Improving Co-Brokerage Journey for Property Agents

Overview

Pinhome is an end-to-end real estate e-commerce that facilitates interactions between buyer, seller, agent, and related parties, such as developers and banks. Pinhome has an app built specifically for property agents, called Rekan Agen Pinhome. The app enables agents to advertise their properties to sell and rent for free. Agents can also find primary listings and manage transactions.

As the number of user grew, their needs became more particular. Seeing that agents had their own community where they interacted quite intensely with each other on group chats, our team found an opportunity to cater the interaction among them. The kind of interaction we wanted to facilitate was quite specific. Agents often give information of their client's need of certain property specifications, in hope of matched listings from other agents in the group chat. This activity is called co-broke and it's pretty common around property agents.

Numerous problems regarding the interaction to do co-broke were nevertheless found and it affected their experience in finding the right property for their clients. Thus, we figured providing a particular forum for them would help them to achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently.

The Problem

Agents use social media and messaging app to post client's needs of certain property specifications. The most used messaging app is WhatsApp. They have group chats that act as a forum for them to share what their clients need and see whether other agents in the group could provide listings that potentially match the client's needs. The agents who share their client's needs are called buyer agent and the agents who could potentially provide the listing are called listing agent.

Interestingly, they use a particular format when posting their client's needs. They add WTB, which stands for Want to Buy to indicate they're actively searching for property with the stated criteria. Moreover, if other agents have the listing, they can respond on the group or through personal message.

While the group is helpful to connect buyer agent and listing agent, there were several problems we found when agents share their WTB post in the group chat.

1. Scattered and Cluttered WTB Posts

Agents send many things in the group chat, ranging from property listing ads, event information to WTB posts. New messages are received everyday so earlier WTB posts tend to be overlooked by the group members. It would be a hassle to look back to older WTB posts, making it less effective for buyer agents to get potential listings from listing agent.

2. Hassle to Manage WTB Posts

Buyer agents can handle a couple of client's needs at the same time. They need to keep track of every WTB posts and curate the listings they receive. Managing them in a conventional way might not be as handy, especially if there are a lot of them.

3. Uncertain and Not Transparent Commission Sharing

In co-broke, it's common for buyer agent and listing agent to have commission sharing by mutual agreement. The flexible commission sharing however could lead to uncertain percentage sharing or worse, making it unfair to one of the parties. It's possible that agents don't reach a fair deal regarding commission sharing.

The Proposal

Based on the problems we found, we had an initiative to build co-broke forum as a means for buyer agents to share their WTB posts and for listing agents to propose their listing to buyer agent. The goal was to help both buyer agent and listing agent respectively to find the listings they need more easily and to reach more potential buyers. We wanted the co-broke forum to not just meet the supply and demand of property listings, but to cater likewise the whole co-broke journey end to end.

We planned to conduct a concept testing to validate our ideas and generate new ideas. The objective was to test our proposal, as well as gain insights from user's point of view in terms of current behavior, pain points, and expectations.

Exploration

We knew co-broke would be a complex feature, be it design-wise, engineering-wise and even from the business side, so we took things one step at a time. We ensured the proposed idea was feasible and robust enough to be implemented. We started defining the flow and user journey as below.

Click on the image to see the detail

How Might We:

How might we make agents have a clear understanding about co-broke?
How might we help agents handling many clients and specification data easily?
How might we ensure buyer agent get listing that match specification criteria?
How might we ensure the listing proposal is valid and credible?
How might we provide a seamless communication means between agents?
How might we inform commission share to agents?
How might we ensure listing agents provide all the necessary information about the listing?
How might we make listing agents easily find WTB post that suits their available listings?
How might we help agents proposing the listing easily?
How might we fasten proposal request response from buyer agent?
How might we encourage agents to actively participate in the co-broke feature?

I then designed the solution in low-fidelity both for buyer agent's and listing agent's point of view. In this phase, we wanted to gain feedback from the internal team before going into concept testing.

Concept Testing

We conducted concept testing to 4 users who had previously done co-broke transaction and were active users in Rekan Agen Pinhome app. We first asked them a couple of questions, such as:

What kind of property you've tried to sell with co-broke?
Why did you decide to do co-broke instead of the conventional way?
Please tell us the whole journey on how you handled (potential) co-broke transactions
What problems did you encounter while doing co-broke?
How familiar are you with terms like WTB (Want to Buy), WTS (Want to Sell), and WTR (Want to Rent)?

The session followed by a UT-like setting where users tried our prototype in med-fidelity form and do some scenarios. We synthesized the result to generate insights and new ideas.

In conclusion, the main insights about co-broke in general are:

Commission sharing between agents varies and is usually not easily negotiable
Listing agents tend to reach out to buyer agent first to ask about the specification detail before proposing any listing
Listing agents have concern that their listings are getting bypassed by other agent (the other agent approaches owner directly without involving the listing agent)
Listing agents' behavior in filling in listing proposal form vary, from providing minimum information to specific information. However, they tend to provide minimum information to prevent their listing getting bypassed by other agents
Buyer agents tend to reach out to listing agent first to ask about the listing detail before proposing
WhatsApp is the most preferred communication channel between agents

As for our Co-Broke feature:

Agents see our forum section as a communication means to ask about specification before they're getting serious to offer
Most agents would make all of their listings available for co-broke to gain more closings
Agents need to track their co-broke activity but could not find where it was on the app
Agents are generally interested in Co-Broke feature and they quite rely on it to get offers

The Design

The design phase went through many iterations. It was a challenging one for me because with the solution we offered, we shifted agents' conventional way of sharing buyer's needs to a more enhanced way. Not to mention, WhatsApp was the most preferred communication channel between agents.

Disclaimer: the design shown below is from the production app as per July 2022 so there might have been small UI and copy improvements from my original work, but the flow and functionality remain

A Forum Made Especially for Agents

Users can access the new Co-Broke feature right from the homepage, so it's easy to notice. They can choose to find a listing or a buyer through the tab.

Connect with More Agents through Listing and Buyer's Needs

Users can see other agents' listing as well as buyer's needs post. They can ask questions right from discussion section or contact them via WhatsApp for more private discussion. We provide a representative from our side to accompany them in discussing until sealing the deal through WhatsApp. This is to ensure they close the transaction in our app and get the most benefit.

Propose Listings to Boost Exposure

Users can now propose their listing to buyer agent. They can choose the listing from their catalog or upload a new one.

No More Concern of Unfair Commission Share

Users can see commission share on the commission scheme detail page. This scheme is the commission share we recommend and can be referred to when making a deal between agents.

Manage Client's Needs in No Time

Users can post client's needs (WTB/WTR/WTS) to the co-broke forum. The data they need to fill in is according to the existing data they usually share, so it's no brainer. They can also mark the post as found when a listing has been found. The post will then be closed and not open for new listing proposals.

Have Control of Incoming Listing Proposals

Users can contact listing agent if they're interested in the listing or have questions. If the listing is not suitable with the criteria, they can mark it as not suitable.