STRAITS
ROW

Straits Row rises 18 stories above Chicago’s historic Printers Row. A fully furnished community built for students and student professionals, within walking distance of Columbia College Chicago, Roosevelt University, and Adler University. Developed with Q Investment Partners and managed by PeakMade Real Estate, the building carries custom-commissioned art inspired by the neighborhood’s legacy as the heart of Chicago’s printing industry.

The leasing structure is where it gets complicated. Straits Row leases by the bed. A student signs for one bedroom in a four-bedroom, four-bath apartment on an installment schedule, while the same floor plan can also go to a group taking the whole unit. Every plan therefore carries two prices at once: $1,629 per bed, or $6,516 for all four. Most leasing sites pick one number and confuse everybody else.

In a market this competitive, splitting the website from the media buy is expensive. Advertising drives volume to a page that can’t convert it, or a beautifully built site sits starved of qualified traffic. Either way, the property pays twice.

The site. Threshold designed and developed a website that opens with a nod to the neighborhood’s past: black-and-white photography that resolves into full color as the visitor scrolls, moving from historic foundations to a vibrant present. Beneath the craft, it works as a leasing tool. Pricing and availability show the per-bed rate and the full-unit rate side by side on every plan — studios through four-bedrooms, across the main collection and The Lofts at Straits Row on the 16th floor — so a student pricing one bedroom and a group pricing a whole apartment each read the number that applies to them. Curated art, bespoke finishes, and the rooftop amenity deck carry through every page.

The media. Paid search and paid social ran across Google Search, Google Display, Facebook, and Instagram, generating more than 2.18 million impressions and 41,833 clicks to the site.

The advantage of owning both. Because the same team ran the campaigns and built the pages, the media could point at specific floor plan and pricing pages instead of a generic homepage, and the site’s conversion paths were shaped around the traffic actually arriving. Nothing was lost in the handoff, because there was no handoff.

The clearest signal is what happened to the quality of the traffic. Year over year, average session duration rose 31%, and the user conversion rate improved 68%. The same market, converting substantially better.

Google Search held a 5.34% click-through rate and produced 886 conversions at a 6.29% conversion rate. Paid campaigns generated 367 click-to-call leads. Across the funnel, that traffic produced 148 tour requests and 340 completed online applications. Straits Row signed 146 leases, with several floor plans now sold out.

Reporting window: January 1 – August 2, 2026.