Overview

Homes.com is redefining the home search experience, offering not just listings, but context and confidence. This case study focuses on an agent feature called the Comparative Market Analysis or CMA, which equips buyers and agents with transparent, actionable data in a highly competitive market.

My Role

As the Product Designer, I led the end-to-end design of the CMA experience, collaborating closely with product and engineering.

Problem

Users often struggle with confidence in home search portals because of a lack of transparency in how home values are calculated because they are given no context about how that value fits into today's market. Separately, real estate agents often need a robust, yet simple tool to build CMAs that help educate their clients on home values. These reports give them a clear, digestible valuation with supporting data on the subject project, as well as similar properties nearby.

We did not have this functionality on Homes.com, yet our users wanted a tool like this because existing information felt generic or opaque. Trust in the current valuation models was low and agents needed more flexibility to modify and create reports as they saw fit, while maintaining the simplicity their clients craved.

Goals

• Designing a user-friendly CMA tool agents can use customize reports for their clients and present with it to them with ease

• Ensure valuation data is transparent, contextual, and easy to understand

Process

i. Research & Discovery

We looked into our user's key objectives, their pain points, their opportunities, and what’s unique about their journey. We conducted competitive analysis to gauge what others in the market were doing

Key Insights:

• Users wanted to see why their home was valued a certain way

• Agents spent hours formatting CMAs in outdated, clunky software

• Personalization = trust. People valued being able to tweak comps

• Users wanted information quickly and easy enough to understand

ii. Define

I collaborated with PMs to map two overlapping user flows:

• Homeowners exploring their home’s value

• Agents creating and sharing CMAs

We identified touch points where trust often dropped off—confusing Average Value Models, missing comps, or stale data—and focused on clarity, interaction, and data freshness.

iii. Ideation

We went through many iterations before finally moving forward knowing that we could update designs after testing and iteration.

iv. Testing and iteration

We tested many builds of the CMA tool, always seeking to be better than the previous iteration. As feedback came in, we sought to improve the tool through UI changes, increased customization capabilities, and more. We also decreased the amount of steps from four to three making the CMA tool quick and efficient.

Outcome

The CMA feature launched in 2023. It's success with agents inspired us to launch HVR (Home Valuation Report) for our consumers in the following year. This are some stats of what we've seen:

• Increase in MAU, reports generated and shared

• +24% growth of agents who shared CMA reports from the previous 12 months

• +20% monthly growth of users creating Home Valuation Reports since its launch

• +40% engagement with home valuation tools

• Steady increase of reports generated month to month for both CMA and HVR

• Homeowners report higher trust in valuation vs. competitor AVMs