Viewings Manager

Project overview

With a client base of 20,000 and over a million new properties listed every day, Rightmove is the UK’s largest property portal. Everyday, over 5 million consumers use Rightmove to search and enquire about their dream properties. However, agents across the country struggle to keep up with the pace. They fail to respond efficiently to the enquiries and to prioritise the leads that will grow their business. To fix this issue, I designed a management tool for agents to pre-qualify leads and manage viewings.

The challenge

Rightmove operates on a B2B2C model which serves a vast consumer audience for property listings on one side and 20,000 advertisers of available properties on the other side. But we simply connect people with property, which is a tiny part of our users’ journey. Once a home-seeker sends an enquiry and the agent receives it, we lose sight of what happens next… How might we change this and grow business? How might we improve the whole home seeking experience for both home seekers and agents.

How I worked

I built this project from scratch, from the strategy to launch and through multiple iterations. As the design expert, I was in constant cross-functional collaboration with internal stakeholders (Analytics, UX Researchers, Marketing, Ops, Account Directors). But I also kept really busy visiting clients across the country. On a day-to-day basis I was part of the newly formed “Act” squad (1xPO, 1xBA, 6xEngineers, 2xQA) and we worked in agile sprint cycles.

From MVP to the “ideal experience”

We had to ship fast, but also ship to learn. Our MVP had just enough features to be considered “working”. We made it available to only 17 customers (out of 2,000) in Bournemouth and Yorkshire. I monitored and worked closely with this customers to learn how to evolve the product. At the same time, I had a “behind the scenes redesign” project, where I would focus about 25% of my time on refining our existing product without being bogged down by limitations. Anything was on the table in this “ideal experience” I would leave it in the backlog and allow the designs to evolve slowly.

Research

Before starting to design anything, we needed to align on the problem space, needs, challenges, target audience and opportunities for both - our users and the business’. “Quan” and “qual” data helped to identified assumptions, hypothesis and gaps in the knowledge.

The users

We focused in the lettings space as it was less risky and aligned with the company OKRs. That allowed us to narrow our efforts into a core audience of lettings agents (inc. student lettings agents).

Research goals and initiatives

• To map the rental process: steps, tools used, software, exceptions, needs, motivations and painpoints we spoke to 7 agencies and 17 participants across all agency types.

• To understand set ups across different agency types: “Single” vs “Multi-branch” vs “Corporate agents”. “Fast” vs “Slow moving property markets”. And “Separate admin staff” vs “All-in-one” - I travelled the country to interview agents and managers from 10 agencies.

• To learn how viewings are handled and processed, I listened to over 30 calls between agents and property seekers requesting a viewing.

Workshops

From establishing research goals or the project vision, to insights analysis to ideation sessions or feasibility, I ran and participated in many workshops. Workshops are the heart of design and innovation.

Insights driving the design decisions

• 🏡 70% of the leads sent online are viewing requests.

• 💬 Agents (but also consumers) struggle to have conversations at their convenience.

• 🤑 Agents cannot prioritise leads efficiently: they either have too many leads or not enough.

• 🤑 Agents are not responding to enquiries quickly enough

• 🤑 The soft vetting of an applicant is an integral part of the agent’s viewing process.

• 🤑💬 Agents believe that vetting the applicant’s suitability early in the process is one of the most important parts of their job. Now this is done through offline interactions.

• 🏡💬 Agents want written confirmation of their offline interactions with applicants to help them keep track of their progress.

• 🏡💬 Agents feel like the answers they need from renters are not typically covered by a yes/no answer.

• 💬 Sometimes the opinion an agent has of a renter could overwrite a bad referencing result.

• 🤑 Agents take great care to make sure trustworthy landlords will deliver trustworthy, suitable tenants. The landlord is the real person of interest for them.

• 🏡 Organising the logistics of viewings is a pain. Even though agents feel like doing the viewings is part of their role, they feel that organising the logistics takes more time than it should.

• 🤑 Agents have real security concerns about conducting a viewing with an unknown person.

• 🤑 Agents find dealing with problematic references/renters as business as usual, the real risk is jeopardising the trust of the landlord in the quality of tenants they bring.

Project Goals

Three pillars:

• 🤑Richer Leads: Enable agents have pre-qualified leads and then respond to them in priority order.

• 🏡Rightmove Plus: Increase dependency on Rightmove's tools and staying relevant.

• 💬Better comms: Make communication between consumers and agents simple and convenient.

Success measures

• Real time bookings

• Increase usage of our tools

• 2,000 letting agents using the feature

• Reduce lead response time of agents

• Reduce time from enquiry to offer

Principles

• Provide just enough value to customers

• Deliver as soon as possible

• Comfortable with failing and learning from the experience

Ideation and Validation

A “thin slice” flow and the three pillars (“better communication between agents and applicants”, “richer leads” and “appointment bookings”) became the ideation’s pillars.

Based on these and the business goal - increasing Rightmove Plus’ adoption - I created early-stage prototypes to test my assumptions and to evolve the ideas quickly.

Challenges along the way

It wasn’t plain sailing and we took off without the “perfect design”. Here are the biggest challenges I faced:

Not seeing the full picture

Thinking about the hypothesis in the early research phases, we realised that we needed to include the renters’ POV because they are the one initiating the conversations and are at the end of the phone. To move forward we knew that we needed to speak to them. It was time consuming but essential.

Complex systems and fragmentation

Unlike in other industries, in real estate there are hundreds of tools used by agents to lock in offers. From low-fi processes like pen and paper to hi-fi custom made CRMs. This made it hard to prioritise what would deliver the most value for our users.

Lack of design system

Rightmove Plus has a distintive dark mode, but beyond that there is not a design system per se. So instead of “wasting time” building out buttons and components, I worked backward from there. I focused on building flows and delivering UI designs that became part of Rightmove Plus’ design system in the making.

Not changing behaviours

Although the product is used and liked, our stats show us low adoption: more than 50% of the agents prefer to arrange a viewing via the phone. We’re embracing this behaviour and also exploring solutions to drive the adoption of this feature from the consumers’ side.

Business’ centricity and innovation resistance

In retrospect, overcoming this was my biggest achievement. As the design expert trying to balance Rightmove’s centricity against our users’ needs was the biggest and longest standing challenge. A few months into the project I realised that our target audience had their own ways of working. To succeed we needed to respect their existing methods and systems and develop features to complement it rather than impose our own corporate ego. To overcome the business’ resistance, I patiently involved my team in my creative process so they were instrumental in the discoveries rather than simply following decisions.

Launching

In April 2020, we released to 17 agencies an experimental “Viewings Manager”. A few iterations and releases later we got to a well-performing baseline. Fast forward a year and we have achieved over 40% of our 2000 agents target and counting. We know we are far from our 100% target but the foundations are in place. We are gathering valuable data, optimising the journey, and introducing other core features. However the real game changer is integration. Integration with our clients’ solutions will enable us to future proof our ecosystem, making it easy to scale, adapt and adjust as business requirements change.

Afterthoughts

For Rightmove to influence further the rental process there are several areas that we need to improve:

• Landlords’ relationships: we need to help agents strengthen their offering to landlords and improve their relationship.

• Cross-selling: we need to help agents to offer property seekers better matches. As this increase time-on-site, cross-selling can be beneficial for Rightmove too.