headaches in maintaining them. But the arrival of a new marketer with a fresh vision resulted in change. "We had been using Aspasia for residential sales since 2002 and the impetus really came from the team at Aspasia to trial a new gismo. It was perfect timing and with a bit of mutual back scratching our new site was launched in February 2008," said Marketing Manager for Marchand Petit, Justine Andrews. "There were a few teething problems but we could go to Aspasia and make suggestions; they always listened and the support from them was brilliant," she added.

There are different ways that data can be extracted from Aspasia for use in web sites. "We can give access to raw data via an XML feed that means you have complete autonomy on querying data and how you display it," said Aspasia programmer Robert King. "Alternatively, if you have the knowledge you can have the data in HTML format which gives you the ability to put the data into fields within your site or we can provide templates for you to use," he added.

This was the option that Marchand Petit chose. They felt so confident with Aspasia that they didn't even look at other options, "The fact that we could now use Aspasia to integrate with our site just seemed like too good an opportunity to miss," offered Justine.

"Our main motivation was to keep things simple," said MD Marcus Lucock. "People looking for property want to find things easily and since the launch of our site, we have received e-mails stating that we have won instructions on the back of our web site alone," he added.

For companies looking at web site development, cost is an important consideration. "Web sites are something you just have to invest in. We had an associated cost with the design element but the main cost was our time as we managed much of the work ourselves," stated Marcus.

And like many of Aspasia's customers, Marchand Petit do not intend to stand still with their technology. "We are looking at new stuff all the time such as property podcasts. The great thing is that even if Aspasia can't support it at that time, their team will go away and look at it and if they perceive it to benefit all users, they look to develop the idea into Aspasia," said Justine. "We are pushing ahead of other agents which is great for us, for Aspasia and for the industry."

March 2008