Before this project, touring an EH home meant filling out an email sign-up form and waiting for our salesperson to respond with an available date and time to meet in person. Our team is incredibly good with response time, usually within the hour, but still, the gap between interest and action was a major point of friction. Prospective buyers and realtors had to coordinate schedules with a salesperson, wait for a reply, and commit to a specific meeting time before ever setting foot in the house.
For a self-guided tour experience to work, the flow needed to solve several problems at once. It had to let customers book a tour entirely on their own, at any time, without waiting on our availability. It needed to integrate with the backend API that controls the automated locks and generates unique codes valid only within the specific 4-hour window of the buyer’s selected date and time. And all of this while ensuring security and keeping access simple.
The flow had to make it easy to add additional homes to a single tour, filtered by neighborhood, floor plan, and availability, without turning the booking process into a maze. On top of all of that, the experience needed to feel effortless enough that a customer with zero guidance could book a tour and unlock a door on their own, confidently and without confusion.
I approached this as a linear, low-friction flow where every screen had a single clear job, minimizing decisions at each step so customers could move through quickly without feeling lost. Starting from the “Self Tour” button on the property page, the flow guides customers through date and time selection, then account creation or login (skipping that step entirely for returning users to keep momentum going). From there, customers can finalize their tour or expand it, with the system surfacing genuinely relevant additional homes filtered by same neighborhood, same floor plan, or general availability, rather than overwhelming them with the full inventory.
This turned a single-home booking into an opportunity for customers to build a personalized, multi-stop tour, increasing exposure to more listings without added effort on their part. After confirmation, the flow culminates in a final screen designed to function as a self-contained tour kit. This includes a unique door code, alarm code, directions, and clear tour instructions, all in one place, which is critical for a self-guided experience where there's no salesperson on-site to answer questions.
Behind the scenes, this screen ties directly into the backend API generating time-restricted lock codes, ensuring each code is valid only during the customer's scheduled 4-hour window for security.
By designing the entire journey as one continuous, self-serve flow instead of an email process, the experience removed the biggest barrier to entry in home shopping: the wait. The results spoke for themselves too! The redesigned flow contributed to a doubling of sales year-over-year, proving that reducing friction at the point of interest directly translated into more toured homes and more closed deals.
