Redesigning a real-estate platform, from a buyer's first search to an agent's follow-up.

Nobody picks a house in one visit. People come back, change their budget, compare, and bring a partner in. Every visit says something about what they want, but on Stonehaus's old platform very little of it reached the agent. A new lead arrived as a name and a phone number, and the agent had to call to find out the rest.

Stonehaus wanted a public site that made searching easier and an agent app that turned all that browsing into follow-up. I treated it as one product with two sides.

This was freelance work, from 2022 into 2023. The team was seven people: a PM, developers, QA and me. I did the research for the marketing site, talked with four to six of Stonehaus's in-house agents about how they actually work their leads, and drew the whole product as information architecture before designing any screens. Those two maps, below, were what the team argued over and agreed on.

Some things came fixed. Regulation and the listing platforms decide what a site asks at sign-up, and the old site already asked it; there, my job was to make it less painful. The rest was mine: how agents see their numbers, the new email, calendar and team chat modules, and the two parts that took the most time, the lead dashboard and automation. I designed every component from scratch. There was no UI kit.

The homepage opens with a search box over a photo, with Buy and Sell tabs and the areas you searched last time. Below it are recommended and featured homes, and quick links by neighbourhood for people who don't know what to type yet.

Results have filters for beds, baths, price, size and type along the top, with Save Search next to them. You can switch between a grid, which favours photos, and a list, which adds a description, and keep a map open alongside.

A listing shows the gallery, price, address and the three numbers everyone checks first: size, bedrooms and bathrooms. Add to Favorites and Request a meeting sit right beside them. Further down, every section uses the same label-and-value rows, so comparing two homes is easy.

Buyers can write private notes and fill in a pro/con scorecard in the side column while they read. Where school data is missing, the page says so and offers to put them in touch with an agent, instead of showing an empty box.

Saving a home needs an account. You can sign up with a name, email and phone number, or with Facebook or Google. The phone number doubles as the password; that rule came with the platform.

Once you sign in, My Notebook holds everything: favourites, saved and recent searches, an activity feed, scheduled showings, and your search team, the people you invite to see your notes and add their own. Each showing has its own page with the facts, photos, map, notes and scorecard.

Account settings are where buyers choose how they hear from Stonehaus: email, text, property alerts. That matters later, because automated messages only go out on the channels a buyer has allowed.

The whole project hangs on this. Five examples:

On a property page, Request a showing opens a side panel. You can book a tour (pick a date, in person or video) or just send a question. The request shows up in the buyer's Notebook, and on the agent's side as an alert, an email and an event on their calendar. The email says who asked and suggests what to check before calling: saved homes, recent activity, notes.

New leads are assigned by rules, so nobody has to grab them by hand. Each agent, loan officer and listing agent has a status, a weight and a price range. The Advanced tab covers lead caps, reassigning a lead if nobody picks it up within a few hours, availability and pond routing.

Filters, saved filters, pipelines and labels live in the sidebar, and Mass Action handles many leads at once.

Open a lead and the left side stays put: pipeline stage, labels, saved searches, and buttons to call, text, email or recommend a property. The right side holds the history in tabs. Activity opens first because it's the quickest way to understand someone: homes they viewed, the automatic note with their sign-up answers, and the emails they opened or clicked.

All four were new. Before, conversations about a lead happened in other tools, so they never showed up in the lead's history. I kept each one close to something agents already use: an inbox with a reading pane, a texting thread, Slack-style channels for the team (we called it Hauschat), and a normal calendar with day, week, month and agenda views where you can overlay teammates' calendars.

Email templates show their open and click rates, so agents can see which ones work.

Building an AutoTrack takes four steps: pick a template, edit each day's emails, texts and reminders, set what starts and stops it, then review the whole thing before saving.

Stonehaus launched Hausleads in 2023. Feedback from agents in the first month was good: they found it easier than the platform they'd been using. We didn't publish usage numbers, so I'm not quoting any.

• Keep context attached. Notes and history belong to the person or home they're about. Both sides of this product got better every time we did that.
• Decide what each screen is for. Lists and dashboards are for scanning; profiles are for reading. Dense screens are fine once that's clear.
• Give every step an obvious next one. Saving, comparing, asking, following up: if one of them has no clear place, people stop there.
• Draw the map first. The two IA diagrams gave seven people one picture of the product, and saved a lot of arguing later.