Multi-Unit Property
Client
TurboTenant - A vertical SAAS, embedded finance platform that empowers independent landlords to manage and grow their businesses.
Team
Raj, Product Manager
Dani, Lead Engineer
Sveljo, Engineer
Rodrigo, Engineer
Role
Research
User Testing
UX/UI Design
Timeline
Planning & Designs: Jan - March 2023
Implementation etc: March - May 2023
Problem
TurboTenant wasn't structurally built to accommodate landlords that had buildings with units or rooms. For a large landlord that owns one or more multi-unit buildings, the product is very confusing. They are forced to treat each unit as a separate property. This problem persists throughout the product but is most evident within the onboarding flow which signaled to larger landlords TurboTenant wasn't built for them.
High-Level Goals
Give landlords the ability to nest units and rooms under one property.
Objective: Serve Large (3+ properties) Landlords with an experience that leads to better adoption of TurboTenant as their platform for growing and managing their rental business.
KR: Add support for Rental Units to the product by the end of Q1.
KR: Improve platform performance for Large Landlords.
Research & Insights
Early User Interviews
We spoke to a list of landlords that had 3 or more properties in TurboTenant with a matching address to understand how they organize tenant management today and what an “ideal” solution would be.
Some of the biggest “wish-list” items we heard from landlords were: syndication of rooms to rental listing sites, wanting to see more information upfront about the overall property, combining finances of existing properties into “units” under one “building”, and having high level “building” maintenance requests rather than on the individual unit level (which were previously called properties in TurboTenant).
Large Landlord Pain Points
🥸 Inaccurate marketing
🧐 Confusing onboarding
🫥 Lack of features
😩 Poor hierarchy
User Interview Design Feedback
Each landlord seemed to think their own situation was so unique that it couldn’t be the standard use case. Another common pattern we noticed was a heavy focus on the advertising/marketing portion when it came to thinking about the property. For example, when showing the Add Property flow, landlords seemed to look for where they could add more and more details like adding photos and whether or not pets were allowed. This gave us insight into what was most important to landlords during that process.
Requirements, Iterations & Feedback
Requirements
Working closely with Raj (Product Manager) and Dani (Lead Engineer), we set very specific requirements regarding each nested level, where certain aspects of the product should exist in the database, and what will appear on the front end. We showed the earliest concepts to the TurboTenant Product Team for initial feedback. I designed a few different variations for the property overview and index pages to understand how the nesting would best work within TurboTenant.
Requirements & Nesting Levels
First Iterations Property Overview Page - Low to Medium Fidelity
First Iterations Property Index Page - Medium Fidelity
Early Iterations of Other Product Areas MUP will affect - Medium Fidelity
Shipping MVP
Working with Developers
As a team, we decided going slightly beyond the minimum viable product would be best for this project due to its wide-reaching impact. Based on feedback from User Interviews, we created new widgets on the rental overview pages. Before I dive into that, for context, we also changed the naming system from “Properties” to “Rentals” when referring to any type of rental “Property” “Unit” or “Room” all of which became nesting levels within TurboTenant. Some of these widgets would persist across each rental level and some would only exist on the lowest level (whichever that may be for a particular landlord).
Single Property
Property with Units and Rooms
Unit with Rooms
Room with Empty States
Widget Changes
Launch & Impact
Multi-Unit Property
We’ve seen 21,000+ multi-unit properties (MUP) created in TurboTenant since launch (May 2023-Dec 2023). For every onboarding answer, there has been a higher conversion to customer rate for landlords that add MUPs than those that only add single properties during onboarding. 65% of users who added MUP and answered “Lease” during onboarding converted to customer compared to those who only added a single property with the same answer converted at 19%.