Realtor.com

Realtor.com's lead form was a dirty cash cow. A buyer finds a home, fills out a contact form, and instead of hearing from the listing agent — gets a call from an unrelated agent who paid for their data. The listing agent can't answer their questions. The buyer feels deceived. "Who else has my information now?"

The business had been built on this model for years. The challenge wasn't just fixing the UX — it was proving that transparency and service could generate more revenue than the bait-and-switch they were replacing.

We started with the simplest possible test: replace the lead form with two service-oriented CTAs — "Text a Question" and "Schedule a Tour." No elaborate flows, just a directional signal. Buyers responded: 10–30% more engagement.

But conversion dropped 5%. We hadn't solved the problem — we'd revealed a bigger one. Buyers would engage on their terms, but the follow-on experience still wasn't earning their trust.

Customer interviews surfaced the actual ask: buyers wanted transparency about who they were connecting with, and a follow-on experience that matched what they'd signed up for. We wireframed full flows, validated through user testing, and ran A/B tests. Net conversion gains of 4% and 11%.

The insight that held across every test: meeting customer expectations works like magic. When buyers got what they were promised, they trusted the whole experience — and converted.

We combined the strongest ideas into a single coherent interface — multiple ways to connect, tailored to each buyer's preference, without overwhelming them with choice. The business built a subset of the full vision due to technical constraints. What launched added over $45M in incremental revenue.

With momentum and some slack in the schedule, we asked a bigger question: what if agents could broadcast live video tours to groups of interested buyers? Aggregated demand, less agent time, more reach. We called it Peek.

We built a working PoC in under two weeks — React JS and Twilio APIs — for under $10K. (External quotes had ranged from $50K to $100K.) Peek advanced to the final round of Realtor.com's global hackathon, won a consumer impact award, and scored an 85% "would use" rating in quantitative research.