The Needs of Prospective Home Buyers

Role: Product Manager
Team: User Researcher, Product Designer
Duration: 3 months (Apr–Jun 2019)

CHALLENGE

Redfin is a real estate brokerage leveraging technology to redefine real estate in the consumer’s favor. Among other things, Redfin’s website and mobile applications allow people to search for homes on the market and request brokerage services like property tours and agent representation.

Although Redfin is a standout among competitors for its ability to instantly schedule and often times fulfill same-day property tours, home buyers often face an issue that limits them from touring homes to begin with: coordinating a time with their spouse, real estate agent, and the seller is overly complicated.

Getting everyone aligned thus becomes a cumbersome task that home buyers avoid until they’re serious about a home. We wondered if there might be an opportunity for us to use our brokerage infrastructure and technology to make it easier for home buyers using Redfin to see properties they’re interested in.

PROCESS

We had long dreamed of removing this friction by allowing buyers to tour a home without an agent (since 2006!), but before diving in, it was important to us that we deeply understand the current state of affairs.

To do this, we built a research plan and conducted customer interviews through usertesting.com. Our goal was to walk away with a firm understanding of the customer’s goal at the root of the property tour experience, and the challenges and opportunities with the current offerings as a result of that.

We interviewed the following three groups with the intent to answer each corresponding question:

1. People who are actively touring with an agent. What key pain points do people face with the existing product offering, touring with an agent?

2. People who have completed a self-guided tour with OpenDoor. How effective are our competitors at relieving these pain points?

3. People who have completed a self-guided tour with Redfin (a proof-of-concept pilot we ran in one market). How effective are we (so far) at relieving these pain points?

SOLUTION

The themes that surfaced from the research helped us clarify the scope of what we would offer and how we would present it to our customers.

First, we learned that people care more about having autonomy in their touring experience than convenience. This meant that simply giving people large time windows for property access was not a valuable offering on its own. It was more important to help buyers feel in control of their experience—for example, by managing foot traffic and barring the seller from being present at the time of the tour.

Second, we saw that people consistently understood the value of a self-guided tour within their first experience of trying it. This showed us it was more valuable to focus on evangelizing the concept with buyers who had never tried it, rather than convincing people who had previously taken a self-guided tour that it was worth doing again.

TRACTION

Within three months of instigating the project, we launched our preliminary self-guided tour offering in three markets, and quickly expanded to four more following the success of the rollout.

The early performance of the feature far surpassed our goals for 2019—tours on eligible properties increased to over 3x our target, and contact rate from prospective buyers is 46% over target.