PRD for House Canary
Here is an example for a product requirements document that I wrote for the Real Estate Investment company House Canary. I wrote about adding an easy to use data analyzer that can pull data from their valuations. Enjoy!
Title
Easy House Evaluator
By: Sean Pan
Change history
- 7/26/2017 Initial Draft
Overview
One of House Canary’s main target audiences is the individual investor. Unfortunately, it is not well known among the investment groups as seen by a lack of discussion about the product on the popular Real Estate Investment forums. This tool will increase user engagement and will give investors a reason to visit the site and subscribe to a professional account.
Objectives
- The Easy House Evaluator tool will let investors see how much they can profit from a property. It will be prepopulated with the data generated from the House Valuation product. The tool is free and is designed to increase user engagement and introduce new investors to House Canary.
Success Metrics
We will determine that the solution is successful if
- 20% of existing users use the tool
- 30% of new users try the tool and number of account creations increase by 10%
Messaging
- A simpler way to evaluate your investment
Timeline & Release Planning
Creating the tool should take 2 weeks from design to engineering. We will then begin a launch campaign to build up excitement for the product. The launch campaign will include creating Google Ads and Facebook Targeted Ads to potential customers and sending out an email notification to existing users, encouraging them to try the tool when it releases.
Personas
- New Investor — The new investor doesn’t have their own evaluation tools and is unsure how to evaluate a good deal. They rely on software to help them make their decision. Using our tool gets them introduced to House Canary.
- Experienced Investor — The experienced investor has their own makeshift tools, but they are usually created with Excel and don’t look professional. To make a better business case with a lender, they want a professional looking spreadsheet that appropriately presents the information.
Scenarios
● Jeff is a new real estate investor who is interested in breaking into the business. He searches on the BiggerPockets forum for advice and isn’t sure how to evaluate a deal. He has seen advertisements for House Canary and sees that they have a free evaluation tool. The tool is different from other similar analysis devices because it automatically pulls and prepopulates itself with the data from House Canary’s Home Valuation product. Jeff gets interested with the tool and starts to play around with the numbers and tries more addresses. Soon, he is reliant on the tool and frequently comes back to the website to use it.
He might encounter some issues if he doesn’t know what the terms mean (i.e. what is annualized ROI). He also has to create an account to be able to receive his free valuations (and use the tool).
● Will is an experienced investor who uses his own tools and intuition to evaluate a deal. He doesn’t use tools provided from other companies. However, when he needs to pitch his idea to a potential investor or lender (banks) he wants to have something that looks more professional than an excel spreadsheet.
This kind of investor is unlikely to even use House Canary as they don’t trust home valuations from an automated device. Getting to this market is very challenging as their ways are set in stone. If they already have a way to display their graphs, they are unlikely to use this tool as well.
Features In
● The webform will have two main components, one is a form with many inputs that the user can type things in, the other is a collection of graphs that represent the output of the analysis
● The inputs can be auto-populated with the data from the home valuations or manually typed in by the user to tweak some data (in case they believe something is incorrect)
● Some notable inputs will be ‘estimated rent’, ‘estimated property taxes’, ‘estimated insurance’.
● There will be graphs that shows a pro-forma example of how the investment will do over time
● There will be another graph that shows the total-ROI based on how much you decide to put as a down payment (20% down with higher interest vs 25% with lower interest on the mortgage)
● The tool will need to be formatted in a way that it can be saved as a pdf or printed to look professional.
Features Out
● This trend sheet will only be focused on ‘buy and hold’ properties. This will not be appropriate to use to analyze a ‘flip’. The ‘flipping’ tool requires more inputs such as repair costs, after repair value, holding costs, etc…
● It will also not be appropriate to use for large multifamily complexes or other commercial real estate investments.
Designs
TBD
Open Issues
● TBD
Q&A
● TBD
Looking forward to the future, the possibilities are endless.