Kiwi Property is a giant in the NZ property industry. It is proudly New Zealand-born and bred and has a presence that spans well over a quarter of a century.
It’s a publicly listed company on the NZSX, owning over $NZD 3.2 billion worth of NZ property assets and managing another $400 million on behalf of third parties.
For many years, Kiwi Property has developed, owned, and operated some of New Zealand’s most iconic retail centres, such as Sylvia Park, The Base, and Centre Place North, and iconic office buildings, including the Vero and Aurora centres. These are spaces where kiwis love to work and shop.
Recently, Kiwi Property has expanded its brand and vision to become New Zealand’s leading creator and curator of thriving retail-led mixed-use communities; these are whole reimagined ecosystems where Kiwis live, work, shop, and play.
The flagship for this is the construction of a world-class mixed-use community at Sylvia Park in Auckland, which includes retail, offices, and residential apartments.
That was a vision BOW was proud to get alongside, and together with Kiwi Property we set to work to redefine, refresh and revise the website and bring ‘curated communities’ to life online.
In our client’s words, the existing Kiwi Property site was ‘an old website for an old Kiwi Property’; outdated design and content, hard to maintain, difficult to navigate and not a good reflection of the business, or how Kiwi Property wanted to show up in the world.
It didn’t showcase the modern Kiwi Property or the business's aspirations. Kiwi Property wanted a website that communicated the curated community vision so potential investors could grasp the concept easily and easily find the financial information upon which to base their decision to invest. They also wanted a younger investor audience to be able to see themselves reflected in the company's direction.
Crucially for tenants, too, the existing website didn’t feature the rental or marketing opportunities available within the retail centres or the flexibility of the office spaces. We had to change all that.
Kiwi Property had done some of the hard yards with audience mapping when BOW came on board, so we set to work refining the site IA, so information was intuitively laid out, easily accessible and engaging for our various investor audiences.
Together, we transformed the layout and search functionality, wrote entirely new, engaging copy, dug deeper into the features that set each property apart and made it desirable, and introduced meaningful contemporary images that brought the site to life.
Tone of Voice for a new vision
Communicating the connected communities’ ethos also required a new lexicon and TOV for the business, focussed on the vision of bringing kiwis together in spaces where they could live, work, shop and play.
The result was a clarity of concept, engaging readers, investors, and tenants alike, who were able to get excited about this new urbane approach to living. It was also much easier for them to find what they wanted from the site and say, “Ah, Kiwi Property, now I get it.”ah, Kiwi Property, now I get it”.
Both BOW and Kiwi Property are thrilled with the resulting website. Most importantly for the Kiwi Property team, they now feel proud of their site; it looks great and reflects who Kiwi Property is as a business, drawing browsers into the “connected communities” vision which drives the company.
The staff feel energised about the business because of the website refresh, and the site analytics are way more positive, indicating the investor message is just right. Actual stats are confidential.
As Cam Hodgetts, our client, says.
“We’re trying to attract investment to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars - to invest in kiwi infrastructure for better kiwi lives – and we really didn’t feel the old website inspired that sort of confidence – but now we absolutely do”.
Campbell Hodgetts
Head of Communications and Investor Relations
