Our partner is one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world. With 300 offices in 80 countries, they employ 90,000 people, manage 4 billion square feet of real estate worldwide, and have annual revenues of over $16 billion.
Blackbird was initially an internal project for our partner. Its goal was to provide insights into properties, their surrounding markets, and overall demographics. When they needed new features, the development team would add them. Because of the approach they’d been taking, there were no workflows built to make the system easy to use. Codelitt had been brought in to help make incremental changes to Blackbird, but it wasn’t until our client made a larger commitment to their internal Innovation Unit that the needle really started to move. At this time, Blackbird was more of an “exploration tool” (think Google Earth) as opposed to a resource to help present to clients. It had poor UX and was therefore daunting to learn. For that reason, when brokers needed specific information from Blackbird - presentations, reports, etc. - they were forced to communicate with their internal researchers who were most knowledgeable on how to use it so that they could assemble the info. Our partner needed a solution that would improve the UX, create easy workflows, and empower the brokers so that they could provide fast service to their clients.
The improved Blackbird enables a patented 3D approach for brokers to help clients explore property options across the country to gain a more complete sense of a property's attributes without the time and cost of an onsite physical inspection. Users can assess potential markets based on real-time market data like demographics, tax incentives, and access to transit. It even showed details on current construction projects to highlight what a property would have. The solution ensured that brokers, researchers, and clients could all easily organize the robust information they needed in a logical and engaging way.
After gaining a deep understanding of what their end users needed, the new UI that Codelitt created resulted in Blackbird having the highest usage EVER:
For Blackbird's innovative design, it received several awards as brokers started to heavily adopt the new technology.
Augmented reality takes on commercial real state.
Internal tool to document, rate, share, and manage vendors.
The autonomous mapping robot.