Growing the off market real estate industry
Context
Property Platform, a product owned by REA group, is a tool used by property developers to manage their off-market stock inventories and sales networks. Essentially, off-market property simply refers to agent stock that is not advertised or publicly listed. Developers will often sell stock off-market to fund construction.
Property Platform’s original feature set enables property developers to manage stock inventory and sales, share to a private sales network and process reservation fees. I was brought on board to design Marketplace, which would give developers the ability to reach beyond their own private sales networks to access an expanded pool of prospective buyers for their property stock.
By doing so, Marketplace could offer wider opportunities and optimise sales for all off-market professionals.
Product - Responsive SaaS application, iOS application
Role - Senior UX, UI
Key achievements
Drove E2E product design across responsive web, iOS
Facilitated discovery to win investment in the refactoring of complex legacy UI, improving cross-platform experience
Developed new design system
Rapid testing and iteration of marketplace feature
Developed go to market materials including promotional site
Problem space
The challenge was to enhance the Property Platform, a product owned by the REA group, which property developers use to manage their off-market stock inventories and sales networks. This platform needed an extension called "Marketplace" to connect professionals in off-market real estate, allowing developers to reach a broader pool of prospective buyers. The key problems included a lack of trust in existing solutions (like Investorist), a need for privacy and control over shared information for developers, and a desire for upfront property information for agents.
Approach
To address this challenge, I began with subject immersion and market research, identifying the appetite for specific product features across supply and demand. Core user groups, including Property Developers, Real Estate Agents, and Developer-Agents, were identified based on their unique needs and perceptions of the product. I sketched priority user flows, highlighting overlaps with the existing system, and conducted a thorough review of the existing system from a heuristic and analytics perspective, proposing necessary upgrades.
Solution
The solution involved a series of improvements:
Incremental design and integration of features.
Balancing conflicting user needs of developers and agents.
Ensuring parallel adoption by supply and demand.
Redesigning the information architecture, moving from a complex sidebar to simplified navigation.
Detailing wires for key flows and multiple views using standard REA UI patterns.
Offering flexibility, filtering, and surfacing of relevant property listings.
Streamlining the onboarding flow for agents.
Collaboration with the team and key stakeholders was crucial throughout the design process, including facilitated feedback sessions and testing with mixed groups of agents. The design work also included a refreshed visual brand and marketing collateral. The result was a significantly improved user experience, streamlined navigation, upgraded brand consistency, and intuitive key flows. Users adopted new features seamlessly, maximizing their ability to access and review relevant properties, trust new connections, and reduce onboarding barriers. Despite initial constraints, the beta release successfully curbed initial adoption, with continued uptake.
