A unified design system for real estate’s biggest brand

I came to RE/MAX after the acquisition of the first startup I ever joined - First.io. First was a CRM for real estate agents to that used predictive analytics to determine who from an agent’s personal network was most likely to sell their home.

At RE/MAX we were part of a collection of startup acquired to bring the tech agent’s need to run their business in-house. As the Director of Product Design I saw the opportunity to create a unified look & feel to bring all of the disparate products together and align with one of the company’s strongest assets - it’s brand.

Unfortunately, technical challenges and changes in leadership prevented this work from making it into agent’s hands. And the company ultimately pivoted away from trying to develop technology in-house.

Contributions

Design leadership
Design systems
Visual Design
Prototyping
User Testing

Dates

August 2023 - December 2024

Predictive analytics that helps real estate agents win more listings

As the first, and for a large portion of time the only, designer at a startup, I wore many hats. My favorite thing to work on is always the product, but often that is not the only thing a startup needs to survive. However, our product was unique enough, and we had enough evangelical users, that we were acquired by the biggest brand in real estate to be exclusively offered to their agents.

A little more about First

First used predictive analytics to determine who was likely to sell their home. We did this by mapping attributes of a person/property pair (salary, years in the home, recent divorce) to the attributes of someone who sold recently. We would then score how likely someone was with a simple star system where being a 3-star contact meant that you were 3x more likely to sell in the next few months.

This translated to a higher hit rate in their outreach to their network, our ideal response to a call from an agent was 'I was just thinking about contacting you...'.

This concept was somewhat hard to communicate with agents, so we showed them deals they missed from contacts in their network along with the First star rating to try and prove that it worked.

First becomes the CRM in a new line of internal tools

Through a combinations of acquisitions and in-house development, REMAX had a range of internal tools. The vision for First was to combine it's predictive capabilities with another acquisition and apply the REMAX brand as part of a unified look and feel. Since the tech was internal, I always thought it would be cool to leverage the slash in the REMAX logo as a unique but edgier application of the brand.

Unified design components

Since the unified design was going to have to be applied across all internal tools, we decided to leverage Google's material design library due to it's maturity and level of robustness. While this did allow us to pull styles and components for everything we would need across the product suite, I do think that it lost a bit of the playful consumer oriented personality we had instilled in First.

Web & native app experiences

With all the internal tools connected via a unified look & feel and shared access to databases/integrations, the full featured web experience would allows seamless navigation to each platform via a single top nav. Some tools warrented their own mobile application, and the CRM was one of them. So we designed a native mobile experience using shared components.

Get in touch

I love meeting new people, learning about new businesses & working collaboratively to solve hard problems.

I’m especially interested in AR/VR & Clean-tech projects.

If you want to learn more about working together, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.