Vantage was born at the intersection of my two passions: design and real estate. Through many exchanges with residential real estate investors and realtors, a common frustration emerged – the painful process of finding and analyzing investments across fragmented tools and platforms.
As the sole designer, I spent a month tackling this passion project, validating my hypothesis through user research and designing a marketplace mobile app solution that streamlines how investors discover, analyze, and pursue promising investment opportunities.
Role
Design Strategist
Product Designer
Visual Designer
Project Scope
End-to-end mobile app
Platform
Mobile
Status
Designed
Timeline
4 weeks
Problem
Discovering investment properties is a fragmented, time-consuming process
According to the National Association of Realtors, there are 11 million individual landlords managing 48 million rental units in the US, with investors and second-home buyers accounting for 16% of residential purchases.
Real estate investors face fierce competition and must evaluate properties quickly, focusing on income potential rather than personal preferences like homebuyers do.
Currently, investors struggle with juggling multiple tools designed for homebuyers – a critical inefficiency in a market where speed determines whether a deal is won or lost.
Research Insights
Research with users showed that investors want to analyze deals instantly, not manually
Through my surveys and interviews with real estate investors, three key needs emerged: mobile-first property research, direct access to rental data, and investment-specific search filters.
How might we help users analyze properties on the platform to determine if a listing is worth pursuing?
This HMW question guided the problem framing and solution exploration, focusing on Vantage's core challenge: streamlining the fragmented investment property workflow by consolidating the entire toolstack into a cohesive platform that would support the workflow.
Critical User Journey
Experience drops off when users abandon the platform to perform property analysis elsewhere
The Critical User Journey maps the essential steps investors take from discovering potential properties to making investment decisions. By tracking their actions and emotional states throughout this core workflow, we identified a major pain point: investors were forced to constantly switch between multiple tools to complete their property evaluation process, leading to frustration and abandoned analyses. This key journey highlighted the need for a more streamlined, integrated evaluation experience
The major drop off occurs when the user realizes there is missing information and is forced to switch between multiple apps, tools, and documents to complete a property analysis just to see if a property meets the minimum investment requirement.
Side Note
The Double Diamond reframed
The Double Diamond is a ubiquitous framework to UX design. Likewise, the path of a real estate investor discovering an investment property follows a similar pattern.
Investment criteria often starts off specific and then diverge during the search phase. Qualified listings then converge again during “rapid” analysis to determine if listings meet the minimum return requirements. Qualified properties are then compared, with the best opportunity(s) distilled down for pursuit.
Existing real estate apps like Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com excel at property search but lack investment analysis capabilities. Vantage integrates the entire process—from search to analysis—into one platform, helping investors evaluate and win deals faster.
Exploration
A new user flow that completes the property discovery process on Vantage — start to finish
The investment property discovery process has three critical stages: Search, Analyze, and Pursue. Each must be completed successfully to identify the right investment opportunity.
Testing Insights
A clear signal to communicate value and urgency
To help investors quickly identify promising opportunities, I tested three ways to communicate property value and urgency:
"Hot" listing labels
Prominent return metrics display
Comprehensive investment score
Through user testing, the investment score emerged as the most effective approach, offering a familiar and objective way for investors to evaluate opportunities. Unlike subjective "hot" labels or potentially misaligned return metrics, the quantitative scoring system resonated most with users.
The initial sketch and final design on the Vantage Investment Score, a composite rating of the listing relative to other properties in the competitive market. A high score indicates a quality investment and creates additional motivation for the user to take immediate action.
Refinement
Designing for intuitive feature discovery
A feature's effectiveness depends on both its utility and its discoverability. Through moderated usability testing with actual investors and realtors, a common obstruction was the discoverability of the property analytics tool.
After discovering the analytics tool, test participants were often impressed by its capabilities. This highlighted the need to iterate on tool discovery and page navigation.
Side Note
Developing the Vantage brand and a system that scales
One of the truly exciting parts of building an end-to-end mobile app is the creative freedom to design a brand that embodies the product and captivates the user. The style guide focused on reliability, approachability, and modern design, while the component library enabled consistent branding and rapid development of high-fidelity wireframes.
Vantage's interface uses clean typography and thoughtful color choices to convey sophistication and reliability. The component library was built following iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Material Design to ensure a familiar, professional user experience.
Prototype
A real estate app to finish the job
Vantage began as a passion project and evolved into a mobile app that helps real estate investors search, analyze, and pursue deals efficiently. This opportunity to deepen my craft in mobile design, branding, and design systems transformed into an MVP solution backed by user research and iterative improvements – innovating how investors find their next deal.
Side Note
Post-MVP enhancements and next steps
To ensure long-term success and user adoption, I've identified key post-launch priorities and success metrics that will guide future development and feature optimization.
Post-Launch Priorities
Clear Onboarding Process: A skippable flow to educate users on features and terminology, with minimal modals to reduce dropouts
Investor Profiles: Allow users to save investment criteria and analysis preferences while generating valuable user data
Portfolio Management: Allow users to track and manage multiple investment properties
Market Analytics: Integrate neighborhood and market trend data for comprehensive analysis
Success Metrics
Event Tracking: Monitor user interaction with key features like analysis adjustments, saved searches, and agent engagement
Engagement Depth: Track screen views and session duration to understand property discovery patterns
Task Completion: Measure success rates during testing to ensure feature usability
Conversion Rate: Monitor property inquiries and agent connections
Time to Value: Measure how quickly users complete their first property analysis