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Solutions
The last step of our design process is to make solutions, where we present innovative approaches to address key challenges in the real estate industry. Our revised "How might we" encapsulates the essence of our quest for improvement. In response to the how might we, we've devised forward-thinking solutions aimed at reshaping the real estate landscape:
- Virtual reality sets to facilitate swift property inspections, eliminating the need for physical visits and expediting the decision-making process.
- An integrated app fostering seamless collaboration between realtors and clients, enhancing efficiency and saving time. This platform introduces a rating system, empowering clients to evaluate agents and facilitating the exchange of valuable feedback. Additionally, clients have the option to complete a questionnaire, offering tangible insights to their respective agents.
- A comprehensive system leveraging technology and improved communication to streamline the buying and selling process. By enhancing connectivity and leveraging digital tools, we aim to simplify complex transactions and enhance the overall experience for all stakeholders involved.
Individual ideation
Before brainstorming ideas as a team, an important element and technique of human centered design is to get the individual ideas of the designers before coming up with ideas as a group. By individually drafting rough ideas, we can make sure everyone's voice get's heard. The ideas we individually came up with vary from wild, unrealistic, realistic, simple, complex and impossible. This also serves as a great warmup which can lead us into drafting high-quality ideas as a team later on.
Team Ideas
Streamline idea:
Problems:
The traditional real estate transaction process suffers from inefficiencies, including complex paperwork, communication challenges, time-consuming processes, and lack of transparency, leading to frustration and delays for all parties involved.
Our solution leverages technology to streamline real estate transactions, offering digital transaction platforms, integrated communication channels, automated workflows, transparent transaction tracking, and cost-efficient solutions, revolutionizing the industry.
Solutions:
Evidence:
Anticipated benefits of our proposed solution include fostering a greater sense of safety and trust between clients and real estate agents, resulting in a smoother and more straightforward transaction process. This shift from a tedious and convoluted process to one that is simple and streamlined is expected to positively impact perceptions of real estate transactions among all parties involved.
Conclusions:
Embracing our technology-driven solution enables you to save time, reduce costs, enhance transparency, and improve satisfaction in your real estate transactions, empowering you to shape the future of the industry today.
App Idea:
Problems:
Real estate agents need to discover the personality and needs of every client they work with. This takes time and effort. It may be difficult to figure out the needs of clients. For this reason, oftentimes agents struggle to fit the clients needs correctly.
The aim is to create an app which will allow Real Estate Agents asses and understand their client's needs better. This will be done by a survey curtailing questions that are made to figure out the clients needs. That way, the clients will have an easier and smoother time buying a home.
Solutions:
Evidence:
We heard repeatedly from all of our interviews (except for David) the same message. The client is the most important aspect of Real Estate. When we repeatedly asked why Real Estate agents do what they do, they did not answer for money. They answered to meet the needs of the client.
Conclusions:
This idea was going to be the winning idea in our ideation. The reason it was not is because of two main reasons. Firstly, there is no guarantee the client knows what they want, therefore making the idea irrelevant. Secondly, a survey will limit a client to the needs they want fulfilled and gives no wiggle room for the agent to look for houses that may fit their needs better than what was answered in the survey.
Virtually Integrated tours idea:
Problems:
Touring houses in Real Estate is very time consuming. The agents need to coordinate and schedule their clients accordingly showing them homes in person that may not be what they are looking for. It is a long and frustrating process. In addition, it is especially difficult for international clients to coordinate with the agent to see the properties in person.
Create virtual house tours. Through 3d scanning techniques using AI and other methods, touring homes can be made easier. Although not a replacement for touring homes in person, it can help the client filter out the homes they do not like and can help agents with their.
Solutions:
Evidence:
A common theme heard throughout our interviews is that being an agent is a lot of work. Some like Gloria far exceed what normal work hours are supposed to look like.
Conclusions:
Virtually integrated tours may help agents by reducing the amount of workload they have on their life. Zoom was already experimented and used to conduct virtual classes, this technology is no different. On the other hand, we noticed that this system may overlook Real Estate Agents by eliminating them from the process of looking at homes. Why would clients need Real Estate Agents if they could tour the homes themselves? We found that this idea would be successful despite this because Real Estate agents are needed for their specialized knowledge of homes and the process of buying and selling them. In addition, if Agents were irrelevant in the VR world, then they would also be irrelevant in the physical world. Since people need Agents either way for their knowledge and ability to help the client, this concern was resolved. This idea ultimately won over the rest.
VR wireframe (Agent Perspective)
Step 1
Download app
Download the app from the app store or android store.
Step 2
Property seach or scan
Choose either to search for a property and set up virtual tours or choose to virtually scan your property to add to listing.
Step 3a.
Property search
Look for the property you want to virtually tour using property ID to find the home and schedule a tour with the client.
Step 3b.
My scans
From step 3, if "my scans" is chosen, it will take you to this screen where you can view your scans or create a new scan.
Step 4
Scan property
After choosing to scan property from step 3b, you can scan the property by using a regular I phone 15. Simply go by each room by taking a video while you are in the center of the room. Do this in each room and the app will do the rest!
Step 4b.
Review scanned property
After scanning the property, review the scan to see if it works well. The following example was taken from an example in Luma AI's page (linked in scanned image in the top left).Ideally, both the exterior and interior would be scanned. The hyperlink to the specific example is available in top right.
Step 5
Step up meeting
Finally, set up and meet with the client so that they can enjoy their virtual tour!
Impact
This graph represents the impact our final idea may have on our stakeholders given the information we have reviewed with professionals in the field and the evidence gathered throughout this project.
