Real estate website optimization usually starts with a long list of things to improve. We decided to start with a list of things we could delete.
There’s an engineering principle we like that’s associated with Elon Musk’s approach at SpaceX: before you simplify something, before you optimize it, before you accelerate it, and certainly before you automate it, first ask whether it needs to exist at all.
It’s part of Musk’s five-step engineering process, where deleting unnecessary parts or processes comes before simplifying or optimizing what remains.
As Musk has put it:
“Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.”
So when we took another look at Easy.Realty, our consumer-facing website, we didn’t start by redesigning it.
We didn’t try to optimize everything that was already there.
We deleted it.
Not all of it, obviously. But a surprising amount of it.
We stripped away things that didn’t help accomplish the primary reason a consumer comes to a real estate website in the first place:
They want to look at property.
What’s left is a cleaner, more focused experience with considerably more white space, fewer distractions and our new super-fast home search at the center of it.
It’s something of a Google approach to real estate search. Make it immediately obvious why you’re there, make it incredibly easy to do what you came to do, and then get out of the way.
We’ve also brought EasyBot directly into the consumer experience, helping buyers and sellers find the perfect home and get assistance while they search.
And we want our agents using Easy.Realty, too.
When you’re helping someone find a home, start the search at Easy.Realty. Keeping that search inside the Easy Realty ecosystem means we’re using and strengthening our own technology rather than immediately sending consumers somewhere else.
It’s the same philosophy we’re applying across Easy Realty, from the Agent Hub and EasyBot to the technology we’re putting directly in front of consumers.
There’s plenty more we can do from here. We can continue to optimize the experience, make things faster, develop EasyBot further, and add intelligence and capabilities where they genuinely make things better.
But before we did any of that, we deleted the stuff that didn’t need to be there.
And in the process, we just made Easy.Realty easier.