Idealista is an online service that works as a virtual real estate company. It allows owners to sell or lease their properties and individuals to buy or rent them. It’s used across many countries in Europe, being the most used real estate app in Spain.
COVID-19 pandemic made the real estate sector to struggle in Spain, but sells and purchases are now again on an upward trend.
But there’s a key factor that’s affecting potential buyers: the rise of the purpose of investment buying, which was 24% of purchases in 2021 , and up to 28% in Madrid (INE). This trend made prices to go up and people interested in buying a property for living were pushed to make more efficient searches in order to be better informed about what they want.
Individual users are able to save their common or recurrent searches in order to access them faster and be notified about new results. Nevertheless these saved searches may get useless as users needs or requirements may vary through time. Currently when a saved search is changing any of its filters they’re not stored and the only they can do is saving a new search, which is creating a big list of saved searches harder to manage and maintain. Besides, when saving a search users may not be aware of the amount of results or whether the applied filters makes sense or not. My hypothesis is about providing users a more flexible experience and allowing to rewrite the search if that’s what they need because their requirements really changed.
I’ve created a survey to validate the hypothesis where 10 participants, currently active Idealista users, have answered questions in regards demographics and how they use Idealista. Questions were mixing quantitative and qualitative approaches. The first artefact that’s produced as a result is the User Persona:
Apart from validating the hypothesis there were more insights that were uncovered and may enhance the saved searches experience: