Helping property managers do their job more efficiently, getting the right tenant into the right property sooner.
From 2022–2023 I was the designer on the rent customer team at REA Group, working across our customer SaaS platform, Ignite, and the consumer experience on realestate.com.au.
During my time on the team, we saw our market share stabilise after several months of trending down, and then finally increase for the first time since we migrated customers off our old application platform, 1form, to Ignite.
Below is a short summary of a few of the things I worked on to help achieve our goals. If you're interested in learning more, get in touch.
Increasing customer productivity
For property managers, getting a property leased to a great tenant as quickly as possible is the top priority. One of our key objectives as a team was to increase the quantity of listings with approved applications in Ignite, and reduce the time it took them to reach that approval.
Custom status updates
After approving an application, a property manager needs to communicate the next steps of the process with the new tenant. While we had a canned message that customers could send to an applicant once they updated their status, that message didn't always communicate everything the property manager needed it to, so they often skipped this step and contacted applicants directly via email.
I designed a configurable template that customers could use to create their own editable approve and decline messages, resulting in increased usage of the approve and decline statuses in Ignite.
Improved shortlisting and sharing
With changes to the market, property managers found that they needed to shortlist and share with the landlord more than the 3 potential tenants possible in Ignite, and as a result were sharing these directly and in full with landlords via email.
I updated the shortlist and sharing feature to allow up to 10 shortlisted applications, with additional details to help property managers demonstrate their value to landlords as a part of this process.
While streamlining property managers workflows was important, application sharing from Ignite also helps keep consumer data safe and reduces potential bias by sharing only relevant, anonymised information about each application.
Bringing the entire market to customers
While customers get the overwhelming majority of their applications through realestate.com.au, they didn't want to miss out on applications that may come through other means, or limit themselves to only receiving applications for properties that were listed with us.
Applying for any property
To increase customer retention, we proposed a drastic change to the status quo at REA that would enable customers to receive applications for any property regardless of the campaign activity on our advertising platform, realestate.com.au.
Applying from anywhere
We also explored how we might work around now being a competitor to other places our customers might list properties, and how we might still make it easy for them to direct potential tenants to our application form on realestate.com.au.
Servicing customers from end-to-end
Competition in the rental space was growing, and our customers were utilising more digital tools to help them do their jobs beyond processing applications. To protect and grow our market share, we wanted to expand our offering beyond application processing to evolve Ignite into an end-to-end SaaS product, streamlining customer workflows and reducing their reliance on additional tools.
Managing open for inspections
First, we made open for inspections quicker and easier and linked applicants with their inspection attendance in Ignite to help property managers process applications. This was a broad project, get in touch for a complete case study on this work.
Starting a new lease
Next, we wanted to address the final stage of the process by helping customers generate a lease without cumbersome and repetitive data entry.
To do this, I redesigned elements of the application in Ignite to make it possible for customers to edit certain fields as they related to the lease. With the application details all accurate within Ignite, we could then pass those details via our API to their CRM where they generated their lease documents.
This would also give us unique and much more accurate data on application outcomes which we could use to further improve both the customer and consumer experiences in the future.
Exploring the future
I worked across a few visions for how the rent experience in Ignite might evolve in the future. Some of the ideas explored were incorporated into other initiatives, and the native vision for rental applications resulted in investment in rent features for the Ignite native app for the first time, further increasing monthly active users.