PropApp - Transforming Property sales in Australia
PropApp is an early stage start up looking to transform how homeowners, real estate agents and buys interact and sell property in Australia.
Role
Founding Product Designer & Acting Product Manager (Independent Contractor)
Client
PropApp
Project Length
13 Months
The challenge
Selling your home in Australia is opaque and frustrating. Homeowners don't know which agents to trust and often default to whoever puts a flyer in their mailbox or gives them a cold call. Which is stressful when you consider that the home is typically the largest asset anyone owns.
Agents waste time cold-calling to find motivated sellers. PropApp set out to create a transparent marketplace where homeowners post their property once and local agents compete to represent them.
My scope
I joined PropApp when it was just an idea, a single rough screen, and two founders. As the first and sole designer, I was responsible for transforming their concept into a complete product experience from scratch. My work spanned:
End-to-end product design for a two-sided marketplace
Brand strategy and visual identity (including renaming from Propexchange to PropApp)
Design system built to AA WCAG standards
Product strategy, including the decision to split into two separate apps
Acting product manager role: feature prioritization, developer collaboration, requirements gathering
Marketing strategy and advertising creative direction
I took the product from concept through to a functional proof-of-concept ready for deployment, working directly with the cofounders and eventually leading a small development team.
The Problem
Selling a home in Australia is typically someone's largest asset and a decision made perhaps once a decade. It's a process plagued bissues in transparency and inefficiencies on both sides of the transaction.
For homeowners
The process feels overwhelming and unclear:
The market is dominated by two listing platforms (Domain.com and RealEstate.com) and countless agencies
With no transparent way to evaluate agents, homeowners default to whoever put a flyer in their mailbox or their local agent
Real estate agents charge substantial commissions (often 2-3% of sale price) and upfront marketing costs, but the value proposition is unclear—most agents take photos and post to the same two sites
Sales and marketing plans are required, but homeowners have no easy way to compare these across agents
The high stakes and infrequency of the decision makes trust paramount, but the current system provides little basis for it
For realestate agents
lead generation is their biggest pain point:
Cold calling is universally despised but remains the primary method for finding motivated sellers
No efficient way to connect with homeowners actively considering selling
Intense competition within agencies can create internal conflicts
When agents find qualified and motivated leads its very hard to show their unique value proposition
The Opportunity
Create a transparent, two-sided marketplace where homeowners can post their property once and let qualified local agents compete to represent them. Giving homeowners greater visibility into the process of selling there home, giving them the information and control to choose the agent that is right for them, while providing motivated and leads to agents effectively reducing the need for cold calling
Strategy and Approach
When I joined PropApp they had a few rough screens, a weak logo and they were named Propexchange.
Build, Test, Refine on Repeat
When I joined they had very little in the way of user flows, I spent my initial week with the team understanding their views on the process of selling a home, and exploring the core features of the app.
The core user journeys;
Sign up and sign in
Creating a property listing (Homeowner)
Making a bid (Agent)
These initial flows weren't polished and were long in process and page length. But these first flows gave me a test bed to experiment in style, branding, and to explore what questions and process were needed for both agents and homeowners to successfully complete their tasks.
Evolution of the PropApp homepage over time
Research approach:
With limited resources and a start up timeline, I focused on;
Competitor analysis: While there wasn't anything quite like PropApp in the market at the time, I did deep exploration on Domain.com and Realestate.com to understand how the Australian market categorises homes, and what home owners and buys expect from a house listing.
Two Sided Market Place patterns: I studied other products that also had two sided marketplaces to explore expected users patterns and how they set up their apps.
Stakeholder conversations: I had regular discussions with the founders their industry insight, their vision for the product and their own experiences as buys and sellers of homes.
Talking to agents: I leveraged business contacts to directly talk with agents to get an understanding of their pain points, validate my own assumptions and understand the processes they go through to when their selling a home.
Key strategic decisions
Rebranding to PropApp
When I joined PropApp it was known as Propexchange. I felt that the name didn't fully evoke the intention or the value proposition and intent of the app.
Propexchange to me felt a lot more like an AirBnb type product, where users exchanged property for a time.
The logo also didn't strike me as something memorable or related to the property market. I raised this to the two founders and we began the hunt for a new name that would capture our intent with the app.
Splitting the app
It was my recommendation to split the app into two parts; an app solely for homeowners keeping the name PropApp and a second app called ProspX for Agents. Looking at how other two sided market places operated they would have an app for the buys and the providers. This is because the purpose of each app was different even if they interacted with the same information.
I was also starting to see distinct journeys and complexity arise within each user type, creating friction on journeys like sign up where we would need to ask additional questions to define the user. As the App continued to grow and tasks, activities and features multiplied it was becoming increasingly hard to keep track of and define journeys for both.
Bringing this idea to my developers to first understand the technical feasibility of what i was thinking of. I found they were very enthusiastic about the idea. It would help them to keep their code base clean and more organised.
Building for accessibility and scale
As I developed and refined the design for PropApp, I built a robust and detailed design system with it that was made for a WCAG 2.2 AA Standard. The process to sell a home is at times, text heavy and requires lots of data input to property advertise your home to agents.
Creating an atomic level design system allowed me to quickly iterate, and update designs across long flows.
It was very important to me to have a design system that met a AA standard
Design process
Phase 1: Core flows and scaffolding
I started with a few rough screens and created our initial flows, These flows went through a number of iterations as we continued to define the process and questions needed to capture the core functionality of of PropApp. Our property listing flow for homeowners started at 12 steps and eventually ended up as 7 steps as we cut questions and reorganised the flow.
Phase 2: Brand development and design systems
Rebranding
Once we had our first designs for our core flow I began the move to redesign the brand bringing it from Propexchange to PropApp. During this phase we explored many possible brand names and logos before eventually landing on PropApp.
Design system
During this phase I started the build of a comprehensive design system to make managing the designs and flows easier aiming to achieve a AA standard.
Phase 3: Product evolutions and innovation
As product design and development commenced new features were added and old one were updated to allow for growth of the app. Some of the major ones were;
Interactive property map for agents
Volumetric rating system for agents
Introduction of private sales and agent preselection
White labeled product for strata and building managers
Agency branch management and administration of agents
Phase 4: Development collaboration, PM work and marketing
With a development team being hired and a number of features being ready to go my role changes to encompass not only design but also Product Management.
I worked closely with the development team to bring the features from design through to development
Prioritising the schedule of work
Kick off sprints
Work closely with developer to address technical issues and iterate on design
Conduct desk checks
Sign off on the completion of feature
Launch a beta test with real estate agents.
Results and Impact
I delivered a complete product from concept to a deployment ready POC and left the team shortly before launch due a interlectual property dispute with the founders.
