Virtually Home | Stephen Frederick

Virtually Home with Weichert

A contactless experience for buying and selling a home.

Virtually Home with Weichert was a program developed as an immediate response to the COVID 19 pandemic mandatory lock downs. With Weichert’s All Under One Roof capabilities there was a unique position of quickly developing tools to facilitate home search, mortgage, title, and all other service required to close a real estate transaction.

The goal was to aid all the enterprises and their customers with tools to navigate new social distancing and contactless requirements.

“The Ask"

Research what tools we had as well as develop new tools to help Sales Associates, Mortgage and Title Advisors with virtual transaction support. We had thirty days to deliver these products to market and educate the field on how to use them. Secondarily we would need marketing to help our Associates communicate to new and existing customers what was available. True success would mean continuing the day-to-day process virtually before the competition.

The Process

Timing was quick. I wasn’t afforded the luxury of time. We needed to get to market quick so that customers would not feel any gap in the process. We also had an opportunity to attract new business with this offering:

Research – I made sure an audit was completed quickly of all the digital assets we could leverage. After that I analyzed the gaps in the process that would need to be fulfilled to have a seamless transaction or help in replacing an in-person experience. This effort was titled “Virtually Home with Weichert”.

Deliverables

Through the research process the conclusion was made that we could deliver on 10 products which would require marketing, training, and communication support.

Design

Create a design system that could be associated with Virtually Home with Weichert. When communicating these products, they would have to work as a suite of options and stand alone as individual options when we had to break them out.

Main Challenges - Quickly create a user experience that would allow the request for “virtual showings”. While working with Weichert’s IT department we were able to leverage our listings aggregated information from the original MLS to flag homes marked by Sales Associates as having a virtual option. We could then pop a form on Weichert.com per listing that would collect data from the lead to allow an Associate to know that a customer was interested in a virtual walk through.

From there we would use mediums like social media, mail, and advertising to create awareness around the company’s virtual position.

Virtual Solutions – We soon went to market with the following items: