PropSocial leverages technology and the community to help buyers find their ideal homes. Searching for the right property can be a long and frustrating journey mired with many pitfalls. Most buyers are constrained by time and budget and don’t have the proper knowledge about the property market rates and the neighborhood. They tend to mostly rely on information they get through Google search. But such information is barely sufficient or organized to make a good decision. PropSocial helps property buyers by understanding their requirements and taking a community-driven approach to meeting their needs.
We realized that at the heart of PropSocial’s value proposition is the information it shares. The website had to be able to help property buyers and sellers by reducing the property buying time and by giving them real-time insights and information related to the property market. The website had to be user-friendly and efficient at understanding their requirements. As soon as the user searches a property or a local neighborhood on the portal the website should be able to summarize all the relevant information related to that area and plot the number of amenities and services nearby such as banks, hospitals, stores, schools, etc. on a map.
Building dashboards that are intuitive and user-friendly for its vast community was a challenge. The vast amount of data points, numbers and property market-related jargons could easily overwhelm the user and overload the human sensory. So to make it more manageable and appealing to the users the data points were presented to the users in the form of infographics, numbers took the form of charts and jargons were presented as pictorial descriptions. Also the website classified ads ranking is based on an algorithm which takes into account the quality of the ads and past user experiences to deliver more relevant results. The website had to be scalable to match current as well as future needs and be easily adaptable to newer data to provide richer insights.
We aimed to make PropSocial not just a property listing portal. It was supposed to be an online community focusing on giving advice to buyers buying a property, and the best thing we could do was to understand that essence and develop it in a user-friendly manner. The website interface also had to appeal to different sets of users – property buyers, sellers, tenants, agents, lenders, lawyers and investors and more importantly it had to take special care of first-time buyers and give encouragement to reviewers. The website had to encourage interaction between property sellers and buyers. We had to make sure in case the user wants assistance he or she must have the option to simply list down their requirements and the website should be able to match the user with a property agent ready to assist.
Currently, it has more than 8849 verified property reviews with thousands of property listings. The verification mechanism for the reviews is handled by the website itself. To maintain the portal activity and to reward good reviewers the website also sports a point system and reward section for its users along with a separate section for the listing of products and services for property buyers. The project taught us that a tech-business is more about people than about tech. It was one of the most engaging and challenging yet enjoyable projects for us, and we not only put a smile on our client's face but on the faces of tons of property buyers.
