Overview

PorchLight was a rapidly-growing real estate startup that wanted to streamline their communications, make faster decisions, and scale their operations to handle 10x more listings. We proposed an enterprise application that could replace all of their spreadsheets, email, and Google docs with one integrated platform.

Now, all Porchlight's operations - listings management, agent management, business intelligence, open house management, marketing, agent CRM, and property closing management - work together, improving productivity, accuracy and customer satisfaction. Workflows, feedback loops, notifications and real-time data keep agents, clients, and staff in the loop. Nothing falls through the cracks, and speed has become their competitive advantage.

Scope of Project

- User Personas, Task and Workflow Analysis
- Wireflows and interaction models
- Style Guide and Design System
- Integrations with MLS services
- Responsive Web Design for all devices

Research

The business application has a number of users - Porchlight executives, agents, support staff and contractors - with different needs and jobs to be done. I tackled the entire listing process step-by-step, from entering a new listing, preparing a listing for market, managing an open house, taking offers, and closing.

Transaction Coordinator Tools

Reviewing new Listing Submissions was the first, and most important, step in Porchlight's pre-market workflow. As Porchlight revenue grew from $15M to $45M, Transaction Coordinators were struggling to review and approve all the new listings.

The first problem was an inefficiency in assigning tasks. Agents were emailing their listing submissions to one over-capacity TC, while others sat empty-handed. Then, Agents tried emailing multiple TCs, and then a TC manager, to coordinate who would take it. All of this was slowing everything down.
‍
I designed a shared queue where the TCs could take new listing submissions, rather than require agents to assign them. They could also take submissions from other agents when their queue was empty. Listings were prioritized to a "first in, first out" transparent process. That enabled them to be more efficient - and more fair - with the work.

Submitting a Listing

The Porchlight listing submission is a large document with a lot of critical information about the property, including lockbox number, contacts, schedule, photography. It is the "single source of truth" for the entire process of getting a listing to market. Everything had to be correct, or it would cause issues with the pre-market services.

I re-designed the listing form to address multiple issues that were causing bottlenecks. These changes reduced errors by 50% and reduced time by 70%.
‍
1. Giving Agents the ability to save drafts and make sure their work is correct before submission.
2. Giving TCs the ability to approve/reject individual sections and not have to re-review an entire document when edits are made.
3. Giving TCs the ability to edit an obvious mistake themselves without rejecting the form.
4. Allowing TCs to highlight specific fields that were problematic - and direct Agents to those fields.
5. Keeping a change log of all changes and allowing different TCs the ability to work on the same form.
6. Replacing email with notifications and status updates.

Pre Market Services

Field Service Coordinators need to keep track of the work being done on every property - and ensure each one is ready when it is put on the market. But FSCs were wasting time opening each record multiple times to check if a task was complete. I designed a dashboard that provided an overview of every property, along with real-time updates on task completion. This saved the FSCs a lot of time and frustration.

Open Houses

Porchlight was struggling to manage 5000+ open house slots with their old tool - a shared Google spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet for the upcoming weekend was posted, it was quickly overwhelmed with 300 Agents searching and trying to select slots. The spreadsheet was prone to lock up or crash, and the experience was very frustrating for agents.

I designed a new Open House scheduling tool that enables 300 Agents to schedule 5000+ open house slots in less than 30 minutes. And it can scale up from there. Its easy to navigate open houses, find slots and claim them with a click. And it integrates with each Agent's calendar, map and notifications.

Agent Management Tools

Porchlight executives were struggling to view and forecast the company's performance - and to provide support to certain agents and offices.  I designed a dashboard for Porchlight executives with real-time data on every office, agent and the overall company metrics. This enabled execs to forecast closings and revenue, as well as focus their support on those agents who needed it. The new business intelligence led to improved performance and revenue growth.

Results

After implementing this new application, Porchlight has seen dramatic improvements on many KPIs. Their properties go to market faster, show better, and are sold faster. Agents and customers are ecstatic, and the real estate startup has seen 25-50%+ annual growth year over year.

Within a month of implementing the new flow, we saw a reduction in time-to-approval by over 70% and a reduction of errors by 36%.