Property Valuation Wizard

Challenge

In the german real estate market, most sellers only sell one or two properties in their lifetime. So finding a suitable price is challenging, and sellers often have to rely on their gut feeling for an estimate or trust realtors they have just met. One of Homedays goals is to create more transparency and understanding of the selling process for its customers. The first valuation of the property is a crucial step in that. So we set out to build a tool realtors could use during their consultations with property owners.

Objectives

From experience and early market research, we knew that trust is a significant factor in signing with a realtor and that the more reasonable the realtor's estimation of the property was for the seller, the more likely they were to trust the service through the process. Therefore, the success of our project was going to be measured by customer satisfaction after the first consultation appointment and the broker order conversion rate.

Concept

The project started with some in-depth market research before I joined Homeday. When I arrived, we evaluated the situational context of the first valuation appointment, and I quickly concluded that the tool needed to support the conversation between the realtor and the property owner. The realtor would use the tool hands-on, and the property owner was required to see what was happening simultaneously. An interactive property calculation tool for iPad would ideally suit these requirements. While many other realtors would estimate property selling prices based primarily on their experience and gut feeling, Homedays partner realtors could base their valuation on real-life data from our valuation tool.

Flow

Based on interviews with our partner realtors, we structured the wizard's flow to provide the appropriate input fields at the right point of the conversation and improve the storytelling of finding the ideal price to enter the real estate market.

Early Validation

Before designing any UI for our valuation wizard, we decided to conduct some early validation tests of our flow in the field based on a simple but functional prototype in the form of interactive excel files. The test results showed that we were on the right path but also revealed some issues in the flow that we could fix with minimal effort.

UI And Interaction Concepts

Having clarity on the flow, situational context, and our customers' mindsets, I decided on a straightforward wizard as our central interaction concept. Each page would show just one factor for the property price and the effect it has on the valuation. Where needed, the realtor would be able to adjust the data-based estimate based on what they saw firsthand in the property. Throughout the conversation, the property owner could see and relate to how the market value of their property was affected by different factors.

Adjusting The Selling Strategy

Market conditions always determine the actual selling price of a property. Therefore, I designed an interactive slide that lets the realtor and property owner adjust the estimated price and see the effects on demand and estimated time to sell to find the ideal marketing price.

MVP Version

After testing the UI concepts through interviews with our partner realtors, we were ready to build an MVP to find out how impactful the valuation wizard was and what we still needed to improve. We scoped our MVP to include only major property types, simplifying our flow and the development effort while offering a large enough number of applicable cases to show effects on our KPIs.

Learnings And Iteration

The MVP version of the valuation wizard was quite successful in increasing trust and conversion rates when realtors used it. Nonetheless, we learned that it wasn't flexible enough to cover some of the conversation styles some realtors had, which made it hard for them to adopt the tool into their consultation. So, in a second iteration, we set out to include more property types and add flexibility to further increase the adoption rate by our partner realtors. Since I could hire more UX designers in the meantime, I handed the project to a newly hired Senior UX Designer in our freshly established product squad and took on a more supportive and guiding role as Head of Design.

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