3 Acres

The Setup

3 Acres is a 629-unit luxury rental community in Jersey City, a waterfront development where a single signed lease can mean six figures in lifetime revenue. The website is the property’s front door. Most prospective residents visit the site before they ever tour the building. When I came in, that front door was a WordPress template that looked nothing like the asset it was supposed to sell.

The Tension

The credibility gap was loud. Rents at 3 Acres sit at the top of the Jersey City market. The physical property is resort-grade. But the site looked like every other real estate listing from 2018. The quality of the asset and the quality of the surface were misaligned, and that mismatch costs tour bookings. Visitors land on a dated site, quietly downgrade their mental estimate of the property, and move to the next listing.

The second, less visible tension: search is changing. Prospects no longer type “luxury apartments Jersey City” into Google and scroll through a SERP. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews for recommendations. Most real estate websites, including 3 Acres’ old one, are invisible to those systems. The industry is still optimizing for a search model that’s quietly eroding.

The Decision

The non-obvious call was to build 3 Acres for AI retrieval first, and traditional SEO second. This is the inverse of how the real estate category currently thinks.

That decision had a technical consequence. Delivering it meant leaving WordPress. WordPress is the default in real estate not because it’s good, but because it’s familiar. It’s slow, it’s bloated, it makes schema implementation fragile, and it forces you to involve a developer every time you want to change a line of copy. For a property that needs to launch new content fast and compete in AI-driven discovery, that’s a structural problem.

So the second decision followed from the first: move to Framer. Faster performance, cleaner design control, non-developers can update content directly, and crucially, enough custom code flexibility to ship production-grade structured data inside platform constraints.

The System

I led the engagement end-to-end. Strategy in the brief, design in Figma, build and launch in Framer.

Thirteen pages built to cover the full resident journey: residences, furnished apartments, amenities, neighborhood, gallery, virtual tour, building, events, availability, contact, plus legal pages and a 404. Every page was structured with a clear information hierarchy and conversion logic pointing toward the tour booking.

Every line of copy was written from scratch. SEO-optimized for traditional Google, but more importantly, structured for AI retrieval. Meta titles, descriptions, H1s, and body copy designed to be parsed and cited by large language models when prospects ask for apartment recommendations.

Underneath it, production-ready JSON-LD schema markup: ApartmentComplex, Organization, WebSite, and FAQPage. All implemented within Framer’s 5,000-character custom code ceiling, which is a real constraint that required careful prioritization of what schema to include and how to compress it without losing signal.

The Impact

The site now matches the property. A prospect landing on 3acresjc.com gets a digital experience calibrated to the rent they’d be paying, which is the minimum bar for a luxury lease-up. Content can be updated by the property team in minutes, not through a developer ticket queue. And the site is positioned to surface in AI search results at a moment when almost no competitor in Jersey City real estate is even thinking about that channel.

The building gets a front door that looks like the building. The property team gets a platform they can actually operate. And the business gets a head start on the channel that will increasingly decide where premium renters look first.

The Takeaway

At an inflection point, a website isn’t a marketing asset. It’s infrastructure. Build it for where the market is going, not for the tools the category is used to.