Private Property's refreshed new website now makes the search for finding your dream home, easier, simpler and that much faster.
Mason Ince, Product Designer at Private Property, headed to the Expresso studio to share how the new website improvements will provide users an even better property shopping experience...
For someone looking at your website for the very first time, they can see that there are some cool new features that make finding their dream home so much simpler, easier and faster.
What prompted these changes? What was the idea behind it?
Mason: It has involved lots of soul-searching as a team and a department, and it's never an easy conversation because you basically have to look at what you've done in the past, and how you can improve going forward. So unlike other projects where, as an IT team of guys and girls, we think in an incubator, think in a vacuum, this time we actually spoke to real users like yourself. We asked them what they were looking for, how we could improve, how we could get better. And that exercise was actually fascinating. It took us down a really exciting path. And what we found is something quite caught the South-African story. And this is something that Private Property is very passionate about because we want everyone to be able to tell their story, their unique chapter in our country's amazing history. And, of course, home buying or home renting is crucial to that. So what we've found is that we're a country of amazingly diverse people. We're the same but we're also different. We're all looking for different things. So with these changes, we want to make it really easy for you, for me, for everyone sitting back at home to find the property that matches their exact wants and needs. And that's what we're here to chat about.
What are the exciting new features on the Private Property website?
Mason: I think it's a bit of a misnomer to think of us as a house-hunting website. We're actually more than that. It's actually about matchmaking. So basically, our job is to help you find your perfect match. That's like dating for your house. So if you have really specific requirements for your house, for example, I've seen tons of dogs walking around here - if you're looking through a whole list of properties, and you want us to exclude the homes that aren't pet-friendly, you can do that. If safety is something really important to you, if an apartment with amazing security features is something really crucial to you or your family, that's also sorted. And you can look at homes that focus really well on that. And the other cool thing that we've done is you can still search by bedroom types and price ranges like we always have, but we've included extra features like a swimming pool if you're in Durban, which is fantastic, or Cape Town. And once you've done all of the hard work of telling us what you need exactly, pet-friendly, swimming pool, safety, and security, we do this cool thing where we ask you for your email, just an email, no password, nothing fancy. And then we send you all of these homes that apply to your specific search criteria in your email.
What other new website features can people can get excited about?
Mason: If you're really satisfied with that whole matchmaking journey, we really care about helping you find a good deal. And this is what tons and tons of users that we spoke to mentioned. So one way of doing that is through our brand new bank-sales section. It's fully responsive. That's a fancy word. All that means is that you can view this on every device. You can view this on your desktop, your iPad, your phone. The entire site's like that by the way. And with bank sales, it's a really good opportunity to find a good deal on a property for your family, for example, or yourself. And from an investment point of view, if you want to look at really good opportunities, and then tie in national markets, and if you're an absolute expert at the property game like some of us, you can potentially find your second, third, or fourth home.
With the new-look Private Property website, finding your dream property has never been easier if you're on the market or are just interested to see what's available. So make sure you visit www.privateproperty.co.za today.
Find out more about what's new on the Private Property website, here.
