re/max commercial Israel

Summary

re/max Commercial Israel is the commercial arm of the global RE/MAX group. It serves investors and businesses, not individual home buyers: offices, shopping centers, hotels, industrial and logistics space, land, and income-producing assets. They needed a property site and search platform from scratch, with nothing in place. I designed the site and its search system from zero, elevated the global RE/MAX brand into a premium visual language for a local B2B investment audience, and restructured the standard real-estate search around the part of the business the client most wanted to grow: income-producing properties.

👉 See the live demo of the design →

Problem Framing

What existed when I arrived: nothing. re/max Commercial had no site and no search platform, and they needed one built for an audience the parent brand was never designed for. RE/MAX globally speaks to individuals looking for a home. This branch serves commercial entities and investors who evaluate assets by yield, size, price, and type.

Two problems sat under the brief:

• Brand. The global RE/MAX design language is built for consumers. It had to be adapted for a professional, investment-minded audience without losing the recognizable brand.
• Search. Every real-estate search engine is organized around one split: sale vs. rent. But the client's core business, the thing they most wanted to promote, was income-producing properties (נכסים מניבים), and that category does not fit cleanly into the sale/rent model.

The real problem wasn't "design a real-estate site." It was designing a search that put the client's actual business model first.

Role and Team

My role: web design and prototyping, from zero. I designed the full site and its search system.

The team was small and cross-functional:

• Marketing manager (client) (business goals, brand): promoting the income-producing side of the business.
• WordPress developer (build): something buildable in WordPress.
• Me (web design, prototyping, search UX): a search that fit the business, usable without retraining.

I worked directly with the marketing manager to translate what the business actually wanted to sell into structure, and with the developer to keep it buildable.

Approach

Find out how much freedom the brand actually allowed. With a global super-brand I couldn't assume. From past agency work on global brands like 10bis and BlackRock, I knew you're often locked to the parent's exact design system, with approvals required. So before committing to a visual direction, I researched RE/MAX sites around the world to see what was really enforced.

Adapt the brand, don't reinvent it. I kept RE/MAX recognizable and shifted its language toward a commercial, investment audience.

Design the search around the business, not the convention. The marketing manager was clear that income-producing properties were the priority. So I made that a first-class part of the navigation, not a filter buried inside a generic search.

Keep it operable without retraining. The people using this are agents and investors, not power users of a new tool. The filtering had to feel obvious on first use, a point the client set explicitly: it should work without retraining existing teams.

Challenges

How much freedom did the brand allow?

RE/MAX is a global super-brand, and I didn't know the rules: what was in bounds, what wasn't, and whether I would need sign-off from RE/MAX global. On past global-brand work like 10bis and BlackRock, I had often been bound tightly to the parent's design system. So I treated it as a research question and looked at RE/MAX sites across different countries. I found there was no strict loyalty to one design: a nod to the red, but no mandated palette or type system. That told me I had real latitude, and I could design for this audience instead of just applying a template.

The search

The hardest part was the search.

Every real-estate search engine is built around one primary choice: sale or rent. The client insisted on a third thing that doesn't belong to that family: income-producing properties. It isn't a sale/rent option, it's a different way of evaluating an asset, and it was the business they most wanted to push.

Forcing it into the standard sale/rent structure would have buried the thing that mattered most. Giving it prominence in the wrong place would have broken the mental model of the rest of the search. The challenge was making it distinct and prominent without confusing everything around it.

Designing within the build

The search wasn't a free canvas. The developer had real constraints on what the search component could do, and I had to adapt the design to fit them. Mobile was the hardest part: fitting the dual-structure search onto a small screen, while keeping it operable without retraining, took real reworking. The final search is a design that survived contact with the build, not a mockup that ignored it.

Solution

I split the properties into two categories, each with its own search structure.

Our Properties (general): a double menu.

• A single-choice toggle for sale vs. rent.
• Below it, multi-select tabs for property type (offices, luxury apartments, lots, retail, warehouses, industrial, hospitality).

Income Properties (נכסים מניבים): a single, simpler menu.

• No sale/rent toggle, because these are sale only.
• One menu of property types (offices, retail, industrial, gas stations, hotels, lots, other).

The two structures look related but behave differently, on purpose. The general search keeps the familiar sale/rent model for the properties people expect to browse that way. The income-properties search strips out what doesn't apply and gives the client's core business its own clean, prominent path. The search adapts to how each kind of asset is actually evaluated, instead of forcing both into one template.

Visual direction: brand colors, premium feel.

I kept RE/MAX's colors, with the red as the recognizable anchor, but took the design toward premium, drawing on how luxury products present themselves: high-end watches, cars. For an audience deciding where to place serious investment, the site needed to feel like the caliber of asset it was selling, not like a consumer listings site.

Results and Impact

• A complete commercial real-estate site and search platform, designed from zero.
• The global RE/MAX brand adapted for a local B2B investment audience.
• A search restructured around the client's actual business model, with income-producing properties given their own first-class path.

An honest note on outcome: I designed the site and handed it to development, and I know the build was started. I cannot confirm it went live with this design; I don't see it deployed as designed. The design and the search structure stand on their own.

Next Steps

What I'd do differently

Get the developer's constraints on the search component, and especially its mobile behavior, on the table in week one. We reconciled them later; aligning the search structure with what was buildable from the first screen would have saved rework.

What the product still needs

To reach real users. The two-structure search is a strong hypothesis, and it's worth validating with the actual agents and investors who would use it.

What this project taught me

The most useful question in a search design isn't "sale or rent." It's "what does this client actually sell, and does the standard model serve it or bury it?" Here, the convention would have buried the business.

Designing around the business instead of the convention is the difference between a template and a tool.