Realtor.com Market VIP — Designing for Retention

Growth & Retention | User Research | Data Visualization | B2B SaaS

Client: Realtor.com—one of the largest real estate marketplaces in the U.S. Market VIP is a premium lead referral product offered to brokers, providing priority access to high-intent home buyers.

Problem: Brokers paying premium prices couldn't see the value they were getting and were churning as a result. Account managers and data scientists were spending significant hours manually assembling performance reports just to keep customers from canceling—a costly and unsustainable retention cycle.

Goal: Retain customers by helping them realize the program's value themselves, while reducing the operational burden on customer service and data science teams.

Role: I led design on the project, embedded in a product squad with five engineers, one PM, and one data scientist. I owned research strategy, synthesis, and end-to-end product design.

Approach: Run qualitative research with paying customers before designing anything, then redesign the broker dashboard as a self-serve experience that surfaced ROI and benchmarked it against the market.

Outcome: CS escalations dropped ~30% in the first months post-launch. Market VIP is now a core part of the Realtor.com product ecosystem. The research approach was adopted more broadly across future work.

Market VIP is a premium lead referral product. Brokers pay upfront for priority access to high-intent home buyers—a select program rolled out to top-performing brokerages after an early launch.

The pricing was premium, but customer satisfaction wasn't. The 2020 NPS showed 70% of customers were dissatisfied with the program. They couldn't see the value they were paying for, and when they got close to canceling, account managers and data scientists scrambled to manually compile performance reports just to retain them. The retention motion was working—but it wasn't scalable, and it wasn't fixing the underlying problem.

What made this hard

Customers couldn't tell whether the program was working for them—even when it was

The existing dashboard surfaced data but didn't make value legible

Retention depended on costly manual intervention from CS and DS

We had direct access to paying customers but weren't using it for research

Strategic framing

I identified an early gap: we had direct access to our paying customers, and we weren't talking to them. Before designing anything, I advocated for qualitative research to understand what brokers actually valued, what confused them, and where they got stuck.

The insight that emerged shaped the whole project: the data brokers needed to understand their ROI already existed in the system. It just wasn't surfaced in a way they could use.

Key decisions

Run research before building—use direct customer access we'd been underutilizing

Reframe the problem from "the dashboard needs more metrics" to "value needs to be legible and benchmarked"

Surface ROI and benchmark it against the market, so "good performance" became self-evident

Prioritize pipeline over lead volume—research showed pipeline was the metric brokers actually used to evaluate the program

Remove the agent score (widely distrusted and unused for coaching) rather than try to redesign it

Research

I designed and ran 45-minute 1:1 interviews with ten stakeholders across the customer base: two brokers, six agents and team leads, and two heads of operations. The goal was to understand how customers used the product, what they valued, where they got stuck, and what they wished it could do.

I synthesized findings into personas (an Operations Manager and a Lead Agent Mentor), journey maps that traced how each persona moved through the dashboard, and a prioritization matrix that mapped findings against impact and effort.

personas & journey maps

personas & journey maps

Key research insights

Customers wanted more metrics, not fewer—but they had to be clear, time-bounded, and filterable

Pipeline was more valuable than lead volume—brokers used pipeline to coach agents and evaluate ROI

The agent score was widely distrusted—not used in coaching, and a frequent source of customer frustration

Benchmarks were a top ask—brokers wanted to know how they stacked up against the market

CRM integration matters—all customers managed multiple lead programs and wanted less friction across them

Design iterations

Based on research, I redesigned the dashboard around three principles: surface performance and ROI clearly, add benchmarking context throughout, and let brokers filter time and segments per card rather than at the page level.

Key changes:

A Snapshot section summarizing met rate, offer rate, and spillover rate alongside market averages

Pipeline visualized as a funnel with conversion rates between stages—what brokers were already calculating manually in spreadsheets

Monthly closes replaced cumulative closes, addressing a major frustration point

Months-to-close benchmark added so brokers could project when to expect ROI

Agent score removed from the agent list view

design iterations

Customer validation

I ran a second round of 30-minute interviews with four customers—two from the original research and two new—to validate the new designs and surface anything I'd missed.

Findings:

Filtering per card was a clear win

The Snapshot section was useful and immediately useful for coaching

Monthly closes (vs cumulative) was a major improvement

Benchmarking closes against the market resonated—brokers could now estimate time to ROI

The pipeline funnel was polarizing—some customers preferred the original layout, which informed our rollout approach

validation

Final designs

The launched experience pulled the research and validation together into a single broker dashboard. Market Snapshot at the top compared brokers' core metrics against market averages. The pipeline became a clearer funnel with stage-by-stage conversion rates and estimated closes. Closes were monthly, benchmarked, and showed time-to-close distribution against the market.

The goal was a dashboard a broker could open on a Monday morning, understand in under a minute, and use to coach their team—without needing to call their account manager.

final designs

Outcome

The redesign shipped, and the results held up where it mattered most: customer service escalations dropped roughly 30% in the first months post-launch. Brokers could now see their own ROI without needing CS or DS intervention, which broke the costly retention cycle that triggered the project in the first place.

Market VIP has since been fully rolled out and is now a core part of the Realtor.com product ecosystem.

Beyond the product itself, the qualitative research approach piloted on this project—direct customer interviews before building, synthesis-driven design, and follow-up validation rounds—was adopted for future work on the Market-VIP team.

live product

"Valuable to me and even my idiot brain can wrap my head around [this]."

— Broker, post-launch interview

Reflection

This project taught me that retention isn't always a comms problem—sometimes it's a clarity problem. The data brokers needed already existed; what was missing was a design that made it actionable. The 30% drop in escalations didn't come from selling harder. It came from helping customers see what they were already paying for.

Learnings

Talking to customers before designing reframes the problem—research moved this from "the dashboard needs more metrics" to "the metrics need to be legible and benchmarked"

Funnel-stage thinking translated user mental models directly into design—brokers already thought in conversion rates, the design just had to match

Removing things (like the agent score) can be as impactful as adding them

Designing for self-serve has compounding business effects—it reduces operational load while improving customer satisfaction

Challenges

Premium B2B customers expect high-touch attention—designing for self-serve required convincing stakeholders the customer would prefer it

The pipeline funnel redesign was polarizing in validation—some customers preferred the original layout, which shaped the rollout

Balancing research depth with engineering velocity in an embedded squad

Wins

~30% reduction in CS escalations in the first months post-launch

Established direct customer research as standard practice across product teams

Removed the agent score, a long-standing source of customer frustration

Market VIP fully rolled out and integrated into the core Realtor.com ecosystem