Reflection

I enjoyed working with my team on this project. We were helping a fictional company called HomeSquare, a Zillow near-equivalent, attempt to stay afloat in a market dominated by major giants. We ended up pivoting entirely towards property managers and proposing a platform that would help with communication and monitoring in property maintenance processes for rental properties. Especially towards the end, we were able to learn to get in a groove as a group with our communication and equal sharing of ideas and work.

One of our biggest challenges was when the realization dawned on us that we needed to pivot entirely out of the market that HomeSquare was in (real-estate listings). This was particularly difficult because it came fairly late into our ideating process– researching competitors was what really nailed down for us the extent to which HomeSaquare was never going to be able to outcompete giants like Zillow and Redfin in this arena. 

Something really enjoyable that came from that, though, was being able to pivot to a process that we all felt more familiar with. We were able to draw from our own experiences with renting summer housing in particular when we identified pain points in the communication and maintenance process as renters. It was from there that we were able to extrapolate and, ,through interviews, determine that this process was equally if not more painful for landlords and property managers. From there, the process felt more streamlined than it was before we pivoted out of the listing market.