Pioneer Acquisitions

Pioneer Acquisitions is a real estate investment firm in Rye, New York. It was founded in 2008 and built a portfolio of multifamily, office and retail properties by buying at points in the market cycle when prices were down.

We had looked after the firm's previous website since 2019. In early 2024 the partners asked us to replace it with a new one, and it went live in May 2024.

The firm was starting to raise money from outside investors: high-net-worth individuals and family offices, most of whom the partners had already met in person. The website's job was to back up those meetings. It needed to look like a serious investment firm, explain the strategy, show a few deals, and give investors a way to get in touch.

The partners were clear about what they did not want. No long list of pages, no pitch to retail investors, and nothing that read as a local Chicago operation. They wanted a few pages that said a lot.

A design settled early

We started with a set of AI-generated mood boards so the partners could react to a look before anyone drew a page. Once they chose a direction, we wireframed the home page, mocked up each page in Figma and wrote a style guide from the approved home page. The partners reviewed and approved each page before we built it.

A short site on WordPress

We built the site on WordPress with Elementor, on a staging server of ours, and moved it to the firm's own hosting at launch. It has six main pages:

• Home: a full-screen photo, animated headline numbers, the firm's strategy, and a section on the Penthouse, an events venue the firm created from an unused space
• About: the firm's story and its partners, each with a full bio page
• Strategy: the firm's approach, set in a mosaic of building photos
• Investments: one section for each kind of property the firm has bought
• Careers: open roles, managed from the WordPress admin
• Contact: a contact form, plus an Investor Login page and the legal pages

Changes after the first review

When the partners saw the working site, they asked for more than 20 changes. We made the headings lighter, moved the navigation to the right with a small top bar for Investor Login and Contact, renamed Portfolio to Investments, and replaced the statistics on the Investments page with plain text. We also gave every page a single H1, added labels for screen readers, and tested on phones, tablets and desktop browsers before launch.

• A new site for the firm, from kickoff in late February 2024 to launch on May 20, 2024.
• Six main pages that explain the strategy and the track record without a sales pitch.
• A bio page for each partner, linked from the About page.
• An Investor Login page and contact form in place for investor follow-up.