Gparency: Commercial Real Estate Platform

Empowering Users to Find and Finance Commercial Real Estate Properties

Introduction

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Gparency Marketplace

Overview

Gparency is a groundbreaking commercial real estate SaaS platform that allows users to find potential investment properties and finance deals directly through lenders. It acts like a marketplace, bringing together both investors and lending institutions, and helping to facilitate transactions. The solution is akin to something like Redfin/Zillow but solely for commercial properties. I was hired in the first month of the companies histroy and was tasked with leading the design for the platform.

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Timeline

2022-2023. Designed start-up Gparency's marketplace and SaaS platform over the course of a year. Releases were iterative as our teams ran modified agile sprints and over the course of one year the platform has over 200 active subscriptions and over 100 lending partners.

My Role

As Head of Design, I led all design efforts around the SaaS products while working to establish design thinking, processes, and operations throughout the company. I led all phases of product design and development, and even stepped in briefly to help run agile operations. I worked closely with the CEO, CTO, and CPO to set product direction, roadmap features, run research, and build and scale teams across the company to support the growing business.

Challenges & Goals

Challenges

  • Aggressive Delivery Timelines: As a brand new start up, we needed to turn an MVP quickly and immediately begin to gain market adoption, signing users in order to secure revenue that would allow us to continue to operate and grow. This led to some aggresive timelines that presented challenges to both design and development.
  • Prioritizing User Value: One of the biggest challenges was balancing stakeholder expectations and asks with features that were going to bring the most value to our users. I consistently advocated for prioritizing features that were going to allow users to reach their goals quicker and provide more value to them which often times meant shifting priority on stakeholder requests.
  • Consistency & Quality Assurance: Ensuring the final product matched our design standards became a critical challenge. I acted as both final QA and front-end development sign off for most of the year in order to ensure quality and design specification adherance.
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Early map view for commercial properties.
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Goals

  • Design the marketplace MVP: My primary goal was to design the MVP solution of Gparency's commercial real estate marketplace within the aggresive timelines and set foundational items to scale the design.
  • Establish Design Process and Operations: I established a design system language to expedite the design and development process, and to enable faster feature releases. I also solidified design operations as I began to hire designers.
  • Always Be Data Driven: Our entire team was commited to ensuring that we gathered data at every stage, however we could, and allow that data to inform our decisions. Wether it was feature prioritization or smaller design decisions we always wanted decisions to be anchored in feedback and data.

Research & Data

  • Market Research: Initial research was done around other companies with digital tools in the commercial real estate space. What was working for them? What tools did they have that we felt our users needed?
  • Networking: Our founder had an extensive network of lenders and investors within the commercial real estate market due to his previous company and career. We leveraged those connections to send out surveys, conduct interviews, and even gather feedback on initial wireframes and prototypes.
  • Analytics: To ensure a solid pipeline of feedback and data I established Hotjar within our product. I worked directly with our data team to integrate Hotjar with Tableau to provide valuable feedback, real time.
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A lot of analytics went into crafting and tweaking the property filters as we learned more about how users were searching for investment properties.

Design & Build

Design Process

Initial Research | Wireframes | Internal Feedback from Stakeholders and Teams | Design Mock Ups | Design Review | Rapid Prototyping | User Testing | Final Changes | Delivery to Development | QA

Mobile Designs

  • Fully Responsive: As a SaaS product we ensured that everything we designed and built was responsive and looked great on both small and large devices.
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Map, Propery Details, Filters.
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Find A Lender Search, Property Search.
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Desktop Designs

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Supporting Development Teams

One area of focus for me was writing front end code and partnering with engineers to ensure that design were being executed as intended with included microinteractions and animations.

Impact & Outcomes

Signed Over 200 Active Monthly Memberships Within a Year

  • Our team consistently hit growth goals and our target of 200 active memberships within the first year. Working together with sales and marketing I was able to help fuel their efforts by providing design materials and feature timelines that led to an increase in memberships from less than 5 a month to over 40 a month.

Facilitated Deals of Over $100M

  • Our marketplace began succesfully facilitating commercial real estate transactions, allowing for investors to connect with lenders in their area and fun their deals. Hundreds of deals have now been completed with multiple high value deals on properties worth over $100 million dollars.

Enabling Direct Access to Lenders

  • Industry first! Equitable access to commercial real estate along with direct access to lenders was achieved.

Multiple Public Accolades

  • Leading an innovative design team of 6 we were recognized in industry publications the Commercial Observer and The Real Deal.