2021 — Present
match with the right apartments for your budget
Web service that calculates mortgage payments according to your income and obligations, filtering the best available apartments. — go to Urbits’ site
Project Type
Ongoing — Product design, UX UI, Content Creation, Marketing
Company — Client
By: Maria Olga Samperio and EÑE — For: Urbop Desarrollos
Overview
Major Real Estate developer Urbop has a vision of creating a habitable and enjoyable city that is actually made for its citizens, a titanic challenge in a city that’s known for its chaotic urban planning and public administration. To achieve this they need to equip their main protagonist, the citizen with tools that could counteract the two evils of the Guatemalan Real Estate market: overpricing & lack of information.
To tackle these obstacles they created Urbits, the Tinder of Real estate, which calculates mortgage payments according to your income, obligations, and wishes; filtering and comparing options to match the user with the perfect available apartments. This way, possible homeowners and investors have a way of comparing the rentability of their investment and aid their savings and credit needs to be able to make better investments.
Role
UX Designer & Researcher | Content creator
User testing & research, wireframing & flows, visual design, and prototyping, content marketing strategy.
Team
3 supervisors, 7 teammates & 3 direct reports
Team of 1 art director, 1 videographer, 1 producer 2 UX designer, 1 graphic designer & 3 developers
¿So what was the problem?
Guatemala has experienced a recent boom in real estate development, with at least 3 new buildings being announced each month. But this sudden growth comes poisoned with the old boogeyman: lack of information and tools to discover the right properties that match the user’s income and obligations. Instead, users are left with subjective and arbitrary price points, most of the times overpriced, and with a rudimentary, real-estate agent-dependent system
IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND DATA-DRIVEN RESULTS ONLINE
And what about the user’s needs?
The main pain points of the users are: not knowing if they are fit to invest in Real Estate, or all the more, not even knowing if Real Estate is a fine investment at all. The tedious process of searching on Facebook, OLX, long google searches that show unrelated results, and being at the mercy of untrustworthy agents and development companies. The user wants to have something where they can find everything that they are looking for, and compare between options while knowing what will fit their income and obligations so they can feel safe about investing.
Pages like OLX and Encuentra 24 are the closest thing that users get when it comes to market searches and price comparisons.
Other obstacles? — Oh yeah!
One of the main obstacles of real estate developers is the fact that Guatemalans are bad at saving and investing long term, so we asked the question “How do we help people save more so they can invest more?”. If we could build a solution that could create a comprehensive savings plan.
The Goal
“Both Urbop and Urbits seek to develop a city that is habitable and enjoyable, while eliminating any barriers that prevent us from having a good ecosystem and life.”
The Solution!
A web service that concentrates all available Real Estate projects in one place, calculates mortgage payments according to your income and obligations, filtering the best available apartments while creating a realistic savings plan for you.
While a common and obvious tool in the US and Europe, this simple tool was unexistant in Guatemala’s investing environment.
What about the selling and advertising strategy?
We created 2 branches of content that connect in a fundamental way with the desires, curiosities, insecurities, and needs of a wide and varied target group. This content reaches them through instagram, tik tok and facebook, and they function as subtle advertising, as a catalyst for a community of potential clients and as added value for the entire audience. The content talks about Urbits as a solution to many of the public's concerns, highlighting its killer features.
The Process
Discovery & Planning
Research & Strategy
Conceptual Design
Detailed Design
“To be successful in real estate, you must always and consistently put your clients’ best interests first. When you do, your personal needs will be realized beyond your greatest expectations.”
We got to know our audience
Using the extensive market information that Urbop, as a major Real Estate developer had, to track and measure who was our audience, what were their needs and what it meant to have the home of their dreams.
To define these features and a dual Website / App ecosystem, we have made parallel efforts of UX & Market Research to streamline the process of finding the right solution for the customers and providers. We’ve used desk and field research, such as card sorting, interviews, and direct observation to create the User Personas & Journeys. We have created paradigm diagrams that map the social biases that might prevent the users from using our platform and have studied past communication strategies from competitors to understand how they used advertising to modify the collective conduct of their public to that they adopted a platform that they are not used to. Parallelly the commercial team conducted various market studies.
Basic Features
Current
Mortgage calculator
Apartment search engine
One to one comparison
Beskopen recommendations
Education resources
Coming soon
Ratings, Reviews & Recommendations
Savings plan
Real Estate map
Wireframing
Current UI Design
The Content Strategy
The contemporary world is changing, and with it, the real estate market. Traditional forms of communication are limited when it comes to adressing a young generation that does not know yet that it has the power to invest in the real estate market, either because for their bad financial habits or because of not knowing that the available offer is fit for their economic possibilities. To grow the universe of users of an unconventional tool like Urbits, disruptive strategies are needed
