Helping Landlords connect to higher-quality Tenants.
Details:
Category:Product
Client:Cityhive
Time:Apr 2019 - Jan 2020
Landlords face numerous challenges when it comes to filling vacancies in their properties and retaining tenants in the long term. Tenants, on the other hand, have few options to truly vet a potential apartment prior to moving in. Cityhive bridges this gap by offering a platform which incentivizes current tenants to invite their friends to join their “hive” by renting vacant units in their buildings.
In my position as head of product at Archbolt, I managed the design, development, and launch of the Cityhive web app.
Building Cityhive
Gathering Information
After undergoing the Archbolt discovery workshop, Cityhive had a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve: a platform where Landlords could set up incentives, invite their current residents, and mobile their current residents as a source of referrals. If a prospective tenant moved forward with a unit sent by a current resident, one or both parties would receive an incentive.
We began our efforts by communicating top level requirements to our User Experience team. I worked closely with our UX designer to brainstorm ideas and set a visual direction for the responsive web application. Once we had a clear set of designs, our User Interface team put together wireframes, and eventually final high fidelity designs. We used Figma for creating and managing the screens and InVision to map clickthrough prototypes. For advanced user testing, we integrated our InVision prototype with Maze (maze.design) to measure how users were interacting with the designs.
Building the Platform
Once we had our designs set, we moved to develop the web application. We used ReactJS for the front end, and NodeJS + MongoDB for the backend. Mixpanel and Google Analytics were also integrated to collect usage data. For automated emails, we used Mailgun. There were 4 primary views developed: the Admin view, the Landlord view, the Current Resident view, and the Prospective Tenant view. Landlords could set up buildings and list unit availability. They would then add residents, who would receive an invite via email to join Cityhive. Once a resident follows the link, they would be able to sign in and view available units they could recommend, as well as create shareable links to send to their friends (i.e. Prospective Tenants). Prospective Tenants could view who had sent the link, the available units, and a call to action to contact the Landlord. Landlords could manage Prospective Tenant outreach in their dashboard.
Final Thoughts
Cityhive was launched in Summer 2019. The platform has since undergone some minor revisions as new Landlords and Tenants are onboarded. The Cityhive team continue to iterate on the platform to match their growing needs. Since Archbolt's wind-down in January 2020, the project was transitioned to our former design partner, Tapptitude.
