TRELORA Real Estate App
The TRELORA iOS app is a native application that allows sellers and buyers to communicate with their TRELORA team, get their home on the market, search for homes, and manage their transaction.
OVERVIEW
TRELORA is a flat fee real estate company with a focus on useful technology and exceptional customer service. We can charge a low flat-fee because our agents work on a team and use an internal proprietary tool to execute 30x the industry average of yearly transactions per agent. On top of that, TRELORA was looking for funding and investors greatly asserted the need for a mobile app.
Team
UX/UI Designer - Mia Donnell
Product Manager - Zack Sulskey
iOS Developer - Rolly Sarmiento
Back-end Developers - Tyler Long & Robbie Lane
Tools Used
Sketch
InVision
Zeplin
Opportunity
Utilizing Google Analytics, we saw that the majority of our website users use iOS devices. Since 80% of our customers come to us as sellers, we drew the conclusion that we should start this endeavor by creating an iOS app for sellers and later modify the app to also suit buyer’s needs.
In real estate, communication is #1. Communication was the cornerstone subject in nearly all our customer feedback both positive and negative, on Google, Yelp and NPS reviews/scores. TRELORA needed to improve its communication with customers and increase transparency of every step of a client’s transaction.
GOALS
Improve communication with customers
Increase transparency of transactions
Final designs for the three core screens of the app.
RESEARCH
The Product Manager and I began the process by understanding the needs of the business and our customers by:
Speaking with the executive team and listening to their vision for the company over the next 5-10 years
Analyzing data and demographics on website customers through Google Analytics and in person customers
Interviewing our real estate agents about the buying and selling process, the emotions customers go through, and customer pain points
Conducting user interviews with current clients to learn about their experiences and how they felt throughout the process
Reviewing messages and recorded phone calls between agents and clients
Studying feedback from NPS scores and Facebook, Google, and Yelp reviews
We found the need of the business was two-fold:
Enable our agents to work more efficiently without sacrificing quality of service
Increase our customer satisfaction
We identified that the main pain points for our customers were:
The lack of up-to-date transaction information, especially during pivotal events
The intense anticipation/anxiety during critical points in the process (eg. waiting for an offer to be accepted and during inspection)
The scattered locations of information
A whiteboard outlining the buying process taken from an interview with two real estate agents.
A mind map of a typical seller’s process
IDEATION
Define features for the minimum viable product (MVP) and beyond
Meet with developers early and often
Create user flows
Structure app architecture
Create wireframes and mid-fidelity mocks for testing and review
I came up with a list of features based on the research data and a few of my own ideas. The Product Manager and I met with our back-end and iOS developers to discuss how long each of these features would take, and how they would integrate into our current architecture.
The feature list:
To Dos - Dates, deadlines, and actions that a seller needed to complete
Messaging - All communication (text messages, emails, and voicemails) with their team
Tracker - A timeline showing customers where they are in the process, what has happened, and what is coming up
Search - A place for searching and saving homes that are posted on trelora.com
Documents - One location for every document related to all transactions
Notifications - Real time updates on transactions
Home Profile - A step-by-step wizard for sellers to enter all of the necessary information to put their homes on the market
MVP
We started development with an MVP version which included To Do’s (now Home), Messaging, Notifications, and Home Profile. We next added Search followed by Document storage.
The tracker feature has yet to be added as it is still unclear how this can best be presented to the user in a useful and timely manner. However, it has been identified repeatedly in user interviews and feedback that our buyers and sellers would like a bird’s-eye view of their current status in relation to the entire process.
A simple flow showing how a seller would be taken through the Home Profile Wizard.
- Enter address
- Confirm address and basic information pulled from public data
- Home profile page
-Category page where the user fills out information on their home (e.g. square-footage)
-Completed category animation
Sketches showing exploration of layout and illustration for the Enter Address screen.
Feedback and Iteration
The Product Manager and I presented our initial designs, flows and some mid fidelity prototypes to the senior staff, investors, real estate agents, and developers time to get feedback. This valuable information helped us to narrow down our feature set for MVP and plan out next steps.
Variations for what could be on the home page including variations for the tracker feature.
DESIGN
Create a style guide
Design high-fidelity screens and prototype
Test prototype with customers and business stakeholders
Iterate on feedback
Export assets for development
Refreshing The Brand
This was a great opportunity to refresh the brand’s look and feel. When I started we had a very basic color palette of green, black, gray and white. The brand overall was pretty aggressive and harsh. I knew that with a native app we would need a wider range of colors. I had the vision to soften our brand, instill trust with our customers, and make it more friendly with typography, color, and illustration.
A sampling of the style guide I created along with the new colors added to the palette.
Some of the icons and illustrations I designed for the iOS app.
Colors
Initially, I went with a teal color scheme, but the executive team believed that our green color had to stay prominent as it was a core part of TRELORA’s brand. I worked with the executive team to work on a palette that focused on the green as our action color while bringing in a friendly purplish blue. In future testing with customers, this color combination and new look would be anecdotally confirmed as a success.
This is the design progression of the home screen. V1 and V2 show some experimentation with colors, layouts, and content on the home screen.
Final Approval
After the senior staff approved final designs, I worked with the developers to ensure that everything was technically feasible.To provide specifications to the developers, I exported the screens and style guide using Zeplin.
An example of a screen I posted in Zeplin. I worked with the iOS developer to set up the format the way he wanted it. Overall Zeplin is a great tool. However, if a project is set up as an iOS project in Zeplin, icons can only be downloaded as a PDF. The iOS developer I worked with preferred SVG. We resolved therefore to set the project up as a web project, hence the CSS and HTML code.
Continued Development
Since the initial MVP, we have continued to iterate by adding the ability to search for homes, favorite homes, and view and download transaction documents.
We are currently developing more tools for buyers and sellers such as calculators and an improved onboarding experience for buyers.
Final designs for the Home Profile feature where sellers provide home details in a step-by-step wizard and list the home on the MLS via TRELORA.
The final design for a payout calculator so that sellers can determine how much cash in hand they will have after the sale of their home. They will also see how much TRELORA’s flat-fee model saved them when compared to the percentage-based model of a traditional real estate agent.
Final designs for the Apple App store screen shots.
RETROSPECTIVE
I believe the app successfully accomplished its objectives:
iOS app increases the quality of communication. Now customers can decide how they want to communicate with us more easily.
iOS app now gives our customers access to every part of their transaction from their phone.
Secured funding to continue the business, we have received several series of funding since the inception of the app.
Looking back:
The fact that we only service Denver and Seattle made it difficult to market the app on the App Store, and our app did not have as many downloads as expected.
We did not market the app enough internal or externally (this was partially due to lack of budget and the challenge of adoption a new process with our real estate agents).
From current data collected it appears that the app may be better positioned as a lead conversion and customer touch point tool rather than a transaction management tool. Our most used areas of the app are messaging and search.
Starting smaller with notifications, messaging, and search could have saved on the development costs.
Going forward we need to continue talking to customers to gain insight into what is most useful for them and defining our goals as a company to be clearer on our objectives for the future of the iOS app.