Buying a new home is an emotional ride. Location is important, but equally as important is the look and feel of the house. With the real estate apps that we are creating at Rendering House, home buyers who are shopping for new constructions can choose a location (community, and homesite). They can also personalize their home plan with a base design, custom options, and custom colors. But what comes first? Do you select a homesite, and then choose your home plan? Or would a buyer select their home plan first, and then choose the homesite to build the home? Which has more weight, the location, or the design of the house? To make matters more complicated, there are also other constraints that need to be considered. In some communities for instance, builders will not build the same home plan on adjacent locations/homesites. The color schemes available to a to-be-built house can also be constrained by the color schemes of homes that are already built by your next door neighbors.
Because of these real life constraints, choosing a home plan and choosing a homesite are not 2 independent choices but 2 choices that are intertwined. Any real estate app of any weight selling new constructions must wrestle with this conundrum.
To address this conundrum and improve the home buying experience using our real estate apps, we have created a SplitView UI component. We believe there is no right answer to the question of design vs location. Buying a new construction is a personal decision that runs through a web of complex decision factors. There are home buyers who place more importance to location, and there are some who place more importance to the design. There are certainly many home buyers who lie in the spectrum between the two extremes. The SplitView component addresses this spectrum by giving any user the ability to adjust the size of each half of the screen relative to the weight that they give to either design, or location.
With our SplitView component, the selection of a homesite and a home plan are made on the same screen. How do you ensure that a user understands that they are making not one, but two choices? The old adage of having a singular call-to-action on a page/screen will not work.
Stay tuned for our solution.
