Roofsavvy | Roofstock Asset Management App
Roofstock is an exclusive online marketplace for investing in tenant-occupied single-family rental homes that generate cash flow from day one. Our intuitive platform and world-class support team remove the stress from buying, selling, owning and managing investment properties.
In October of 2016, Artem Skripka (Sr Product Manager) and I were tasked by the CEO of Roofstock to develop a prototype for a mobile application related to real estate asset management, as part of a business strategy to raise a new round of funds for the company. At this time Roofstock had a marketplace experience for users to buy and sell real estate assets as investment properties. But we didn’t have a post-buying experience where we can keep investors engaged.
Six weeks later we delivered a fully-defined product experience, along with a prototype of a mobile app, around the concept of allowing investors to monitor, analyze and plan based on actual financial insights of their properties. This initiative allowed the company to raise 20 million dollars in their series B round of funding.
product statement - what we delivered
Roofsavvy is an application for owners of rental properties to help them stay on the top their investments:
- Understand financial performance
- Be notified of any major event
- Improve communications with their property managers
- Manage their budget to run these properties
- Manage their property tax payments
Research
Step 1: Reviewed existing data for non-institutional property managers and brokers owners of single-family rental homes in the United States, and found that we could segment our users as follow.
Novice Investors
- Owns one property within 100 miles of where the life
- Doesn’t seek to squeeze out every dime, doesn’t seek to optimize ROI or track many metrics
- Accidental landlord
Advanced Investors
- Very involved
- They’re likely to work with property managers to help them oversee properties in the different market.
- Holds more than one property in different markets
- Hold an average of 6 properties
- Looks forward to optimizing their investments
Step 2: I conducted open-ended interviews with 20 investors to get a sense of their needs, goals, and constraints. Some of their questions asked were
- What prompt you to invest in real estate?
- How many properties do you own?
- How often do you think about these investments?
- How are you tracking the financial performance of these properties?
- do you have any concerns about these investments?
- How do you find tenants?
From these two data points, we were able to two create two main proto-personas and grade their pain-points by frequency and intensity, which then allowed us to define the MPV of this initiative.
Ideation
After reviewing the pain-points of our target audience, I conducted a brain-storming exercise with our product managers, and stakeholders to help the team identify potential product features that will satisfy the needs of our users. The graph below is a visualization of the outcome of this exercise:
Product Definition and Features:
MVP V1 — > Target audience (Moderate to advance investors working with property managers)
- Monthly financial reports
- Alert notifications for future events
- Tips & insights
V2 Target audience — > (Novices investors that are self-managed)
- Real-time reporting
- budgeting and planning
- Tax planning
- Market’s comp
This PDF will take you to a brief walkthrough of the product discovery process this initiative went through http://3675design.com/projects/09-roofstock/Roofsavvy-procces.pdf
design and develop
Once the product manager and I had a high-level definition of the product. The product manager and I proceeded with the following steps:
- Document user stories (PM)
- Create user flows based on stories (Design)
- Validate financial metrics with business (PM)
- Determined how to visualize the selected financial metrics (R&D, Product, and Design
Below is a representation of the first iteration of the “Cash Flow User Story:
During this process, we conducted two usability test sessions, which led us to create new iterations where we optimized the information architect of the application. This was the first prototype we build.
Launch and Learn - the outcome
After several iterations with input from several usability testings, we launched a beta version of the app to 200 users that were already working with one of our property managers. From the learnings of this launch, we optimized the experience further. Currently Roofstock in getting ready to launch a new iteration of this product to the public for iOS, as well as a web
View prototype: https://invis.io/5HFO1JTZQGR
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