Agent Lender Unit

A Buy Before You Sell (bridge loan) transaction involves HomeLight unlocking a person's equity in their old home to give them cash to buy their new home. It's a complicated process that involves many milestones, tasks, documents, and contacts.

The problem

Business has been seeing a decline in BBYS application submissions. The initial claiming flow had a poor user experience, leading to agent calling clients frequently, inability for agents to add their preferred lenders, and lender inability to track on clients’ milestones/delay in documents submission.

Our team revamped the legacy claiming experience for agents and introduced functionality that allowed them to add their lender partners.

We launched a new lender dashboard, enabling lenders to track client applications, monitor milestones, upload documents, and manage payments efficiently.

 

I worked on this project from Q1 2024 - Q3 2024. I ideated on the early discovery phase, user research, presented regularly to stakeholders, and delivered final assets for production. I worked with a team of 2 product managers and 8 engineers.

 

Problems

Agents and loan officer  feel like they have to spend a lot of time and mental energy understanding what happens next. They don't feel confident that their transaction is progressing smoothly because the experience feels disorganized.

KPIs

 

For agents:

  • Only requiring 1 call for agents to claim both buyer and seller and BBYS leads

  • Ability to add preferred lenders or work with lender partner

  • OR a top-performing onboarded LO in the same state

For loan officers:

  • Agent Lender Registration claim experience and milestones

  • Ability to submit documents, photos, unlock home’s equity, schedule home inspections, and close in one platform

For business: 200 leads > 20 Applications > 4 IR Contracts per month

  • 80%+ of BBYS leads are introduced to educated ALU

  • 20% of BBYS Intros convert to a submitted Application

  • Avg home val = $500K | Avg CPAI per contract = $5-8K


Product: Productize the most operationally intensive steps and require no operational effort:

  1. Solve the poor UX experience in pre-claim and post-claim

  2. Add a dedicated client profile milestone page in the Lender Portal

  3. Send pre-filled application links to introduced Agent & Lender as an unit

 

We conducted rounds of research to better understand the user, validate the hypothesis and reduce uncertainty, thereby and minimize the risk of failing the product-market fit. I used tools like hotjar, user testing.com and dovetail to gather research.

 
 
 

Result

  • With the new design, agents and loan officers found it much easier to manage their transactions without having to rely on HomeLight support

  • Agents felt that the new design drastically improved their efficiency and ability to support more clients

  • Business saw a 6% uptick in application submission