Projects: UK Real Estate Firm Goes Paperless With Shopfront Listings

February 3, 2016 by Dave Haynes

Real estate firms putting screens in street-side windows is not new, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a spin on it like this letting agent (apartment rentals agency) in London.

Kings Lettings’ new office in Shepherds Bush has a couple of high-bright 55-inch Samsung smart sign panels in the window, but each has a trio of 15-inch panels running an Android player below them. All the screens are running off the embed signage platform.

“The primary objective for installing digital signage was to create a high-impact, paperless window display which can be easily updated with a variety of content types,” says Oliver King, Director of Kings Lettings.

Eclipse Digital Media, which developed embed but has since set it up as its own entity, put the solution together and saw it installed, and also designed the templates. The set-up is managed and maintained by store staff via an Excel spreadsheet. The staff update property information, save and upload the Excel file and associate any property images. Content is then published to the displays within the template design.

Every time I see a sidewalk level real estate firm with listings printed and dropped in little sleeves or picture frames in windows, I wonder why they’ve not gone digital. At some point, most will be changing over, given the constraints of the past – like high display costs and properly dealing with glare – have largely gone away.

The next logical step for this sort of thing would be navigation of the screens from the sidewalk, using a web app on a phone. Then people could zero in on their interests, and take away listings on their phone or connect with the letting agents.