Realtor Finance

Design, validate and deliver MVP solution to manage realtors’ finances (2015)

Key Technical Insight
The recent availability of aggregated banking and credit card data enables the creation of niche financial management web applications for professionals.

Sample Account Screen

Design, Validate, & Deliver MVP
The client explained that realtors have a difficult time managing their finances because of the scattered nature of their business, and they proposed a solution that would centralize all of a realtor’s bank accounts and credit cards, and automatically categorize the transactions. At the end of the year the realtor could hit print and generate a detailed P&L for their accountant.

Empathize
The client had already done some informal user research that had informed a lot of their assumptions, but I recommended we complete a more intention user research effort to gather data about real estate professionals’ bookkeeping practices and challenges. Luckily, the client had access to a large number of research subjects, and we were able to quickly gather feedback.

Define the Problem
The data confirmed my client’s biggest assumptions: that real estate agents don’t usually have a good way to manage their professional finances. Their income and expenditures are often unpredictable so most of the time they are unsure if they are even making a profit. They therefore see bookkeeping as a painful problem without a solution. We also identified that real estate professionals tend to consider themselves less technically savvy than the average professional, and perceived technology as a barrier to effectively managing their business finances.

Ideate
Ideation involved solutioning and sketching exercises, iterating through concepts to improve the bookkeeping process for realtors. We identified services like Mint.com that automate merging multiple bank and credit card accounts and considered some of these features, as well as more realtor specific features such as automated categorization of expenses under real estate-specific categories, and the automatic generation of a balance sheet to provide to their accountant at the end of the year.

Prototype & Test
I used our sketches as the basis for several rounds of wireframes and screenshots of increasing fidelity that we used to create clickable prototypes we could test with users. Based on user feedback we iterated further until we had identified an MVP candidate.