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From 2015 to 2024: how real estate websites have evolved
The UX of real estate websites 9 years on
In 2015, I embarked on the journey of buying my first home. At that time, I wrote a blog post critiquing the UX of real estate websites through a, somewhat sarcastic, persona named ‘Kayla’ and listed out ‘her’ (my) user needs and how they weren’t being met. Let’s revisit Kayla’s user needs and see how they stack up in 2024.
Kayla wants to see new properties matching her search filters (new)
In 2015, I noted specific bugs. Today, those bugs are mostly gone. However, I encountered a new problem: properties that I had already viewed were still showing as “unviewed” across devices — that is they were still red dots when I expected them to have changed to grey. This led to frustration, as properties marked as new were often ones I had already ruled out.
I also noticed 4 particular properties that a real estate agent would delete and relist, multiple times a week, so they would show as red again.
This created a poor experience and meant I would get my hopes up — “Oh! A new property has been listed” — only to click on it and realise I had already assessed it.
Kayla wants to see properties within her budget (so she doesn’t get her hopes up and waste time looking at irrelevant listings)
Budget alignment has improved since 2015. However, some listings didn’t display a price but had estimated monthly mortgage repayments that suggested prices far beyond my budget.
This discrepancy raises questions about how these estimates are calculated. If they do know the (higher) price, but the agent has hidden it for whatever reason, why bother showing it in a search with a mismatched price filter? It’s not like many people can decide to pay 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars more just because you showed your property to more people. It seems like a waste of time for everyone involved.
