What's the Story?

Imagine...

you’re searching for your dream home.

You find a beautiful home listing online and eagerly reach out to connect with the agent. But instead of hearing back from the listing agent, you get a response from an unrelated agent who paid for your data. She can’t even answer your questions, and suddenly you feel regret for filling out the form. “Who else has my data now?” you think. “I just wanted help to find a home.”

When Realtor.com brought me on to transform their lead experience, I faced this exact challenge. Could we create a transparent experience without killing the company’s lead business? And could buyers, agents, and Realtor.com work together to replace a "bait and switch" sales process with a solution that genuinely served everyone's needs?

What follows is the story of how we solved it—through learning, rapid iteration, and building trust. Our approach ultimately drove a $45M lift in revenue, vastly improved customer satisfaction, and demonstrated that doing right for end users can be a powerful way to grow a business.

Concept Sketches

To start addressing the challenges buyers faced, we turned to the basics—conversations and sketches. Realtor.com’s lead form hadn’t changed in years, so it was relatively easy to come up with innovative and achievable ideas that could help buyers connect with agents.

Since we were actively tinkering with the core part of the business, we knew we had to identify quick wins. We identified "text a question" and "schedule a tour" as the lowest-hanging fruit. Before even building out full flows, we decided to try these new CTAs to assess buyer demand. It only took a few meetings with the engineering team to get our first tests live in the market.

Insight

Buyers responded. By replacing the lead form with service-oriented CTAs, we saw 10-30% more engagement. However, fewer buyers turned into leads (a net 5% conversion loss), which showed that we had replaced one problem with an even bigger one. What could we learn from these mixed results to help grow the business?

Experience Flows

We realized buyers wanted to ask questions and schedule tours. However, realtor's entire business was built around selling leads to buyers agents. So we set out to design a series of follow-on flows that could better appeal to buyers, while still helping agents convert these leads into clients.

To better align with customer expectations, we turned to 1:1 customer interviews. What do users expect when trying to ask questions and schedule tours? Would they be willing to engage with a buyer agent if we were transparent about it? And what would that buyer agent need to do in order to get their business?

Armed with a deeper understanding of the ecosystem, we wireframed full flows. We validated our designs through user testing, and worked with the engineering team to launch several A/B tests in the market.

Insight

Meeting customer expectations works like magic. Once customers experienced follow-on steps that more tightly aligned with their needs, they started to trust the whole experience more. Whereas before we saw a net 5% conversion loss, we now saw net conversion gains of 4% and 11% for our A/B test. We knew we were on the right track. But could we do even better?

Clickable Prototype

Our early experiments showed promise, and we quickly realized the power of buyer research. Integrating it into our weekly process, we found that customers appreciated being heard, and our internal research team felt more valued and empowered. Soon, our team became known for innovation across the company, and we were assigned the most senior research team—a group so talented, I still consider them the best I’ve ever worked with.

This success sparked a bold idea: what if we could combine all of our best ideas into a single, seamless interface? While we doubted the business would immediately support building it, we saw value in learning from our vision. So, using InVision, we built a clickable prototype that integrated various communication and service options to meet each buyer’s unique preferences. Our goal was to see if we could offer this flexibility without overwhelming users with choices.

Insight

Offering customers multiple ways to connect proved to be impactful. Buyers responded well to a service-driven approach tailored to their needs. While the business only ended up building part of our vision due to technical constraints, what we launched added over $45M in incremental revenue at scale—our most successful design yet.

Feature Video

With a passion for doing right by our users—and some extra time on our hands—we started asking even bigger questions: What do buyers and agents really want? And could we reinvent the home-browsing experience in a way that would save buyers time and earn agents even more?

Realizing that “seeing is believing,” we decided to turn agents into videocasting stars. Enter Peek—a live video tour feature that allowed agents to broadcast home tours to groups of interested buyers. By aggregating demand, agents could save valuable time while reaching a larger pool of potential clients. For buyers, it offered a convenient way to view homes from their living rooms. It was a bold idea, so we drew it up and entered it in a company hackathon to test its potential.

Insight

Design driven by deep user understanding is innately powerful. Realtor.com’s hackathon is a global competition with three rounds, and Peek advanced all the way to the final round, winning a consumer impact award. It went on to score an impressive 85% “would you use” rating in quantitative research.

Mobile Prototype

To bring Peek from concept to reality, we needed a fast, cost-effective way to test the idea in the real world. Realtor.com wasn’t traditionally viewed as a tech company, so we faced initial skepticism about whether our vision could be built. We designed a lightweight MVP, partnered with the right external development team, and built a full proof of concept (PoC) using React JS and Twilio APIs—all in under two weeks. Win!

Insight

Lean prototyping can be transformative. Although initial quotes ranged from $50K to $100K, we got scrappy and built it for under $10K, proving that big ideas don’t always require big budgets.

Conclusion

Through a blend of empathy-driven design, strategic prototyping, and incremental wins, we transformed Realtor.com’s lead generation experience into a model of transparency and trust. What began as a “dirty cash cow” evolved into a $45M revenue-driving unicorn, with happier buyers, empowered agents, and a business better positioned for the future.

Notably, we developed Peek—our virtual tour feature—just before the pandemic. Had it been implemented sooner, Peek could have offered critical support to agents and buyers when in-person tours were impossible. Though the company ultimately decided to focus elsewhere, the potential of Peek was later recognized as a missed opportunity.

In the end, we didn’t just improve metrics; we reshaped a crucial user experience for millions of happy homebuyers. And we learned that building trust isn't just good for business—it also feels great!