Housing Hand is the UK's largest rent guarantor service. Since 2013, the business has supported over 100,000 tenants into rented homes, working with more than 4,000 landlords and accommodation providers, and has guaranteed over £1 billion in rent. Its customers are overwhelmingly students, with a smaller but growing base of working professionals, and a B2B partner network that spans universities, operators, agents and letting partners.
Housing Hand had identified a commercial opportunity. Despite being the market leader, the business was reaching needed to respond to more of its total addressable market, and a significant growth opportunity was going untapped. A new strategy was already in motion:
The website was a central element to all of it. The existing site sat outside HubSpot, ran on a different technical stack to the business's sales and customer management systems, and had grown organically over several years. It could not carry the new brand consistently across multiple distinct audiences, it did not support the data and personalisation work the marketing team wanted to do. What’s more it was not at the target speed set for users and in Google Core Web Vitals, thus sub optimal for search visibility. The business needed a website that could launch the new brand, deliver a best in class user experience, work seamlessly with HubSpot, and be ready for the 2026 student booking season.
That last point mattered more than it sounds. The student accommodation market has a pronounced annual cycle, and the migration had to complete before the quiet season ended. A delayed launch would have meant deferring the repositioning by a full year with significant impact.
Innovation Visual delivered a complete rebuild of housinghand.com with a custom designed and coded theme on the HubSpot CMS Enterprise platform, built to a phased scope that allowed the core site to launch on time while leaving room for more complex functionality to follow in a second phase.
The website theme is built to make the most of the flexible, powerful tools HubSpot CMS offers. The theme is composed of custom modules, purpose built for Housing Hands brand, business and marketing needs. The build itself uses React and React islands, a modern approach that enables a fast and improved user experience. Security, performance and accessibility standards have been met throughout. With these custom modules, the entire website is user editable through the native HubSpot content management tools. The marketing team can update pages, swap modules and launch new content without a developer in the loop. Consisting of more than a dozen templates and over twenty flexible and adaptable modules, Housing Hand can build new pages in new ways with confidence they are maintaining brand consistent, design language and overall consistency across B2C and B2B user journeys.
A custom quoting tool for Housing Hand’s Guarantor Service was built as a client-side React form, with sensitive pricing logic served from HubSpot serverless functions. That's a security point and a powerful feature because quote pricing for a regulated financial product should never be exposed to the browser.
The site also consolidates Housing Hand's content estate. A main Help Centre, Guides for Tenants, Guides for Parents & Guardians, Guides for Accommodation Providers, and a News Blog all sit on the same platform. HubSpot’s powerful Blog software manages all of this beautifully, with each blog built with a custom template and search. The Help Centre itself is over 150 articles, categorised with HubSpot’s tag system and a custom client-side search built specifically to make that volume of support content genuinely usable to website visitors typically short on time and patience.
Figure 1: The new Housing Hand site, rebuilt on HubSpot CMS with React, supporting four distinct audience journeys.
The technical spec was deliberately written to enable rather than restrict marketing. Every page template is compatible with HubSpot Smart Content, so the marketing team can serve personalised hero sections, CTAs and content blocks based on lifecycle stage, visitor country, device type or list membership, without further development. The same templates support HubSpot's native A/B and adaptive testing tools, so conversion work becomes a matter of marketing operations rather than engineering tickets. Structured data has been implemented throughout for AEO, positioning the site to perform in AI-driven search as well as traditional Google results.
Figure 2: The Guarantor quote tool, built as a React wizard with pricing served securely via HubSpot serverless functions.
The rebuild gives Housing Hand a modern, fast, brand-consistent website that is deeply integrated with the HubSpot CRM platform and the marketing and service tools the business already relies on. The four audience journeys are clear, the product portfolio is coherent, and the marketing team has the operational independence to run campaigns, tests and personalised content without a development queue sitting in front of every change.
It also sets the business up for the next phase. The platform is ready for the powerful new features to support the business’ accelerating growth including payment gateway integrations once regulatory and commercial reviews complete. With their customer base spread across the close the internationalisation work to create dedicated country routes is now a configuration exercise rather than a complex rebuild.
“We were all very excited to see it come alive, your team did a great job in getting this home. We really appreciated your team's professional insight. A good solid job.”
Housing Hand