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DepositLink
Landlord Dashboard & Rent Request Flow
About this project
UI Designer
Summary, TLDR
DepositLink is a digital payments platform for the real estate industry. It replaces paper checks and risky wire transfers and offers fast, secure transactions for brokers, agents, title companies, attorneys, and rental businesses.
The platform enables these users to manage a wide range of transactions, including earnest money deposits, commission payments, rental payments, refunds, and closing funds.
I explore a solution that would engage a currently uncategorized group of users. This solution will drive both new and returning users into the software to make recurring payments in the software, leading to higher user retention.
Problem
Currently DepositLink primarily utilizes single, one time payments. This means users come into DepositLink to pay requests made by their real estate agents, brokerages, etc., once their transaction is complete they don’t have a reason to come back into DepositLink.
The Overall Problem
- User retention is low.
- Investors are looking for increasing numbers.
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A fulfilled order with over 20 small miscellaneous boxes.
They were using miscellaneous boxes for shipments and many of the shipments contained over 20 items per box, and that can be confusing without proper labeling. One quote the guide said stuck with me he said “sometimes we have customers loosing pieces of hardware because they can get separated from the other boxes and we have to ship them again.”
- A single order can contain 25 (or more) individual pieces.
- Some things such as the monitors, and registers are all sent in manufacturers boxes, no labels are on the outside of the box to identify it as a Toast product.
- Miscellaneous boxes are used when the toast boxes either don’t fit or are in low stock.
- Instructions / setup manuals are rare, only a few items have instructions.
Landlords’s needs:
- Rent collection & Tracking tenant’s payments.
- Collect rent from tenants and keep track on time and late payments.
- Improved efficiency.
- All transactions, properties, and tenant information in one location
- Financial Reporting.
- Track income by week, month, & year. Along with income by property.
The small boxes that could be used when parts aren’t pre-packaged in boxes from the manufacturer.
DepositLink’s needs:
- Drive overall revenue growth.
- Get more users in the software making payments on a repeat, consistent basis.
- Increase user traffic & retention.
- Give users reasons to come back into the software.
- Improve the software's appeal to investors.
- Increasing user traffic, user retention, and profits.
Solutions
- Add recurring payments to our software, landlords will be able to request rent from their tenants for monthly payments.
- A one time payment has a single fee with DepositLink. If we can get landlords using these solutions and have their tenants use DepositLink on a monthly basis, this would increase profits by a large margin by charging tenants a small fee when they pay their rent every month.
A fulfilled order with over 20 small miscellaneous boxes.
They were using miscellaneous boxes for shipments and many of the shipments contained over 20 items per box, and that can be confusing without proper labeling. One quote the guide said stuck with me he said “sometimes we have customers loosing pieces of hardware because they can get separated from the other boxes and we have to ship them again.”
- A single order can contain 25 (or more) individual pieces.
- Some things such as the monitors, and registers are all sent in manufacturers boxes, no labels are on the outside of the box to identify it as a Toast product.
- Miscellaneous boxes are used when the toast boxes either don’t fit or are in low stock.
- Instructions / setup manuals are rare, only a few items have instructions.
To create our solution we need:
Landlord Outreach
- This will let landlords know of these new features and get them using the software for their rentals.
A Landlord Dashboard
- This will give the target audience an incentive to come back into the software on a regular basis driving user traffic & retention
The LL requesting rent from a tenant.
- This will tap into the unused large database of agents, landlords, and others that have in the past or are currently using DL for their one time real estate payments
The Tenants getting a request and paying their rent, along with the small fee.
- This will bring in a new revenue stream on a regular basis.
A Tenant Dashboard
- This will give the tenant an easy way to make and track their rent payments.
Challenges Faced
Enticing landlords to use DepositLink over alternatives.
- Solution: Make it free for landlords
Keep this project within the scope of a phase 1 project, where we would release the MVP quickly.
- Solution: Reduce internal stakeholder expectations to keep the scope small for phase 1, create something that uses existing systems in our software to minimize development time.
End of Q1 deadline for a phase one MVP release.
- Solution: Reduce & reuse!
The fee tenants have to pay will have to be small enough for them to not mind paying it, this number is important to the overall success of this project.
The small boxes that could be used when parts aren’t pre-packaged in boxes from the manufacturer.
Ideation
Landlord User Flow
Landlord Dashboard Ideas & Mockups
Landlord Outreach
This will let landlords know of these new features and get them using the software for their rentals.
At the end of their initial transaction within DepositLink Landlords end up on a success page. This success page is a great page to advertise our new features. Because we have landlord specific payment types the person requesting the payment can choose from, we can set these ads to show up for landlords only.
We also considered sending out targeted emails to landlords.
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Landlord Dashboard
This is a version of the dashboard that we could strive to build towards.
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Keeping the Landlord Dashboard within scope
To keep the Landlord dashboard within the scope of our end of Q1 release date, I removed much of the features.
The realistic, in scope Landlord Dashboard
This paired down version of the Landlord Dashboard speeds up the development process, allowing it to be released sooner. Our goal with this is to get the product in the hands of the user quicker so we can start bringing in revenue and iterate using live feedback.
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Landlord Rent Request flow
After the Landlord sends a rent request the tenant will receive an email prompting them to pay their rent through DepositLink.
Jes Chuhta worked on the tenant side of this project.
Impacts of the new designs
- These new features are estimated to bring up to just under 2,000 landlords back into the software, along with 2,000 - 8,000 tenants: (1-4 tenants per landlord).
- There have been around 1,900-2,000 users who have accepted a Rental Deposit in DepositLink.
- At $5 per tenant rental charge, it could potentially bring in $10,000 - $40,000 per month (2,000 - 8,000 tenants using the software to pay their rent).