Making portfolio transactions simple, transparent, and easy
How I championed design thinking during challenging real estate landscapes to build a marketplace, driving a 40% increase in task efficiency
B2B real estate startup | Responsive web | Sole designer | 2022 - current
My role
I am leading all design work from ideation to shipping. We started with a simple objective: let’s improve the portfolio experience.
I collaborate closely with one PM, five engineers, and the Business Development team. This project is ongoing, lasting over 2 years.
What’s Roofstock?
Roofstock simplifies real estate investing in which anyone can buy single-family-rental properties to generate wealth.
Since late 2022, the company has shifted its focus to enterprise solutions for institutional investors, particularly within portfolio transactions.
What’s the opportunity?
Buying or selling 20 to 1,000 homes at once is hard and takes a long time. There is no leading marketplace for portfolio transactions.
Analysts work late creating slides and answering emails. Buyers face pressure in making sure their acquisitions align with their portfolio.
1. How can we help analysts work more efficiently to spend time on what matters in deals?
2. How can we empower buyers to feel more confident when analyzing deals and making decisions?
The process
Deeply understand the problem
Empathize with the customers. Identify major pain points and the journey.
Test and validate
Validate concepts with users. Assess feedback to incorporate or monitor.
Build, measure impact, and learn
Collaborate with Eng to build and ship fast, and with Product to track and optimize.
Before
Before I joined, Roofstock analysts marketed deals through individual listings
Everything was manual and tedious. The main problems:
Analysts have to constantly check their phones to accept NDAs and grant access to buyers one by one
Analysts have to track and collect all offers through emails
Buyers can’t compare deals easily
Buyers have no idea what price range the seller is expecting
After
A purpose-built marketplace for buyers to compare deals and submit offers
Deeply understanding the process
For 2 months, I led workshops, interviews, and shadowed our analysts and buyers.
Our heads were spinning with all these manual tasks and workarounds, all made under intense pressure and tight deadlines.
Analysts are in high-stress mode the entire time, peaking when they’re collecting offers
Buyers need a better way to analyze deals, and pricing guidance to submit the best offer
What users really wanted
but not limited to
Online offer collection
Buyers are manually tracking offer deadlines and statuses. Analysts are fielding questions, chasing buyers, and communicating results.
Portfolios mapped
Zillow & Redfin map individual properties but these buyers need to map assets within and across portfolios to identify which best meets their needs.
Business goal
Generate revenue
Portfolios bring in a lot of money. The faster we close, the faster Roofstock makes money.
Grow customer base
Without a public marketplace, a lot of potential buyers don’t know about our deals.
Success metrics
It’s all about efficiency
Time to market deal
Analysts spend 1-2 days preparing marketing materials before the deal goes live. It should only take a few hours.
Time to collect and present offers
Everything is done manually. Analysts time is better spent elsewhere.
Increase in deal interest
Deal announcement emails are easily lost in inboxes, and buyers miss exciting deals that align with their needs.
Test and validate
How do buyers best interact with portfolios on a map?
Clusters when zoomed out
Majority of users preferred seeing approximate property locations despite zoom level.
Directly to details
Identifying portfolios through hover wasn’t enough. Users wanted to fully compare portfolio locations before moving on.
Portfolio selected state
Users liked that selecting a property clearly highlighted its portfolio and the locations of other properties.
How do buyers best scan the deal info to make a decision?
“It’s as scanning a resume. I want to know in 2 mins if I’m interested”
2 column layout
Users liked the easy access to main metrics but did not find the generic offer timeline useful.
Main metrics in a sticky card
Users overlooked the offer status due to the gallery size, and had some difficulty in scanning efficiently.
What do buyers need to submit a quality, confident offer?
We were constrained from offering a pricing range or guidance.
Providing expectations for each stage
Users appreciated the extensive information but at this stage they only care for deadlines.
Laying out the entire deal timeline
Users questioned the accuracy of the deadlines for future stages, even for the estimated ranges.
Connecting the experience across teams
Roofstock faced tough times
Market slowdown, 4 layoff rounds, consumer marketplace shutdown
Reactions to the company identity crisis included fast builds without user research.
When a pod built a portfolio analysis tool, I quickly realized its connection to the marketplace and stepped in to lead the design strategy.
Validated with investors who use Stessa, the prop tech app
I validated the solution and learned that institutional users don’t need an analysis tool.
I interviewed 10 small and mid-sized investors and uncovered that they have always wanted to break into portfolio sales.
We saw an exciting opportunity to level the playing field in a sector that is predominantly institutions.
Driving the new vision
I workshopped with Product leaders on the new vision
We started to shape the unified experience, connecting the transactional journey across all apps and services.
Final designs
Analyzing multi-market portfolios on a map
Scanning deal info similar to a resume - am I interested?
Feeling reassured and confident when submitting an offer
Build, measure, and learn
Results
The portfolio listings release was timed with tough market conditions, resulting in a huge slowdown in portfolio sales and an inevitable miss on our goal to increase customer growth.
The entire portfolio vision was punted. In the midst of a merger and more re-orgs, the company kept its focus on institutions for now.
Despite the slow market, the marketplace and admin app made strong impact:
40%
Increase in internal task efficiency
20%
email conversion rate
3x
increase in deal access requests
Reflections
This is a rollercoaster of an experience where I’ve experienced all the highs and lows with my team.
I’ve had a chance to hit significant milestones such as leading a 40-person design workshop with the BD team, and collaborating on a company vision.
Fail fast, learn faster is what a lot of us design by but easier said than done. Fortunately, the beauty of startups, whether you like it or not, is fast releases. I learned to adapt and love the quicker feedback looks, and trust the process, the collaboration, and myself.