Existing real estate apps are designed for mature audiences who use technology very differently than young people do. These days, however, a younger audience with different product needs is beginning to enter the rental market.

Let's look at a few products young people are used to using: ✨

All Projects

Now let's look at the rental/real estate products they are exposed to: 🤔

As Gen-Z enters adulthood, they'll need to find a place to live — and they will want to use their mobile devices to do so.

We shouldn't keep exposing these young customers to unfavorable real estate product paradigms when the other apps they use are built with a true understanding of their needs.

Intuitive

Use common gestures to empower the customers to navigate the app in a familiar way.

Mobile-First

Make the apartment
finding experience simple & fast on mobile devices.

Voice-Enabled

Use voice-recognition to save tenants time and frustration when initiating a search.

Lovable

Build a commercially viable product that customers love to use and talk about.

We began our discovery process by looking at the competitive landscape, interviewing potential customers, and digging through existing app reviews in the App Store.

The interviews we conducted revealed that customers often revert back to desktop-based products after trying existing real estate rental apps.

Participants felt that the mobile device was an uncomfortable way to accurately search for properties when living in densely populated areas with lots of listings. They reported difficulty in getting all the details they need via an app.

More Key Takeaways from Existing Real Estate App Reviews:

1. People Want to Hide the Duds. ❌
‍Reviewers commonly stated the wish to "X out" listings they had already reviewed and deemed undesirable.

2. People Want a Secure, Reliable Messenger. 📫
Reviews detailed the needs for an in-app messaging platform that protects the tenant's contact info and helps avoid spam.

Our main two customer categories are tenants, who are searching for places to live, and landlords who post their units as listings.

Since landlords will primarily use a desktop-based portal to manage their listings, our main focus for the app design is on the tenant.

Tenant Empathy Map

Flow: New Customer Finding an Apartment

Full Sitemap

After the onboarding screens, our tenant begins by searching for a rental using voice commands, speaking a list of features, amenities, and constraints. The natural language processing identifies these as keywords and search metrics.

Our tenant is then presented with a stack of cards to swipe through. A right-swipe adds the listing to their favorites and a left-swipe skips to the next listing.

Onboarding & Initiating a Search

Problem:
‍Intending to start their search, test participants would often start speaking at the wrong screen and become confused. It also became clear that users didn’t immediately understand the app’s novel functionality upon first use.
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Solution #1: Better Onboarding
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We implemented a series of onboarding slides upon launch to educate customers on the app's functionality.

The card-swipe affordance of the slides prepares the user for the swiping behavior that is later used to sort through listings.

Solution #2: Lazy-Load Voice UI
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We also greatly increased our task-completion rate after staggering the loading of the search page elements in order to give more clear instruction for when to start speaking.

Error Recovery & Obscure Entries

Problem:
In the initial ideations of Doorsy, tenants didn’t have a good way to recover from speaking errors besides repeating the voice input and hoping it worked.

It also proved difficult for users to input obscure entries via voice such as "La Cañada Flintridge, CA."
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Solutions:
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1. Implementing a swipe-to-edit feature helped users recover from speaking errors and permitted them to change their minds on a spoken search item.

2. A manual typing feature helps users input keywords that voice entry has a hard time understanding.

Revising the Search Radius

Problem:
Tenants would sometimes start by searching within a large city like “Los Angeles,” but later want to refine that to a smaller neighborhood or specific area which was not easily stated through voice command.
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Solutions:
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1. We added a “Draw Map Outline” function with an adjustable radius. This allows the user to open up a map view of their search area, and re-draw the outline to narrow their results.

2. We also added an “Edit Search” button to the top right of the interface, which allows the user to return to the voice search screen and make changes or additions to their search criteria.

Monetization Strategies

While being a free app for both tenants and landlords, Doorsy aims to monetize its app in three ways:

1. Advertising

In-swipe ads offer an accessible yet scalable way for advertisers to reach our audience. Advertising is targeted to relevant products or services such as movers, direct-to-consumer furniture and bedding, cleaning services, etc.

The ads show up in the card stack between listings and the user can swipe left to skip it or swipe right to open the landing page and/or save it for later.
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2. Paid Premium Listings

Doorsy also offers landlords the option of paid premium listings. Since the search results for the tenants are displayed in order based on an algorithm, paid listings will show up first in the results.

Paid listings also are granted the capability for the listing owner to display 3D tours and videos, while free listings are limited to photos.
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3. Universal Background/Credit Checks

The third monetization avenue is a universal background and credit check, which is identical to the background checks that tenants must complete when applying for a rental property.

Normally a potential tenant must pay around $30 per application when applying for rentals in person so that the property manager can run their own check.

The Doorsy Universal Background Check will use the same vendors that property managers use, except the user can duplicate their report to apply to multiple listings without having to pay again for each application. This saves the user around $30 per application when they apply for multiple listings.