Problem

External
When COVID-19 hit Denmark, the rental industry started to see some problems. 
Landlords and tenants were afraid about going to property showings, because of the health risks. 

Besides that, people were staying indoors and going out to new places, weren’t in the biggest of interests. 

Internal
As a company, we weren’t interested in solving these problems with unsustainable solutions that wouldn’t provide any value to your customers in the future. 

So we, therefore, had to create something that would solve these problems, but also be used in the future, and not waste development time and money.

Research & ideas 

We started by contacting our landlord customers and gathering information about how they were solving these issues, and if they were currently looking at any solutions that we could back up.

The interviews were of course done remotely :-) 

Findings

Landlords started doing digital showing by videocall. But the problem was that property seekers didn’t know, so we saw a decline in applications for available properties - which were hurting the landlords business. 

The decline in applications was primarily because of property seekers being unaware of the digital showing option, and thought they didn’t have a chance to see the property in real life. 

We also looked through our list of feature requests by customers, and we found this: 

Be able to upload a video on your ad to showcase your property digitally.  

Since this was requested before COVID-19, we knew that it would benefit our customers, also after the pandemic. 

Our two main ideas

Doing COVID-19 we did a lot of internal and external improvements, that I can’t disclose here. But here are the two main and biggest additions to renting out and seeking property on BoligPortal.   

Digital showing tag
Make it easy for landlords to communicate if they are able to do a digital showing of their property.

Video on their advertisement
Make it possible to upload a video of the property and show it together with the advertisement information. 

Let’s dive into each feature

For landlords to be able to communicate if they were doing digital showings of their properties, we made it possible to add a ‘’tag’’ to your advertisement, so it was easy for property-seekers to see. 

We wanted this tag to be visually prominent, so that: 

1. It brought attention to the feature, and we could communicate that we were taking action towards the current situations 

2. Bought attention to the advertisement with the tags so other landlords would want the same attention, and also started doing digital showings - having an influence on the property market. A snowball effect in the number of advertisements with the digital showing tag.

Conclusion 

As mentioned before, these two features where just some of the many enhancement we made under COVID-19. We saw a great impact on the business and our customers gave us great feedback.

We didn’t just help our customers in a tough situation, we also showed our customer base that we’re adapting to whatever happens in the industry. Big and small.