Perchwell | Broker Platform
The Challenge
New York City real estate brokers operate in one of the world's most competitive markets, yet they're often stuck using antiquated enterprise software designed decades ago. Perchwell had built a modern listing management platform that brokerages loved, but the mobile experience was an afterthought—a problem when agents spend their days moving between showings, client meetings, and open houses.
The challenge was to bring the full power of Perchwell's enterprise platform to mobile, enabling agents to run their entire business from their phones without sacrificing capability.
My Role
Product Designer · Led the design of Perchwell's broker-facing mobile and desktop platform features including Dashboard, Listing Management, and advanced search. This work built upon research conducted for the consumer app redesign, applying learnings to the enterprise context.
Design Process
Research Foundation
Designing for Perchwell's brokerage platform drew heavily on research conducted during the consumer app redesign. Through interviews with agents and brokers, I developed deep understanding of their workflows, pain points, and the unique demands of NYC real estate.
The key insight: agents don't distinguish between "consumer" and "enterprise" features—they need seamless access to everything, whether they're searching listings with a client or updating their own listing's price.
Design Strategy
Given our strategy of creating a unified consumer and enterprise experience, I established a core principle for the broker features:
Manage seamlessly: Anything agents can do in the desktop platform, they should be able to do with equal ease in the native app.
This wasn't about creating a "mobile lite" version—it was about true feature parity with an interface optimized for mobile contexts.
Customizable Dashboards
Agents have different priorities: some focus on new listings, others track market trends, others monitor their pending deals. I designed a dashboard system that agents could customize to surface exactly what matters to them.
The same dashboard experience works across mobile and desktop, with components designed to be fully responsive. An agent could configure their dashboard on desktop and see the same setup on their phone, or vice versa.
Search & Saved Searches
Search is the heartbeat of real estate work. I designed a filtering system that scales from simple (beds, baths, price) to sophisticated (building amenities, listing history, days on market) without overwhelming casual users.
Saved searches with alerts became a powerful tool for agents serving buyer clients—set up a search once, get notified the moment a matching listing hits the market.
Listing Management
Creating and editing listings from mobile required careful attention to form design. I broke the listing creation flow into logical chunks, with smart defaults that reduced data entry while maintaining flexibility for edge cases.
Photo management, pricing updates, open house scheduling—every aspect of listing lifecycle management was designed to work beautifully on mobile.
Outcome
The redesigned broker platform unified Perchwell's consumer and enterprise experiences, giving agents a single powerful tool regardless of context. Agents reported significantly reduced friction in their daily workflows, and the ability to manage listings from anywhere proved particularly valuable during the pandemic's shift to remote work.
