A website for Foncia's customers

Foncia is the European leader for residential real estate services. The company is part of the Banque Populaire and Caisse d'Epargne (BPCE) group. The Foncia group provides its customers with a comprehensive offer of residential real estate services: management of joint ownership, rental management, renting, sales, finance search, insurance, technical assessments etc. FONCIA has gradually improved its services by providing advice for company real estate, real estate investments, rental expertise in new programs and the sales and marketing of blocks of flats or plots. After considering their web communications, Foncia called on Smile to redesign its website. The aim was to create a website with innovative services. Smile Consulting took part in the project in order to ascertain operational needs and to advise Foncia on the choice of tool. Following this phase, the CMS eZPublish from eZ System was chosen. Always attentive to the changing requirements of its customers, Foncia wanted a site focussed on customer relations. http://fr.foncia.com provides smooth and simple navigation with ergonomic features. Operational features include new services for users, prospects and customers. You can for example highlight the search area accessible from the homepage with its "Call to Action" menu (menu that can also be found on other pages), which provides access to ads based on search critieria filled in by the user. Homepage navigation has been simplified with a menu that has been split into customer's areas of interest: rental, purchase, sale, management or investment. The real estate office finder map also provides details of the office's contact details with a simple click! Search results pages offer a comprehensive vision of current searches: summary page with slideshow of photos for each ad that meets search criteria, access to the search engine for a new query, reminder of criteria filled in in the right hand column and direct access to the last ads viewed. The user can also choose to make direct contact with the office that has released the ad and can share the ad with contacts of their choice. Foncia's offices are thus at the heart of the system. This web-offices link optimisies users' searches. Finally, users can choose to subscribe to an RSS feed that publishes ads and provides real time alerts of new offers. The right hand column on the home page provides Foncia with an area for communicating about services and products. This area can be independently modified using the CMS tool. http://fr.foncia.com obtains data from two different sources: some content and services come from Foncia's IT system and others from the CMS eZ Publish. The connection between the two systems is carried out via web services. They allow the transparent transfer from one management system to another. Smile has also customised the back office with the aim of making the back office as similar to the front office as possible. All the publisher's styles were therefore changed.