Crowdhouse
Crowdhouse is the first Swiss real estate crowdfunding platform that allows individuals to acquire shares of rental buildings. With a small investment starting from CHF 25’000 you can already call yourself co-owner of a property and benefit from attractive returns.
Crowdhouse approached Ginetta in early 2015 to help them make their market entry a success. In order to best support them, we built an interdisciplinary team tasked with designing and implementing their online identity, the promotional microsite and the online platform itself.
Crowdhouse's core business consists of swiss properties. Thus, it was clear from the start that concepts like city, apartment and floor plans should be related to its brand.
Crowdhouse defined three key values to describe themselves: democratic, lucrative and personal. Based on that, the idea behind the logo emerged: a deconstruction of a simple geometric shape - a square - represents a property and transports the company’s three key values.
The microsite was designed to inform potential customers about the benefits of Crowdhouse and to trigger their interest to invest. Its goal was to generate as many leads as possible by generating buzz and anticipation for the new platform even before it was publicly available.
In a workshop, the information architecture of the website as well as the content strategy was discussed.
In constant collaboration with the client, we evolved from wireframes, to ux design, to visual design.
We implemented the designs of the microsite through a close collaboration between the designer, developer and client.
The collaboration with Ginetta was extremely professional.
The commitment of the team was extraordinary.
The Crowdhouse team already had a lot of experience in the real estate market in Switzerland. In the past years, they had built trust and acquired loyal customers. However, our process to transition Crowdhouse from paper to digital wasn’t an easy path. Our approach to overcome this challenge consisted of three main steps described below.
Understand the Crowdhouse business model and clarify their online strategy.
Thoroughly analyse the process for offline negotiations and identify the critical factors to convince potential investors. Explore ways to display this complex information digitally in a most simple and appealing way.
Build a clickable prototypes based on our designs and test them with potential users to iteratively improve the structure and designs. This allowed us to validate and ensure that the product was indeed intuitive and convincing.
The Crowdhouse online platform was launched in August 2015. By December 2016, there were more than 8000 registered users and around 100 property investors with 29 million swiss francs invested. Five properties were already funded and every month a new property is added to the list to be funded.
Inês João
Design
David Aerne
Frontend
João Figueiredo
Frontend
Melanie Kovacs
Client Partner
Sylvain Morger
User Research