Equity & home loan tool
Reworking a drop-off-prone loan tracker into a finance experience property owners actually stick with — clear equity, a clear home-loan picture, and a nudge toward a better rate, inside realestate.com.au.
Inside realestate.com.au there's a genuinely good experience for property owners to track their properties. Part of it was a legacy finance product — a loan tracker — that had real potential to give people useful insight into their money, but wasn't yet delivering on it.
The problem
The loan tracker had been around for a few years. It met the objectives it was originally set, but the numbers told a harder story: only around 10% of people tracking their property engaged with it at all — and of those who started the flow, 71% dropped off before finishing.
Something about the experience wasn't earning people's attention or trust. That drop-off was the problem we set out to fix.
The process
I started with research — nine one-on-one interviews with brokers to understand how people really think about their equity and repayments. From there I planned and facilitated an ideation and principles workshop with the team and stakeholders, then took the strongest ideas into design.
The design ran through two full iterations: the first explored directions from the workshop, shaped by stakeholder reviews and early user testing; the second responded directly to what that testing surfaced. To pressure-test the prototype I ran guerilla sessions — including an in-office round with homemade cookies as the incentive (they worked). Stakeholder reviews and further user testing ran alongside, and I closed the loop with a shareback to share consumer feedback, finalise the design and bring everyone along before build.
The final design
The redesign brings equity and home loan into one clear, glanceable view: how much equity you have and how much of it is actually accessible, your current rate and repayment, and — where it's relevant — a nudge toward a lower rate based on your LVR. The complex stuff stays in the background; what surfaces is what helps people make a decision.
The results
It shipped — and the drop-off we set out to fix moved. In the first couple of weeks live, completion of the flow jumped from 29% to 70%, and lead submissions climbed from 20 to 62 a month. Early numbers, but pointing firmly the right way.
The qualitative signal matched the numbers — people rated the experience 9s and 10s, and told us why:
Simple to use — the visuals really help illustrate the loan amount versus the equity.
It helps me keep track of subtle market changes in interest rates, and the differences between lenders.
Challenges
This one came with no shortage of challenges. There were a lot of stakeholders to keep aligned, and because the experience spans federated teams across realestate.com.au, the design and functionality had to stay coherent across boundaries I didn't fully own.
The product also had to prove its value upfront — which meant simplifying genuinely complex finance concepts into something glanceable — and with no existing guidelines for data visualisation to lean on, much of that had to be worked out from scratch.
What I learned
A few things I'm taking forward. Estimate timelines with a buffer — finance work has more moving parts than it first looks. Over-communicate: a dedicated Slack channel for updates did more than I expected to keep everyone oriented. And collaborate early and continuously, so the people around the work are brought along on the journey rather than handed the destination.