Roam
Your next home, made affordable 🏡
At Roam we help people buy a home with a lower monthly payment through something called an assumable mortgage. Basically, this means a buyer can take over the seller’s existing loan terms. Some home sellers have mortgage rates as low as 2% – much lower than the ~7% rate of a new mortgage. In practice, this means a buyer’s monthly payment can be as much as 2x cheaper.
There are millions of homes with mortgages eligible for an assumption across the United States.
As a founding product designer, I’ve been involved in every area of the product. The search experience, calculating your savings, onboarding flows for scheduling a call with our team or getting pre-qualified, and even emails and print ads.
Below are examples of my work on the search experience, which contains two projects I’m particularly proud of in terms of addressing real user needs discovered in research and impact on the business: a self-guided checklist and the savings calculator.
Our self-guided checklist experience allowed people to learn how assumable mortgages work, see what steps are involved in the process, and the ability to complete those steps. Additionally this helped our sales and operations team know where people were in the process of a home transaction and be informed on how to best communicate with them. And finally, it allowed us to integrate more areas of the home transaction workflow inside the product. Real estate generally involves several manual, messy steps of back and forth emails, texts, pdfs, etc. The guided checklist experience centralized and digitized more of the process.
This project was born out of research findings that showed many people didn't know how the process worked, which steps to take next, or how Roam helps them during the transaction. The solution solved all of these problems.
Research has been a constant thread throughout my time at Roam. I interview current users but also people who have never interacted with our product. I’m curious to learn about the common experiences of buyers, sellers, and real estate agents. I’m curious to learn what their needs and pain points are and how we can build things to help, and how it aligns with business priorities and capabilities. User Interviews, UserTesting, sales call transcripts, and in-product feedback loops from Hotjar provide insight into what areas of the product need improvement or where new opportunities should be pursued.
Our calculator tool allows people to view their financing options and estimate their potential savings. There are some additional complexities involved with a mortgage assumption. Displaying this complexity in a clear, concise, interactive, and appealing way was a challenge. One thing I’ve certainly learned over the past couple years is that people love their home financing calculators. Many iterations, team discussions, and testing have led to something that is much appreciated by those in pursuit of assuming a mortgage to buy their next home.
