REConsole
The problem
Sourcing opportunities to market requires extensive market knowledge and the ability to react quickly to changes, ie, market expertise.
Producing effective marketing requires expensive resources like market researchers and marketing assistants.
For agents:
The power of a personal researcher, able to aggregate, organize and synthesize proprietary intelligence.
The power of a personal marketing assistant, able to instantly create and distribute visually stunning, dynamically-updated marketing pieces.
For investors:
The power of a personal market researcher, able to distill market opportunities and trends into succinct, actionable snapshots.
The concept
A data-driven market map that instantly generates recent comparable sales, competing properties, current and planned construction projects, and market mover-owned parcels for every property in every market
Agents use these maps internally as databases or easily create property-specific URLs to serve as interactive marketing materials
Building the Brand
Once the team had settled on a name for the company (REConsole) I set off on creating a recognizable logo. I knew that I wanted to play off the idea of searching and finding, so the initial concepts played heavily on the idea of sonar and binoculars.
The final logo took elements of the sonar while also building off of the RE, as well as adding a bit of depth and motion to it.
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Taking to customers
During the first 2 weeks of the project, I spent time familiarizing myself with the vertical and customers by scheduling on-site interviews where real estate agents would walk me through their current workflows. After the second interview, common trends began to pop up.
- Information can be incorrect/fragmented
- Expensive pricing models
- Hard to find owner information
With this information, I was able to break down the features necessary for the MVP. The team knew that we would have to position ourselves to provide information that was contextual as well as actionable. After going through the interviews, we understood that while finding information was important, the overall information was fragmented and took additional parsing to extract the actual value.
Planning
We knew that just aggregating information wasn’t enough, The true value was the ability to take action on that info.
The fact that the data was so fragmented and disjointed came up through every customer interview, and we knew that the first step was the need to clean the data and give users a complete view of the market around them. We accomplished this with our first feature, parcel groups.
When you currently search for a comp, it’s simple to see who the owner is, but it’s fairly difficult knowing what else it is that they own. Doing larger land deals, knowing that an owner owns 5 parcels directly next to each other is a massive advantage.
If you were to have to find this information now, you would have to start by finding an owner, then go into the public records and search what other parcels they own. The problem with this is that a majority of the time owners hide the purchases within shell companies.
Our solution was to parse those public records, combined with the corresponding owner information, and display that information in an easy-to-use dashboard. Doing this allowed us to create insight for our users in a fraction of the time that they’ve been accustomed to.
Building on a strong foundation
Having a parcel tool is important, but it’s not enough when it comes to the everyday lives of real estate agents. That’s why we build out additional features to make sure that they had the tools they need to save time and make smarter decisions, faster.
The IA below breaks out the largest features and benefits into easy-to-find & understand sections.
1. The explore tab
This is where the majority of agents’ workflow would take place. From here they were able to search and filter through parcels, parcel groups, and ownership information. They were also able to place notifications on specific items which would propagate and influence the following sections.
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2. The profile
Given the depth of the platform, the profile allows the agents to keep their ideas and strategies together while they used the system.
Recent activity: Kept track of all of the properties and items that were interested in.
Collections: Most agencies may have multiple people working on a single account (agents, underwriters, designers, etc) and collections allowed them to keep that same level of collaboration as we all an easy-to-find and update system.
Notes: Agents are notorious for taking notes, whether their client remarks or just internal comments. Our system allowed them to keep those notes contextual to each of the REConsole data types.
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3. The feed
Throughout the agent interviews, they all mentioned the same thing when it came to their workflow; real estate news was the first thing that they looked at when they woke up, and the last thing they looked at before they went to sleep.
It’s one thing to have to sift through news, but it gets increasingly hard to find that diamond in the rough when there are multiple news sources and platforms that you need to pay attention to.
The news section for REconsole wanted to bring them that same information, but facilitate the information based on their searches and saves to make sure that they were getting the more relevant and contextual information, as soon as it was live.
The agents would get notifications as soon as articles or new results were posted about either properties, owners, or locations that they’re interested in.
Project takeaways
Given that this was my first start-up position, let alone being able to completely shape a drive a product, the experience was invaluable and I learned what it truly takes to get a product into the user's hands.
Things that I would have done differently:
- Find product fit. While I conducted in-person user testing every few months, there were clear signs that what we were building was solving a problem, but we eventually had the issue that it wasn’t a big enough problem that customers would want to implement the product. More generalized feature feedback could have figured this out beforehand
- Implement a standardized design system and modular design approach. As I was early in my career, I focused a lot on the “doing” part of the job, and not the “how”. A simple example of this is that I implemented Photoshop early on given that’s where I had more of my experience. I should have seen that the process and symbol features of Sketch could have saved me a bunch of time in the long run. It’s possible to create a pseudo-system within Photoshop, but it’s clunky and not as optimized as a product design-oriented tool.
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