Move

As a leader in online real estate and operator of Realtor.com, Moving.com, and others, Move is popular among homebuyers, renters, and real estate professionals. Move conducted research that showed 70 percent of homebuyers are married or unmarried couples who want an easy-to-use, collaborative home search and buying experience. Without a tool to enable this, the home search process is fraught with challenges related to shared planning and decision-making. 

Move aimed to improve their services for this key Realtor.com audience and came to us for help developing and designing human-centric tools that would enable the collaborative buying features they need to be successful in their home search.

Working together with the Move team, we conceptualized and validated the idea of a digital solution that makes the home search easy for multiple parties and empowers them to reach collaborative decisions online. Our goal was to incentivize this co-buying process by giving users a trigger to complete an action and then reap the reward shortly after.

Move and Apply Digital actualized this goal by leveraging modern cloud-based technologies and developing two omnichannel features, the co-buyer and the feedback-link, elevating the entire buyer experience across iOS, Android, and responsive web.

Move’s customer data revealed that many users share property listing links to collaborators off-site. In order to bring these collaborators onto the platform, we collaborated with Move’s team to develop a co-buyer feature centered around an inviter-invitee relationship between the user and their off-site co-buyer. Once both buyers are part of the platform, the co-buyer feature connects these users at the back-end,  enabling back-and-forth communication for sharing and commenting. 

Homebuyers also value the opinions of people close to them when making decisions on a meaningful purchase like this. After all, home is a place that brings family and friends together under one roof. Valuing these sentiments, we created a feedback-link feature that enables homebuyers on Realtor.com to request feedback from their family and friends on their selected properties through email, text, and social media. Homebuyers receive responses directly on the platform, making all information accessible within a single space.

Soon after launch, Realtor.com was named a Google UX Award — Launch Award 2021 winner for launching a test that achieved positive business results, delighting users around the collaborate and share tools. Consumer satisfaction with the co-buyer feature is high, with consumers saying they like the ease and efficiency of sharing.