In the total private rental sector in the Netherlands over 500.000 houses are rented out and the most used tool by small landlords with less than 10 objects is still Microsoft Excel. This needed to change, therefore I dedicated my graduation project to designing a system where landlords can manage their real estate from searching for new tenants until the maintenance of their object.

For this project, I used the design thinking framework to have a structured workflow. To get to know more about the market I organized multiple interviews with landlords and send out a survey. This gave me a couple of interesting insights. I put all gathered information in task analysis, persona’s, empathy map, and an affinity diagram to get to a clear problem statement. This was translated into a mid and high-fidelity clickable prototype that I could test with multiple real estate owners.

Year
2021

Tools
Figma

Role
UX/UI Designer

Project phase
Concept

Challenge

After many interviews with landlords I wanted to solve the following challenge:

 

“As a landlord, I would like to have a streamlined workflow, so I can

spend less time on administration”

 

This lead to the following how might we statements:

“How might we help our users create a streamlined workflow”

“How might we help our users spend less time on administration?”

“There are currently no public apps in the Netherlands with a good workflow for managing assets in the Netherlands. From acquiring new tenants till maintenance.”

“Most small real estate owners still use excel to manage their assets.”

“Biggest pains are checking if invoices are paid.”

“Biggest time investment is when there is a switch of tenants.”

Insights

Final product

In the current situation, landlords must gather information about their objects from multiple sources. With Assetflow this will change, and landlords will get updates about their objects from the system as soon as it is available. All tasks and events which are important for the landlord will be displayed in a dossier together with all information about the object, the tenants, invoices, and delivery reports.

Since the biggest time investment for landlords is the delivery report, in my final presentation I created a clickable prototype to show how a landlord can easily generate a delivery report.

 

This project was elected as the best UX/UI graduation project from the 2021 class.

AssetFlow // Asset Management Software

Future Development

Assetflow has many possibilities, I think that a great expansion of the system would be support for business objects. Also, there are a lot of landlords that outsource finding new tenants, therefore the option to create multiple roles and permissions would be a good addition to the system.

This project was mainly focused on making life better for landlords, but I can also imagine a client portal for tenants where they have an overview of their rental object, invoices, and the possibility to create a task for maintenance.