Real estate agent strategy

Defining a foundational real estate agent strategy by creating personas and addressing key pain points during the loan origination process

Industry

Real estate

Timeline

8 months

Role

Research, strategy

Team

Research, content, business

Main Project Image

Problem

Real estate agents historically avoided transactions with Chase because of its reputation as a "big bank." As a result, Chase avoided investing in products or services that could better serve real estate agents.

Opportunity

Chase could rebuild its reputation with real estate agents by understanding their overarching journeys, simplifying transactions with them, and capitalizing on financial solutions to help agents grow their business.

Impact

78%

of agents refer customers to their preferred lenders

76%

of buyers apply with their agent's preferred lender

60%

of HLAs don't have any agent relations

$18m

If HLAs with no agent relations started at least one

Discovery

We didn't value real estate agents as a stakeholder in the homebuying process

The business viewed real estate agents as gatekeepers to future transactions instead of true stakeholders with needs and aspirations. To better understand how to serve agents, we built empathy across the team through foundational research:


  • 1-1 interviews with 9 agents through UserTesting and Zoom

  • 750 surveys with agents across experience levels using Qualtrics

Insights

We learned that agents hoped to serve their clients, generate leads and structure their business

  1. Agents were committed to helping clients achieve their homeownership goals. If a lender had inefficiencies or poor communications, it reflected poorly on the real estate agent, impacting their ability to get referrals from clients.

  2. Agents relied on past client referrals and referral sites to get high-quality leads. For 45% of agents, finding leads is a top three challenge.

  3. Although agents are confident salespeople, they may lack knowledge on how to structure a business, get healthcare, or plan for retirement. A trusted bank like Chase could support agents in optimizing their business banking and personal accounts.

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Communication is the top thing with every partner. Stay on task and do your job.

Real estate agent

Personas

We defined personas to help the business understand how to best serve different segments of real estate agents across their career agent

  • Part-time passive: the casual agent who does a few transactions a year but doesn't want to be full-time

  • Riser: the aspiring agent who is fully committed to growing their business but doesn't have enough business to be full-time

  • Solo high performer: the high-performing and seasoned agent who operates independently

  • Manager: the broker, team lead or manager who manages employes and is focused on growing the brokerage

  • Referral-only: a highly-seasoned agent who relies only on their client referral network and doesn't use referral sites

Opportunities

Real estate agents needed consistent loan status communications that we didn't reliably give

Our main focus was to help agents serve their clients by becoming a trusted and reliable partner. To accomplish that, we needed to address known gaps in our communications across sales and operational teams. We needed to confirm agents' communication channels of choice, identify how emerging technologies can increase efficiencies, and develop an omni-channel communication strategy that would increase confidence for all parties.

Next steps

Create a service blueprint

A full end-to-end map of communications during our loan application and origination process has never been documented

Validate that automation is the answer

It was our hypothesis that automation would solve commuication gaps, but we needed to validate it with our sales and operation teams

Identify key milestones for updates

We needed to align the milestones from our internal systems with the expectations of our customers and real estate agents