Staves, Sheffield.

Where it started

The old site opened on a grey hallway and the words Letting Property Is Our Passion, with a social media rail pinned down the left edge of the screen and the properties somewhere below all of it.

Nothing on that first screen said Sheffield, and nothing said there were five offices. For an independent whose whole argument is that it is local and family run, that is the argument going unmade.

What we built

The homepage now opens on Sheffield itself, under a headline that makes the claim out loud: five offices strong, award winning, independent. The five branch numbers sit along the top, so whichever office a seller already deals with is one glance away.

Each branch has its own section with its own homes, team and reviews, and the search sits in its own panel rather than floating over the photograph.

Signing in gets a buyer a shortlist of saved homes, a search they can keep and come back to, and an alert the moment something matching comes on the market.

Ask for it in words, or just say it

Filters or AI search, behind a switch. The example in the box is a real sentence: “3 bed house with a garden in Dore under £400k”, and a microphone beside it means the same thing can be spoken instead of typed.

Ask Staves sits on every page as well, so a question that does not belong in a search box has somewhere to go.

The questions you would otherwise ask at a viewing

Every property page carries a Summarise this home button, and under it a panel that answers the things people actually want to know about an address: the closest supermarkets, whether there are parks nearby, what the public transport is, where to eat, which schools are near, where the nearest doctor and pharmacy are, and what other homes on that street have sold for.

Each answer comes back with walking distances. That is the conversation an agent has standing in a hallway on a Saturday, available on the page at eleven at night when somebody is deciding whether to book the viewing at all.

Twenty nine area guides, written properly

Dore, Totley, Ecclesall, Nether Edge, Dronfield and twenty four more, each one a real piece of writing rather than a paragraph of filler. The Dore guide opens with the postcode, six minutes to Sheffield by train, half the neighbourhood inside the Peak District National Park, and 84 per cent owner occupied from the 2021 census.

That is the part of the job a portal listing cannot do, and it is what an agent has that a portal does not: knowing the place.