Owner Projections V1
Beyond - 2020
Background
Beyond Pricing plays a significant role in the value that property managers provide for their owners: we help make them significantly more money. However, at the time we did not provide them with many tools or resources to maintain positive relationships with owners or recruit new owners. From interviews with our customers about their owner relations process, we realized this was a big pain point (I mean, opportunity! ).
Defining the problem
Property managers and owners have a mutually beneficial relationship, the primary benefit being financial. If owners make more money, PMs make more money. In order to acquire owners, however, they must prove this value. So the challenge is….how do we provide property managers a way to present their monetary value to owners in an accurate, easy, and comprehensible format?
Discovery
Before we defined our goal, we were able to schedule calls with a handful of our customers to have them walk us through how they recruit new owners. We wanted to make sure we understood the process and what the necessary aspects of this process were.
The key takeaways we found were:
This process is 100% manual! This is the biggest pain point we found with every user we talked to
All use financial projections as a way to recruit owners
Projection PDFs are given to either realtors or the owners themselves
They are usually using a listing in their portfolio to base projections off of for both ease and accuracy
The way calculations were broken out varied depending on a number aspects of the specific business (think: Hawaii and Park City have very different “high” and “low” seasons)
The addition of expenses and fees varied across the board
Oftentimes the same set of calculations was used for specific categories of projections (think: one bedroom beachfront properties)
Goal
After these conversations, we made our goal to provide our users a simple, accurate, and flexible way to build the financial projections needed to efficiently and effectively recruit new owners.
Timeline: 2 weeks
Team: Me
Deliverable: An MVP that does not require the use of outside resources for the user
Example of a customer projection…needs some work.
Ideation & Prototyping
Thinking through the flow, I sketched broke down the core steps of creating a projection into the following steps:
Find a listing similar (bedroom size, location, quality) to the target listing
Using typical occupancy and pricing information from the reference listing, calculate a seasons (date ranges) to add to the projection
Tweak any numbers or percentages if needed
[When required] add expense costs to projection
Add company disclaimers and contact information, specific to the situation
Generate PDF for handoff
Step 1:
From our discussions with users, I knew finding a reference listing tended to be the most painful part of this process. There was no easy way to do it, and if they selected poorly the whole projection would be unreliable. Not good -especially when owners will hold you to what you promise them. Since we already have all of their listings in our platform, I thought we could simply let them plug in the address and bedroom size of the listing at hand and let them select a listing from their own portfolio. To help with additional accuracy, I thought we could sort these based on proximity using a radius search.
High fidelity reference listing selection screen
Step 2:
Adding calculations came next, which every PM approached differently. To combat this challenge, I found that it would make sense to allow users to create their own seasons by naming and defining a date range. To make this process as efficient as possible I decided to allow them to save seasons for future use, removing duplicate work and reducing errors. Occupancy estimates were an important part of the calculation, but again used in different ways. At the end of the day, projections are a piece of marketing & sales collateral. Some PMs use projections to show best case scenarios to owners, meaning they want more control over the numbers. To cover all bases, I decided to give them the ability to either use the market occupancy estimate gathered from their reference listing OR define their own for calculations.
Step 3:
To keep the experience consistent, I made expenses work the same way as season calculations, with an option to delete them out of the final projection or keep them as a separate value. It’s important to note that property management companies make their income either through a percentage of the owner’s rental revenue OR by charging a flat rate. Some are straight across the board with this value and some allow room for negotiation. Because of this, I included the ability to add either a percentage of revenue fee or a flat rate fee as an optional field.
Step 4:
Of course each company would want to add additional information and branding to the PDF, so I was sure to add this ability as well. Because the final output of this tool is a PDF, I predefined fields they could enter to ensure the consistency and readability of the final PDF generated.
Step 5:
I created the final PDF to adhere to conventional visual hierarchy (don’t want to reinvent the wheel!), placing company information and a high level summary at the top, then adding in the calculations below, and additional information after that.
Additional functionality
During our discussions with customers, we found two other major pain points outside the nitty gritty of building projections.
The amount of projections PMs were putting together were anywhere from 10-40 per DAY, making this a grueling and time consuming part of their jobs. Though each projection was unique, many of these projections were structured the same way. Because of this, saving sets of calculations, expenses, and notes as a templates could save a lot of time. Users would only need to select a reference listing then import the template, reducing the “build template” step to two clicks.
The second pain point was that there was no good way to track whether or not the projections they created were in line with how owners actually do upon being onboarded. Though creating a way to track an owner’s pacing against projected numbers would be an entire new product and therefore out of scope, I wanted to lay the groundwork for the future. From breaking down the pain point further, I found that the first instance of frustration was not being able to understand which projections led to won or lost customers. Our platform is not a CRM, but adding a “deal status” column to the dashboard of projections would give our customers the ability to keep track of their projections.
Measuring success
The goal of this project was to create a way to provide our users a simple, accurate, and flexible way to build the financial projections needed to efficiently and effectively recruit new owners. The MVP detailed above provided the user a way to initiate, build, and save a financial projection for a potential owner. We even tip toed a bit into the future, laying the groundwork for maintaining owners through tracking a deal’s status.
This project is still in its infancy, meaning there is much testing to still be done. From initial walkthroughs of invision screens with customers and team members, we seem to be on the right track. The only additional need we uncovered in these preliminary conversations was the ability to duplicate a projection, as often a projection may be 99% the same with a tweak here or there.
An encouraging sign is that all of customers we have shown the product to have asked to be a beta testers for this product. We are currently coming up with a beta testing strategy to observe how the tool is used, what functionality is missing, and which flows need improvement.
Our work is not done. To be continued!
View the clickable wireframe here: https://invis.io/2RWPLF4DSKF#/412116694_Owner_Projections_Dash
High fidelity wireframe - Revised owner projection example