When there was no safety net: our “Priority” feature

How Casavo tackled a real challenge with a new feature and turned things around.

Chiara Angori

Published in

Casavo

7 min readFeb 8, 2024

Summary

What’s Casavo?
What’s Priority?
Three points of focus
Time for an honest talk
Conclusions

What’s Casavo?

Casavo is a European scaleup that offers smart solutions to sell and buy homes.

Thanks to its technology and innovative model, the company is revolutionizing the real estate market, while simplifying the life of sellers and buyers.

Casavo guides its customers through every step of the selling and buying process, providing total transparency and full control, so they can instantly find the right offer or home that matches their needs.

What’s Priority?

The Priority feature links homeowners who want to sell their homes to potential buyers.

With Priority, sellers can:

have a list of potential buyers interested before signing with Casavo
test their asking price and get feedback from potential buyers
speed the sales process

With Priority, buyers can:

browse exclusive home listings on Casavo before they hit the market.
express interest and get early access to visits
make an offer before anyone else at the seller's asking price
speed the sales process

With Priority, Casavo can:

Increase the probability of sellers accepting our sale proposal
Speed the sales process by skipping a few steps (ex. photo shooting, “standard” buyers' house showings)

Three points of focus

Price 👛

Sellers aim to maximize profit, while buyers seek a good deal.

On the sellers’ side,

In the home value estimate, we propose a potential listing price range. We use pricing models to make sure sellers have all the information they need, so they can make informed decisions.

In 2023, in 76% of cases, the asking price exceeds the closing price by an average of 8–10%. It means that sellers may aim for 108–110k but typically sell at 100k.
However, we allow sellers the flexibility to choose their asking price, even if higher than the market. We maintain seller freedom in pricing, letting the market validate or reject their choice.

On the buyer side,

While sellers can test the market, we have to ensure reasonable pricing to maintain credibility with buyers. We put a system in place to prevent errors like a $10k price for a minimum $100k home due to typos.
Priority listings have a provisional price, signaling to buyers that the stated price is temporary and subject to change. We want to be transparent and also guide buyers in navigating listing prices.
We reward sellers aligning with our suggested price (up to 10% more) by tagging it as a ‘good price.’

Photos 📷

We knew that the success of a home listing relies on photos and their quality. However, Priority listings are published on the site before Casavo can arrange a professional photo shoot.

How do we help sellers take photos that showcase their homes?

we used deep learning to anonymize photos. For example, by removing faces, or personal details from the floor plan. (more details here)

we used Computer Vision to provide instant feedback. Our data-gathering process already could automatically scan photos to ensure coverage of all rooms in the house. (more details here)

Address

On the seller’s side, one big concern is sharing their home’s location. Some sellers hesitate to reveal their address to keep the sale private.

They don’t want to share the exact address even after signing a sales proposal, so there was no point in asking them to commit to sharing their address when they’re not even sure to sell.

On the buyer’s side, we knew that not showing the exact address would make buyers more hesitant. But you can’t always serve the two audiences equally.

Time for an honest talk

What went well with Priority?

Email conversion and email testing. The 5-second test demonstrated the email’s clarity and conciseness, making it effective in conveying information about Potential properties to buyers without unnecessary content. Qualitative research led us to tweak our expressions to better convey the intended sense of priority.

It doesn’t make you feel like a priority. If you want to give priority to someone, you don’t tell them to ‘get in line’ but rather ‘you’re the first.’ The phrase about the line felt contradictory to the concept of priority. — User 9

We also included details about who will receive the email and why — based on user feedback emphasizing its importance.

Product and marketing collaboration. As a content designer, I’ve teamed up with the copywriter on features previously (PS: Copywriters convince people to try a product with marketing materials like landing pages, brochures, and ads. Content designers create the words users see while using the product, like on their homepage, during account setup, and in transactional emails)
This time, we sat down and created a communication strategy document, covering Audience, Market Context & Problem, Effect, Need, Solution, Benefits, Use Cases, Differentiation, TOV & Wording, and keywords. We wrote it down a bit late, but better late than never.
Once we finished it, we made sure that the marketing landing page and listing product page were well connected. The most significant challenge encountered was the infamous ‘who has the final say?’ but together, we managed to find the right compromise.

What can we improve with Priority?

Aligning CTA with the real experience. Once the Priority listing is online, we send an email to buyers introducing the house, accompanied by a call-to-action that says, ‘I’d like to visit it.’ Then, we track the number of buyers clicking on the button and inform the seller, ‘Hey, X buyers are interested in seeing your house’. Through both qualitative and quantitative research, we realized that the CTA ‘I’d like to visit it’ was way too optimistic. The buyer undergoes a second screening during the call with the advisor to verify data not present in the listing and, if still interested, will visit the house. That’s why we are changing the call-to-action to a less engaging ‘Receive updates’.

Stakeholders alignment. If there’s a lack of internal communication, you can be sure that inconsistency will also be evident externally. Many teams lacked sufficient knowledge about the feature, causing significant delays. To tackle this, we created a specific channel for weekly tasks within the Product, Marketing, and Operations teams. In addition, we reached out to Customer Experience and the Head of Design to help us identify all the necessary stakeholders.

Further research on feature naming. We conducted qualitative research but probably didn’t focus enough on localization. When asked about the ‘Priority’ feature, interviewees understood it as a special connection with Casavo. 3 in 6 saw it as the privilege of visiting houses before others without any hint. A few months later, when asked if they remembered the name, none did, but the keywords used included innovation, exclusive preview, priority, precedence, preferred access, and prerogative. Marketing and Product teams are preparing another research round to ensure an effective naming.

Conclusions

In short, we faced a tough situation with the ‘Priority’ feature because we created a new feature and gave extra attention to a “new” audience (buyers).

It was not perfect; we had ups and downs and countless meetings.

We can confidently say we’ve learned to collaborate effectively and are eager to push this feature even further.

Sometimes a stumble is necessary, especially if it leads to improvement.

Hope you enjoyed reading this article!

If you have further questions, just send me a LinkedIn message ❤️

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