Out of the box home search option
Unique way to search your dream home
Today home buying is a daunting process and most of the online portals provide basic filters to search home. Based on the past data and customer feedback we realised that users were unable to find the right property digitally and largely relied on Real Estate consultants (Brokers). Here we saw a need for smarter pre defined filters which are personalised to various demographics.
Inspired by Zomato, we started exploring Collections for Real Estate domain. There were two major roadblocks when we conceptualised the idea:
- We were pioneers to create a product like this in the real estate sector in India, hence validation of the concept is essential before making it live in all cities.
- Curate list of Collections carefully for demographics. Conceptually, Collections may be a really good product but a biased curation or irrelevant Collections to the target audience may result in a negative impact.
To go ahead with the Collections product we followed the Product Development Cycle, mentioned on this link.
Idea
Create hand picked collection of properties for users to give them a one click property search option.
Requirement Gathering
To develop a product like this, we wanted to understand the target user requirement, pin point the pain with the current search options or other competitor website search options.
Calling users for interviews or setting up a focussed group would have been an expensive and time taking effort. So we went ahead with the following plan.
- Decided to understand the users in the top six cities, as the demand and choices of users vary from one city to another.
- Interview in-house calling team that suggests properties to users just like a broker does.
- Listen to the call recordings of in-house team with the users.
- Added few questions in the script of in-house calling team to gather certain requirements.
- Analysed the user journey data (web footprint) of the existing website.
- Analysed most used filters in these cities.
- Checked most used Google keywords to search properties in these cities.
After gathering the data, we realised that none of the online real estate product understand user preferences. For ex, when a working user is searching for a house in Mumbai, he will search near a train station or which is close to highway or which is close to a business park. None of the website had a feature to search a house in a close proximity of Western Express Highway.
Another issue, all the real estate portal highlight lots and lots of amenities filters on the face of the users without understanding whether users will ever take decision of buying a house on the basis of these amenities.
So, now our idea of Collections changed from the initial concept. Now, we wanted to provide users with a product that can search dream home of the user in a similar fashion that a broker does. Ex, he goes to broker and asks for a house in close proximity to Metro station or in close proximity to business park.
Product Planning
Based on the requirement gathering, we came up with handpicked list of Collections for the Tier 1 cities and now had to strategise the product rollout plan. While strategising, we kept in mind that the product has not been validated with genuine home buyers yet.
To validate the product, we created a MVP (minimum viable product) where at a time we display only 6 to 8 collections. Instead of writing an algorithm to fetch properties in real time, we hardcoded the filters to fetch relevant property options. To stick to MVP, we used as much existing product we can you with lesser new development effort.
Design to Release
To highlight Collections, we added a section on the current Homepage that showcased 6 Collections in Tier 1 cities and linked it to the existing listing page that picked the property database which was hard coded in the backend.
Conclusion
After deployment and launch of the product, we saw some great result. 15% traffic of the website was diverted to Collections and there was decrease in the bounce rate on the homepage by 20%. In some time, almost 30% users started clicking on Collections. We also saw an increase in leads from 3.9% to 4.7% within a month.
This was a successful test and a validation of successful product for us. Post this, we launched Collections in rest of the cities on the portal, created an aesthetically pleasing webpage specifically for Collections, created a complete new user flow and launched it on all our platforms like mobile website and mobile applications.
