In a life annuity sale the seller stays in the house or keeps letting it out, and receives a lump sum plus a monthly payment instead of the full price up front. It is a perfectly sound arrangement and sometimes a very attractive one, but it is rarely explained well. Bauwens Vastgoed has a dedicated arm for it and asked us to put it on the map.

The challenge

The problem was not the listings, it was the doorstep in front of them. Anyone reading about a life annuity for the first time mostly has questions. What happens if the seller lives longer than expected? What exactly will I pay? What if I change my mind? While those questions go unanswered, nobody gets in touch.

On the main agency site the life annuity also stayed a footnote among everything else, when it is precisely the subject that needs the most explaining. And buyers and sellers are two very different people with opposite worries: write for both in the same words and neither feels spoken to.

Our approach

We gave it a brand and a site of its own, so the life annuity is no longer a footnote but the whole story. The listings come straight out of the agency's CRM, filtered down to life annuity sales, with the lump sum and the monthly payment shown on every property.

Alongside that we built two separate journeys, one for the seller and one for the buyer, each with their own arguments and their own objections. A knowledge base of articles and frequently asked questions deals with what people wonder about before they ring. The agency runs that knowledge base itself, because a knowledge base that only grows when a developer is involved does not grow.

The result

There is now a brand that explains on its own terms what a life annuity is and who it suits. The listings stay current without anyone maintaining them, buyer and seller each get their own story, and the agency can keep adding to what it knows without coming back to us.

Where it goes from here

This was the second project we helped Bauwens Vastgoed build, after their own website and editing environment. That is how the partnership tends to go: get the foundation right, then keep building on what works. We stay on for hosting and further additions.