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Challenge
Nest Realty’s growth into new markets was limited by their disjointed suite of software tools.
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Solution
A 5+ year partnership to strategize, build, and iterate on a custom, all-in-one software that enables growth on the national scale.
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Results
Nest agents and staff in 15 markets (and counting!) spend less time on logistics and more time focused on client services and business growth.
Scaling with software. As boutique real estate firm Nest Realty started expanding, their disjointed suite of internal and enterprise tools for client services, transaction management, and agent marketing limited their ability to grow regionally and nationally. We partnered with Nest to unlock that potential, developing a preliminary product strategy and robust V1 of business software essential to rapid expansion. Enter Envoy: a custom software solution that empowered Nest to scale their personalized, agent-centric services — the core of Nest’s business — across new markets, offices, and agents. Since then, we’ve worked in an ongoing collaboration to grow Envoy alongside Nest’s business, scaling it to an all-in-one enterprise-level software system that adapts to suit their evolving needs.
Areas of Expertise
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"The expectation of a consumer has changed and therefore the role of a realtor is changing; and we're trying to be at the forefront of that."
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Continuous Discovery
Nest came to us with loose requirements of features the software could theoretically offer. When it comes to custom development, the sky’s the limit; so, we needed to take a proactive approach to balancing Nest’s return on investment with their complex user and operations needs. To fully understand those needs, we took a step back and dug into the root problems Nest needed to solve. Our approach provided a thorough assessment of the many ways they could use software to address their challenges, some of which weren’t included in the initial requirements. We’ve embraced a continuous discovery philosophy over our multi-year partnership, leaning heavily into ongoing validation with users to determine how to scale and modify the system over time.
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User-Centered Interface
Through our in-depth conversations with Nest Realty agents and staff, we learned that no two Envoy users are alike – each individual agent and office has unique processes and team roles for managing the real estate transaction life-cycle. Nest wanted to optimize for meeting each user where they are, rather than present a seemingly unlimited amount of data and features to every user by default. As a result, we built a sophisticated roles and permissions system coupled with a flexible user interface that accounts for 50+ potential configuration options. This approach provides the most relevant information and available actions to users while maintaining a consistent experience.
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“Envoy is absolutely fantastic. It's so intuitive, so easy to use, and a tangible, time-saving improvement over the previous system. It’s delightful how easy the system makes it to upload documents, make changes, and submit info.”
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Strategic Scaling
Supporting the wide range of business operation needs for Nest (and their franchise owners, agents, and clients) in a single, unified software platform is no small feat. In addition to end-to-end transaction management and enterprise-level CRM functionality; Envoy also provides tools for agents to grow their business, including the ability to create, send, and manage bespoke marketing campaigns and pitch decks. Agents can also place customized direct mail orders — selecting recipients using the CRM — which Nest then prints and sends. Our approach for maintaining this breadth of functionality without introducing unnecessary complexity has been to start with the simplest solutions to users’ highest priority problems, then iterate and enhance based on user feedback. Long-term maintainability is key for business-critical software like Envoy – our emphasis on code quality and 100% test coverage enables it to easily and efficiently scale over time.
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Summary
Throughout our multi-year partnership with Nest Realty, we’ve leveraged continuous discovery and iterative development to build an internal real estate software tool, Envoy. Key to Nest’s continued growth, Envoy is built to grow with their brokerage, enabling them to scale its personalized, agent-centric services across new markets, offices, and agents.
